Dare we dream of a Joe Biden win? Given all that's at stake, not yet
A friend calls to say he’s been having anxiety dreams about Donald Trump. Another, a highly rational man with a forensic intellect, tells me he’s found himself praying for a Joe Biden victory. A third reports checking polling website fivethirtyeight.com in the dead of night. Sometimes twice.
None of these people live in the US, and none is a US citizen. More to the point, none of them is especially neurotic. But something about the US presidential election, little more than a week away, is stressing people out. One study for the American Psychological Association found that more than two-thirds of American adults describe the current contest as “a significant source of stress in their lives”, and that angst is radiating across the world.
Last night’s second and final TV debate will hardly have helped. Trailing in the polls, it was Trump who needed a moment that might upend the race, and he didn’t get one. On the other hand, he performed better than in the first bout – still the same stream of lies, but delivered with greater self-restraint – allowing commentators to rate this encounter a tie, give or take. Which means we’re back to the status quo ante, with all the same dread as before.
The pundit class has an extra layer of unease. Addressing her fellow TV talking heads on Thursday, the MSNBC anchor Kasie Hunt declared that none of them were daring to say what they truly think because “we’re all too shell-shocked by what happened in 2016”. If they hadn’t been so badly burned by the experience of mistakenly assuming Hillary Clinton would win four years ago, they’d now be willing to say out loud what, in Hunt’s view, is obvious: that all the signs point to a comfortable Biden victory on 3 November.
For all that, I’m in the same camp as my insomniac friends, doomscrolling through the news at ungodly hours. I admit that much of this is superstition, with little relationship to reason. But after what happened last time, and with so much at stake – not only for the US, but for the planet – I’d argue that it falls into a category we might call justified irrationality.
It might be the warning from polling guru Nate Silver that, sure, his model currently gives Trump only a 12% chance of victory, but that “12% is not nothing”. It might be that in the key battleground states, “Republicans have swamped Democrats in adding new voters to the rolls”, according to one expert analysis.
That raises the possibility that, while Trump is palpably losing among women, people of colour and Americans with college degrees, he’s expanding the segment of the electorate that has always loved him: white male voters in rural areas especially. In 2016, the number-crunchers assumed he had maxed out that demographic, but what if there’s more meat on that bone? Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that the Trump campaign has a “massive get-out-the-vote” operation in the key states, “with a larger volunteer effort that has been on the ground longer than Biden”.
I can keep going in this vein, but here are two specific worries. First, a poll lead of a few points in a must-win state is not good enough for Biden. Voter suppression – deliberately reducing turnout in Democratic areas, especially among Black and minority Americans – is deeply entrenched. Witness this month the early voters queueing for 11 hours to cast a ballot this month, inevitable when Black neighbourhoods have far fewer polling stations than white neighbourhoods. It means that wanting to vote for Biden is not the same as actually managing to do so.
What’s more, millions of Americans are voting for Biden by mail – and yet postal ballots tend to get rejected in greater numbers than in-person votes, deemed spoilt because someone used the wrong kind of envelope, their signature didn’t match the one on file, or their vote arrived late. Legal battles over which votes to accept could ultimately go all the way to the Supreme Court. Next week is set to see the swearing-in of Trump nominee Amy Coney Barrett, just in time to enable Republicans to win those election-related cases by at least a 5-4 majority.
A second worry arises from a 2016 memory. At the Republican convention in Cleveland that year, I heard Kellyanne Conway predict that Trump would do better than expected, because so many voters were not telling the truth to pollsters: it was not “socially acceptable” to back Trump, so people kept it quiet. Given all he’s said and done since, surely it’s even more socially unacceptable, at least in some circles, to be a Trump supporter now. Could polls be missing shy Republicans, including those who were looking for permission to vote for Trump and found it in his relatively restrained debate performance last night?
Set against all that is, I know, a much greater weight of evidence in Biden’s favour. He’s so far ahead that even if the polls are badly off, he still wins. And he leads in the states that matter most. It’s true that Clinton was ahead in 2016 too, but her lead was much more volatile; Biden’s has been steadier. His campaign has a huge war chest, comfortably able to outspend Trump in TV ads in this last stretch.
Above all, this is not 2016: Trump is now a known quantity, and Biden is not the polarising figure that Clinton was. Most Americans regard Biden as safe, unthreatening and fundamentally decent (which is why Democrats were shrewd to pick him).
Those are all rational reasons to breathe easy and prepare for a Biden win. The trouble is, elections are not a wholly rational business. They involve fear and hope, our future and our fate. That’s why they invade our dreams.
• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
• Join Guardian journalists Jonathan Freedland, Kenya Evelyn, David Smith and Sarah Churchwell for a Guardian Live event on the US election results on Wednesday 4 November, 7pm GMT (3pm EST). Book tickets here
