America, choices have consequences

Four years ago this page confidently predicted a resounding victory for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in the United States presidential elections. I could not have been more wrong.

After defying the punters, the pollsters, the analysts and all known logic to clinch the Republican Party nomination, the real estate tycoon-turned-unlikely-politician went ahead to disprove the adage that lightning does not strike the same place twice.

Mr Trump did not just defeat the Democratic Party stalwart handily but also dashed the dream of a first ever woman in the White House. The rest, as they say, is history.

The rambunctious merchant of disruptive politics went on to impose his own deranged style on the most powerful office in the world and today faces re-election with the pundits still wondering what hit them.

He is on familiar territory, sitting well behind on the projections of nearly all pollsters, including those from his beloved Fox News cheerleaders.

Despite the numbers, which indicating clear victory for the Democratic challenger, former Vice-President Joe Biden, nobody can dare write off Trump.

Inflict pain

The lessons of 2016 still inflict pain on all pollsters, who, by now, should have learnt their lesson and tweaked their sampling and methodologies to make sure they never repeat similar errors.

Assuming their polls are now reasonably accurate, we should be ready to bid President Trump a loud good riddance. But we can’t do that with the ghosts of 2016 hovering over us.

In that election, I had worked out from crunching the numbers of all key polls that Mrs Clinton would crush Mr Trump in the popular vote and secure a landslide of some 370 Electoral College votes.

My reasoning then was simple. Mrs Clinton, at the time of writing, was projected be just two delegates short of the magic 270 needed to secure victory. All she needed was capture just one big battleground state, and Florida, with 29 delegates, seemed hers for the asking.

I ventured further to predict handy victories in the big battleground states that had turned to President Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 — such as North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio. Things, to put it mildly, didn’t go according to plan.

Double-digit lead

Now we have another election with Obama’s VP, Mr Biden, even better placed than Mrs Clinton was four years ago. All polls indicate a double-digit lead over Mr Trump in the national polls and healthy leads in the aforementioned delegate-rich battleground states.

The polls even show Mr Biden leading or running neck-and-neck with Mr Trump in Republican bastions like Arizona and Texas.

All the ‘mazematics’ point to Trump going home but there’s something about ‘Trumpland’ that the pollster and the clever boffins have never put a finger on.

In a conversation following the 2016 elections, numerous pollsters tried to persuade me that they had not got it wrong. They pointed out pinpoint accuracy on their national projections and the fact that, in the battleground states where Mr Trump turned tables on Mrs Clinton, the outcomes were within the margin of error.

Of course that is all nonsense, seen against the actual results. What the brainboxes don’t get is that Mr Trump introduced Kenya-style tribal politics to the US.

His supporters tend to be white rural folk of limited education and exposure and giant chips on the shoulder. They tend to be racist, xenophobic, insular and afraid of being swamped by blacks, asiatics, latinos and other tribes taking their jobs. And their women.

Opinion polls

They are the kind of fellows who often don’t get captured in opinion polls and are fiercely loyal to their tribal kingpin and very susceptible to ‘us versus them’ narratives. They will come out in droves for Mr Trump, as will more sophisticated Wasps who may be ashamed to publicly identify with his jingoist politics but on polling day will be there in numbers.

Mr Biden, by contrast, does not generate excitement. Most of those coming out for him are not so much voting for Biden but voting against Trump.

If it rains, if it’s too hot or too windy, they might not be motivated to surrender their creature comforts to vote for a person as inspiring as a dead fish.

Mrs Clinton lost in 2016 largely because the Obama voters were not too excited about her candidacy. Mr Biden badly needs that vote to come out for him today, alongside all voters who don’t want their country led by a neo-Hitler.

This is the rime to remind my American friends that choices have consequences.

[email protected] www.gaitho.co.ke @MachariaGaitho