A Two Horse Race

(Originally published in the Western People on 2024-07-16)

Following the notorious recent presidential debate hosted by CNN, The Hill reported on July 1st from a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll that 72% of voters have already decided who they will vote for in the upcoming election, with 58% of Independents, 16% of Republicans, and 28% of Democrats yet to decide. Meanwhile, Trump leads Biden in a head-to-head match-up in the poll by 6 points. Since then polling suggests that Biden has lost further valuable ground in swing states due to the public’s reaction to his dismal debate performance. These seven crucial states, where less than a hundred thousand votes can swing the election either way, have the Democratic Party in turmoil over whether Joe Biden should be the nominee to contest the upcoming election against Donald Trump.

The Biden team and their supporters argue that the polls cannot be trusted at this stage, with many such surveys disagreeing with each other — besides it being too early to accurately predict November’s election results. Recent history suggests his team is correct, but maybe not in their favour. The nonpartisan American think tank, Pew Research Center, reported on April 8, 2021, that in final estimates of the 2020 U.S. presidential race, 93% of national polls overstated the Democratic candidate’s support among voters, while nearly as many (88%) did so in 2016. The Center suggests that if the problem is not flawed likely-voter models, it is ‘fewer Republicans (or certain types of Republicans) participating in surveys, which could have implications for the field more broadly’. This has an Irish corollary where, according to a 2016 study by Tom Louwerse at Leiden University, Fianna Fáil support in polls consistently overrepresented election turnout during 1989-2002. Attempts by polling companies to rectify this by ‘adjusting’ their figures for this Fianna Fáil overrepresentation actually seem to have underestimated their support in the 2007, 2011, and 2016 elections.

What is going on here? Are people simply not telling the pollsters the truth? Or are the polling companies asking the wrong people about their voting intentions? There is also the issue so eloquently summarized by Dr Gregory House (played by Hugh Laurie in the TV drama, House, from 2004 to 2012), who repeatedly warned his medical team that “Everybody lies.” How many eventual Republican voters will never vocalize their support of Donald Trump to friends and colleagues, much less to a pollster? In some respects, none of this matters. It goes back to those seven swing constituencies of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, because partisan support is baked into most states. Thus, California will always vote for Biden and Texas for Trump in this two-party, first-past-the-post electoral system. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote of the entire electorate by nearly 2.9 million or 2.1%, but it didn’t matter, as Trump won the states that produced the most electoral votes based on an electoral college system that is effectively weighted against populous states, which tend to lean Democrat and favour low-density population rural states that lean Republican.

This is a feature, not a bug, of American politics. While places such as New York City and Alaska have introduced what they call Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) for some elections — which is essentially only a variant of how we in Ireland have been electing our politicians through ‘Proportional Representation’ — it has been disdained by both the Democratic and Republican parties. They claim that voting for candidates in preferential order would lead to fraud, low voter turnout, and the fracturing of political parties with ensuing instability — which translated means it would lead to their demise as the twin political pillars of the American republic. In a two-horse race, the other horse always has a chance, especially if you keep running the races and neither wants to give ground to a potential competitor.

This Irish system of P.R. using the Single Transferable Vote (STV) is not actually our idea. Following the almost complete victory by Sinn Féin in the 1918 parliamentary elections in Ireland, the British Government introduced STV under the 1919 Government of Ireland Act to shatter Sinn Féin’s impending dominance in the local elections to be held a year later. It seemed to work, such as Sinn Féin falling to fifth place in the Ballina urban elections of January 1920. The versatile Republicans in Mayo got around this potential minefield by ‘persuading’ all opposition candidates (including sitting councillors) that it would be in their best interests not to contest the county and district council elections of 1920. The R.I.C. termed it intimidation, but the IRA called it “canvassing” as Volunteer companies went door-to-door to turn out the vote, resulting in another electoral landslide. Despite that, STV was here to stay.

Ironically, in a capitalist country that vaunts consumer choice and the plurality of free speech, the American left–right political spectrum results in an effective single choice for President — and that in just seven swing states. It has also corroded the political system, where the Republican Party has been effectively taken over by the extreme MAGA movement in support of Donald Trump – a man who has been twice impeached and also convicted, while spewing over 30,573 lies or misleading claims over four years, according to the Washington Post Fact Checker, including falsely claiming the 2020 election was rigged, without any evidence whatsoever.

In a multi-party system, a less radical (but still conservative) political bloc would have carved out its own identity and become a home for anti-Trump Republicans, and likewise, the more ‘progressive’ Democrats would form their own political party on the left. A Donald Trump candidate would thus be forced to appeal outside of his ‘MAGA’ party to centre-right conservatives in their own independent party and not just crush them within the behemoth of the existing Republican organisation. It would also ensure a ready-made alternative to the ailing Joe Biden, where an existing left-of-centre presidential hopeful could expect to pick up anyone-but-Trump votes. Bringing Irish ‘Proportional Representation’ to America would also mean that smaller parties would grow, learn, and sustain themselves in each successive local election, where voters understood that a vote for a Green Party candidate (for example) would not be wasted.

But that is not where America is at right now, as the country counts down to the most consequential election in recent history, where the next incumbent of the White House will have almost unfettered power. As the Supreme Court has just ruled that a President cannot now be prosecuted for his official actions or decisions, we are about to find out if people are lying to the pollsters. Ironically, for man who has told over 30,573 of them, Donald Trump will hope they are not.