Although Donald Trump and Trumpism have been its catalyst, the enormous socio-cultural and political polarization of the United States goes back a long time, in all probability from when Bill Clinton's victory in the 1992 elections put the end of a cycle of Republican presidential victories that It begins with the victory of Richard Nixon in 1968. Only the term of Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) briefly interrupted that hegemony, which seemed to deprive the Democratic Party of the doors of the White House sine die.
And Bill Clinton's aforementioned victory over George Bush Sr. was not even rushed: Nearly six million popular votes separated the governor of Arkansas from the incumbent president. Because, regardless of the peculiar US electoral system, which in some way prioritizes the territories over the population, the comparison of the total number of votes of North Americans who favor one or another candidate constitutes an unequivocal source of democratic legitimacy and a powerful indicator demoscopic.
And there things have not painted well for the Republican candidates. In the last 20 years, only once, in the 2004 elections, with the country traumatized by the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq at the beginning, did the Republican candidate obtain a majority of popular votes . Specifically, George Bush Jr. won more than three million votes from Senator John Kerry. The rest have been majorities of popular votes for the Democratic candidates, from the 9.55 million that Senator Obama took from Senator McCain in 2008 to the almost five million that Obama himself, already president, took from former Governor Romney in in 2012, going through the 8.2 million obtained by President Clinton in his reelection against Senator Dole in 1996. In the most recent elections, contested by a considerable segment of the population against all empirical evidence, former Vice President Biden surpassed President Trump by seven million long votes. In the 2000 and 2016 elections, what was until then a historical anomaly occurred, that the losing candidate in popular votes prevailed in the electoral college. These were the cases of Vice President Gore, loser to Bush Jr. despite winning more than half a million popular votes, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who also lost to Trump despite obtaining 2.59 million votes at the polls across the country. votes more than the New York real estate entrepreneur.
What underlies all this cataract of numbers is a possible natural and future majority of the Democratic Party, at least in the presidential elections. Hence the attempts of Trumpism to return to the past –“Make America great again”– or of the state legislatures dominated by the Republican Party to rewrite the electoral rules in their favor.
That does not mean that background currents in certain states exert powerful impacts on the final results. States like Florida or Ohio, within the reach of Democratic candidates like Clinton and Obama, now seem to tend towards Republicanism, while Arizona or Georgia, until very recently clearly Republican, are now much more competitive.
All these background trends pale before the singular threat that hangs over the 2024 presidential elections, that of two candidacies with different but very marked traits of unpopularity, that of former President Trump, who does not require further comment, and that of President Biden, of the that it is very difficult to imagine his re-election.
