Fate of US Presidency unclear as count continues in battleground states
The election is closer than expected, and all eyes are on battleground states
Record turnout is expected, and several races are too close to call. As the United States prepares to count votes and learn who will be the next occupant of the White House, scroll down for FP's round-the-clock coverage of the results as they come in, with short dispatches from correspondents and analysis from around the world.
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The Chinese public is convinced Trump will win
Chinese have a clear opinion on the likely electoral victor in the United States: President Donald Trump. When China’s Phoenix New Media covers the election on Weibo (a Chinese version of Twitter), the most liked comment is always “Chuan Jianguo [Trump] will surely win!”
Lots of Chinese bloggers refer to Trump as Dong Wang (懂王), “the Know-King,” which comes from him saying “nobody knows more about taxes than I do,” “nobody knows more about construction than I do,” and even “nobody knows much more about technology.” But this nickname is always used sarcastically, due to Trump’s failure in handling the Covid-19 pandemic.
Since the coronavirus hit the country, the United States has failed to protect its people, leaving them dealing with illness and financial crisis. In contrast, in China, where the pandemic originally started, daily new case numbers have been kept very low, and people are able to live relatively normal lives. Chinese media outlets never stop criticizing Trump’s woeful response to the pandemic, implying that democracy doesn’t always work. Emphasizing Trump’s failure could portray China as a more responsible nation, thus downplaying some of the domestic problems China is facing.
Another common Trump nickname is Chuan Jianguo (川建国), literally “Trump Builds China.” Many people believe that under Trump’s presidency, there has been continuous doubt about America’s global leadership and that China’s path to becoming a superpower is now clear. Many Chinese scholars and reporters thanked Trump for giving China four years to grow and rise up to power. Hu Xijin, the chief editor of the tabloid Global Times, once thanked Trump for his work to “help promote unity in China” on his personal Twitter.
Trump’s challenger Joe Biden gets much less media coverage in China, where he is usually called Baideng (白等)—it sounds similar to his name “Biden” in Chinese, and it means “wait in vain.” Ordinary Chinese barely know anything about him save for the news featuring his family’s business affairs in China, and they tend to think he has no shot in this presidential election. When the country’s propaganda machine constantly features Trump’s failures, many Chinese influencers and bloggers have openly endorsed Trump, as have some dissidents overseas, such as the blind activist Chen Guangcheng. Many Chinese opposed to Communist Party rule see Trump as their savior.
Tracy Wen Liu is an author, reporter, and translator
Biden and Trump fight out surprisingly close election
US President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden remained in a tight battle for the presidency Wednesday, despite widespread polling that predicted a clear Biden win but appeared to be as flawed as it was four years ago, when Hillary Clinton lost to Trump.
The two candidates were in a desperate fight to win some of the same Midwestern states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—the so-called Democratic blue wall—that cost Clinton the election four years ago, with the counting not yet done. Final vote tallies were not expected until later Wednesday at the earliest, but one outcome was clear: The United States is just as polarised as the pundits feared.
Biden was bidding to be elected the 46th president of the United States, putting him in a position to replace one of the most tumultuous and controversial leaders in American history. In a statement after midnight Tuesday, Biden told supporters that the vote could go well into Wednesday, in part because of the late mail-in votes yet to come in. “We’re feeling good about where we are,” Biden said. “We’re feeling real good about Wisconsin and Michigan. And by the way it’s going to take time to count votes, but we’re going to win Pennsylvania.”
If he manages to eke out a win, which may not be known for days, the 77-year-old Biden would be expected to be a far more predictable and stable president than Trump, one who has pledged to restore US alliances and prestige, as well as attack Covid-19 in a more forthright way.
But obstacles remain, including possible legal challenges by the Trump campaign should the vote go Biden’s way.
Michael Hirsh is a senior correspondent and deputy news editor at Foreign Policy
Florida Called for Trump
Donald Trump is projected to win Florida, one of the most important battleground states in the 2020 elections and a must-win for the US president on the path to reelection.
In preelection polls, Democratic candidate Joe Biden had a narrow lead over Trump in Florida, but Latino voting blocs turned out for Trump in higher numbers than expected—especially in Miami-Dade County, where Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton won by a 30-point margin in 2016. This year, Trump got nearly 46 percent of the vote in the majority-Latino county, a surge of 13 percentage points since the last election.
Part of the president’s appeal among the more than 2 million Hispanic voters in the county is his tough stance on socialist Latin American regimes. The Trump team warned during the campaign—repeatedly and falsely—that Biden would advance radical socialist policies in Washington if elected. (A surge in conspiracy theories and disinformation may have also played a role in turning Spanish-speaking voters in South Florida against Biden, as Politico reported.)
Trump, who has long been favored by Latino communities that fled such regimes, including Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans, even made inroads among more Democratic-leaning groups this year, early post-voting data shows.
Trump was hoping to attract Colombian American voters in Florida by painting Biden as a far-left sympathizer. Even young Cuban Americans, who Democrats hoped would veer left, turned out in larger numbers for the president this year. While only 21 percent of Cuban Americans under 40 said they intended to vote for Trump in 2016 in Miami-Dade, around 55 percent indicated they would do so this year.
Ahead of the elections, some members of Trump’s top national security team visited key swing states including Florida on official government business—trips that Democratic lawmakers and other Trump critics said were thinly veiled political stops designed to shore up support for his reelection campaign on the taxpayers’ dime. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit to Latin America in the weeks before the election drew criticism from some Brazilian lawmakers and diplomatic heavyweights, who accused Trump’s top diplomat of using the trip as a “campaign rally to appeal to Latinos in Florida.”
In a last effort to win the state, Biden sent former President Barack Obama to campaign in Miami on Monday night. Obama, who won around 58 percent of the vote in Miami-Dade in 2008 and 62 percent in 2012, used his last speech as an opportunity to appeal to the Latino community. “Here in South Florida, you see these ads, ‘Joe palling with communists, palling with socialists,’” Obama said. “You’d think he was having coffee with [late Cuban President Fidel] Castro every morning. Don’t fall for that. … He served as my vice president. I think we would know if he was a secret socialist by now.”
Augusta Saraiva is an intern and Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy
Republican Lindsey Graham keeps his seat, but control of the senate remains uncertain
Control of the Senate remained uncertain at the close of election night in the United States, with a few key races that would determine whether Republicans retain or lose the majority still too close to call. However, Republicans had at least one thing to celebrate when Sen. Lindsey Graham scored an important reelection win in South Carolina.
Graham, the powerful Republican leader who pinned his fate on cultivating a close relationship with a president he once derided as a “race-baiting, xenophobic bigot,” scratched out a victory over a heavily funded Democratic nominee, Jaime Harrison, in South Carolina’s Senate race.
Graham is the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He has represented South Carolina for nearly two decades, carving out a role as one of the most influential and visible Senate leaders. But his powerful defense of President Donald Trump made him a favorite target for Democrats, who poured piles of money into the campaign of his challenger. In the weeks leading up to the election, Graham bemoaned his lack of funding, issuing a series of desperate appeals for donations. “I’m getting overwhelmed,” he told prime-time host Sean Hannity on Fox News. “Help me. They’re killing me moneywise.”
In Washington, even Graham’s staunchest critics concede his influential role as the right’s most prominent guardian angel for diplomacy and foreign aid budgets. Graham sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chairs the lesser-known but arguably just as influential appropriations subcommittee that oversees the State Department and foreign aid budgets.
As Graham became more aligned with the president, he continued to resist the administration’s repeated efforts to gut funding for the State Department and US Agency for International Development. When the Trump administration’s fiscal year 2020 budget called for a 23 percent cut to diplomacy and global development, Graham slammed the proposal as “insane.”
“I don’t know who writes these things over in the White House but they clearly don’t understand the value of soft power,” Graham said at an appropriations committee hearing with then-USAID chief Mark Green.
Beyond Graham, here are other important developments in Senate races across the country:
Colorado goes blue: Democrat John Hickenlooper defeated Colorado’s incumbent Republican Sen Cory Gardner in a win that erodes the Republicans’ narrow majority in the Senate. Gardner was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he played an important role in the Republican caucus on crafting hawkish legislation on North Korea. He also co-chaired the Senate Cybersecurity Caucus.
Tuberville turns ’Bama red: Former Auburn University football coach and political novice Republican Tommy Tuberville has defeated first-term Democratic Sen. Doug Jones. Jones had defeated Roy Moore to claim the seat once held by former Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions three years ago in a hotly contested upset for Republicans. Jones was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Warner coasts to win in Virginia: It’s not a shock that Sen. Mark Warner won a third term in the Senate, but the move could be significant if the Democrats manage to flip the upper chamber. In that case, Warner, who’s the ranking member of the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, would take over the powerful gavel, and he has promised to restore independence to the panel. “The Intelligence Committee has got to be independent of politics, it needs to be willing to speak truth to power, and should the Democrats take control, and whether I’m chairman or vice chairman of that committee, those intelligence professionals, the vast majority of who live in Virginia, I’m going to have their back,” Warner said on Tuesday.
Cornyn takes Texas: Border-focused Republican Sen. John Cornyn, the former majority whip in the upper chamber, has won reelection over Air Force veteran and Democrat MJ Hegar, who ran for a seat in the Austin suburbs two years ago. Cornyn chairs the Senate Judiciary subcommittee for immigration, refugees, and border security, and he has defended the Trump administration’s decision to take money from the Pentagon budget to pay for Trump’s border wall.
Democrats flip Arizona: Former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly has defeated Republican Sen. Martha McSally, a key pickup for the Democrats. Kelly, who is also the husband of former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, polled ahead of Biden in the state, which Democrats won in the presidential race for the first time in 24 years. The race is also significant because it takes out a Trump ally on the Senate Armed Services Committee in McSally.
Ernst ekes out Iowa: Trump ally Sen. Joni Ernst has scored a narrow victory over Democrat Theresa Greenfield in Iowa. The retired Army National Guard lieutenant colonel sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter, Colum Lynch is a senior staff writer, Jack Detsch is Pentagon and national security reporter and Darcy Palder is an intern at Foreign Policy
Japan worries about four more years of Trump—and about Biden
For Japan, just about any outcome in a nail-biter US presidential election brings its share of worries.
A victory for incumbent President Donald Trump carries the known risks—contentious negotiations about who should pay for the extensive US military presence in Japan, the constant threat of tariffs on Japanese autos, and the broader concern of having a mercurial figure at the head of the US-Japan alliance. (There is no illusion here over who is in charge of a relationship dubbed by a former US ambassador as “the most important relationship in the world, bar none.”)
A Joe Biden administration carries unknown risks. Who will be in charge of foreign policy? Will Japan be able to recreate the close personal ties between Trump and former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (a favorite golf partner for the president)? Most importantly, will the United States go soft on China?
That’s not to say that Japan is itself willing to stand up to a rising China in public. On the record, officials talk about the strategic alliance with the United States but add that it would be unrealistic for Japan to decouple from its largest trading partner.
They are happy, however, to let Washington take the lead—and the heat. Such a position would give Japan the chance to take a somewhat harder line on the human rights, territorial, and security challenges posed by Beijing without getting in too much trouble. They believe that Trump will happily oblige in this area. There is also the practical issue that the conservative ruling party in Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party, has traditionally worked better with Republican presidents. The relations between Abe and Barack Obama were noticeably cool.
At the same time, a new Trump administration could carry a very tangible cost. Negotiations on a base agreement for US troops are due to start next year. Japan currently contributes around $1 billion annually. Trump, ever the negotiator, is said to be demanding an increase to $4 billion to $5 billion. Former National Security Advisor John Bolton puts the figure at $8 billion.
There is also the fatigue factor. The diplomats at the foreign ministry believe that they have successfully steered clear of any relationship crises with a prickly foreign leader, but they are not sure they can keep this up for another four years. In this, they are probably not alone.
William Sposato is a Tokyo-based writer who has been following Japan’s economy and financial markets for more than 15 years
No sign of large-scale voter disruption in US election
After one of the most bitterly fought election campaigns in recent memory, Americans went to the polls on Tuesday amid fears that Election Day would be overshadowed by voter intimidation, foreign interference, and technical glitches at polling stations.
But by Tuesday afternoon, the election had progressed largely without incident, according to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which runs a nationwide election protection program.
“It appears at this stage that we are on path to a relatively successful Election Day, one characterized by record turnout levels during early voting, record levels of participation in vote-by-mail,” said Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, on a call with reporters Tuesday afternoon.
“I think this speaks to the success of historic voter protection efforts, which aimed to empower voters so that they were armed with as much information as possible about how to participate in this election amid the pandemic,” Clarke said.
While the committee’s hotline had received tens of thousands of calls from voters across the country, they mostly centered on isolated issues, and there was little evidence of efforts to systematically prevent people from voting on election day.
The FBI and the New York attorney general are investigating a wave of robocalls received by voters in several states urging them to “stay safe and stay home.” The calls do not explicitly mention voting, but the timing raised fears that they could be part of an effort to deter people from going to the polls.
Earlier in the day, cybersecurity officials reasserted their confidence in the security of the election. Unlike 2016, when Russian hackers targeted election infrastructure in all 50 states, this year was “much quieter,” a senior official from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency told reporters. “At this point, this just looks like any other Election Day and even just another Tuesday,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“We have no indications that a foreign adversary has succeeded in compromising or affecting the actual votes cast in this election,” said acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf on Tuesday.
The Washington Post reported early Tuesday evening that US Cyber Command and the National Security Agency took action in recent weeks to deter foreign actors, including Iran, from seeking to interfere in the election. The move came after US intelligence officials announced that Iran was behind a wave of bizarre emails sent to Democratic voters in swing states.
Amy Mackinnon is a staff writer at Foreign Policy
Historic US turnout still lags behind major democracies
The United States is on track for its highest electoral turnout since 1908—likely around 65 percent of eligible voters, according to data from the US Elections Project. But US turnout usually lags behind that of other developed democracies.
In Sweden’s general elections in September 2018, 82.1 percent of eligible voters showed up at the polls. Preelection polling suggested that the far-right, anti-immigration Sweden Democrats party would win big. The final results revealed no clear winner, but the election appeared to put the center-left Social Democrats in control of the country’s agenda, but the Sweden Democrats still pushed other parties right on immigration policy during the heated campaign. Unlike in the United States, Sweden’s elections were held on a Sunday, giving as many people as possible the opportunity to vote.
In December 2019, the United Kingdom’s parliamentary elections saw 62.3 percent turnout, just below estimates for Tuesday’s elections in the United States. That election kept Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party in power—they won the largest percentage of the popular vote since 1979, picking up seats long held by the Labour Party. It also granted Johnson a mandate to proceed with his plan to leave the European Union on Jan. 31. The UK election was held on a Thursday, but Britain allows voting in person, by mail, and by proxy.
See the figures above from nine other major democracies to get a sense of how the United States compares.
James Palmer is a deputy editor and Audrey Wilson is an associate editor at Foreign Policy.
10 problematic ways in which US voting differs from the world’s
elf is very different from just about every other democracy’s, making voting more difficult and increasing the risk of voting irregularities and partisan disputes. Here are 10 problematic ways in which voting in the United States is different:
1. Election Day on a work day. Most democracies vote on weekends or make their election day a holiday, which means more people can vote without worrying about missing work.
2. No uniformity in national elections. The United States appears to be the only democratic country in the world that does not strive for uniform rules and procedures to govern national elections. Voting takes place across thousands of jurisdictions with myriad ballot types, voter eligibility criteria, voting equipment, counting methods and time frames, procedures for early or absentee voting, and rules for resolving disputes.
3. No national election management body. Unlike almost every other country, the United States lacks a national election commission or other body responsible for the election process. Even other countries with strong federal traditions such as India, Canada, and Mexico have national election commissions that run federal elections with national rules.
4. Partisan election management. In 33 US states, the chief election official is elected in partisan elections and is allied with a political party—the only democracy in the world that selects its senior election officials this way. The impartiality and fairness of election administration thus depend too much on the personal integrity of partisan state and local election officials, who often endorse candidates or run in the elections they themselves supervise. This greatly increases the risk of disputes and litigation.
5. Complicated voter registration. Unlike most countries, the United States lacks a national or otherwise uniform voter registration database. Instead of registration being automatic or taking place at the initiative of the government as in most other countries, the burden of registering to vote rests on each individual. This tends to discourage voter participation.
6. Widespread controversies over voter identification. Most countries have uniform rules on what identification voters must provide at polling places to cast their ballots. Many countries have national ID cards or voter ID cards that every voter can show.
7. Voter suppression. Historically in the United States, there has often been at least one major party working intentionally to make it harder for at least some category of people to vote. Currently, one major political party appears to be trying to discourage voter participation. This does not seem common elsewhere in the world. The practice in some US states of stripping those with past felony convictions of their right to vote for life is also highly unusual.
8. Little authority for election administrators. US election administrators generally have relatively less discretion than those in other countries to adapt rules and procedures—for example, in reacting to the Covid-19 pandemic.
9. No standardized balloting or counting process. Even within a state, technologies and procedures vary from one county to another. Rules about how absentee ballots are counted vary substantially throughout the country—another potential source of disputes. Again, no other country seems to do it this way.
10. No dedicated mechanism to resolve election disputes. Globally, the trend is to establish dedicated election dispute resolution mechanisms. In the United States, in contrast, those with complaints about the process generally have to go to the courts, which tend to be slower and involve judges with less election expertise.
Eric Bjornlund is the president of Democracy International, chair of the Election Reformers Network, and author of Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring Elections and Building Democracy
Locked down at home, much of France is quietly rooting for Biden
There are plenty of American-style diners and bars in major French cities, and they reported roaringly successful election-night parties four years ago.
Some remained open all night to broadcast Donald Trump’s election as Le Président, with viewers—whether French or expat Americans—describing it as one of the most extraordinary and (it has to be said) entertaining political dramas of all time.
Old Glory flew from café awnings, and the Star-Spangled Banner could be heard blaring out of sound systems as revelers cheered or booed the result of every count.
None of this can happen in 2020, because France is in full coronavirus lockdown, with all restaurants, cafés, and bars from Paris to Marseille shut until at least early December.
An overall sense of nationwide immobility—and gloom—has been intensified by thousands of extra troops and police on the streets following a series of horrible Islamist terrorist attacks carried out by lone knifemen.
This means election night viewers having to remain at home to watch the contest, while barred from organizing any festivities involving more than a handful of family members or others they live with.
All French broadcasters will nonetheless deliver dedicated programs starting in the early hours of Wednesday morning local time, to factor in the time difference.
France is traditionally hugely interested in the political fortunes of its old ally, despite relations becoming very frosty during the Trump administration.
Like everywhere else in Europe, Trump’s approval rating was at less than 25 percent in France at the start of his incumbency, although he did have some fans within Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party.
The far-right party, which used to be called the National Front, was always a natural ally of Trump’s Republican Party because of their shared reactionary views on subjects ranging from immigration to climate change.
These differences were politely played down by French President Emmanuel Macron when he first hosted Trump on a visit to Paris in July 2017. There were even initial signs of a surprising friendship between the two men—and indeed between the respective first ladies, Melania Trump and Brigitte Macron—but it did not last long.
By late 2018, Trump was launching ferocious attacks on Macron over everything from tariffs to France’s capitulation to the Nazis at the beginning of World War II.
The viciousness reached a low point around the time of commemorations of the centenary of the end of World War I, when Trump tweeted that the French “were starting to learn German before the U.S. came along.”
A Macron spokesman tried to be as diplomatic about the insult as possible, suggesting that the line had been “made for Americans.”
Such episodes alone imply that the vast majority of the French are hoping for a Biden victory this time around, although there is unlikely to be much sense of rejoicing if it happens.
Nabila Ramdani is an award-winning French-Algerian journalist, columnist, and broadcaster who specializes in French politics, Islamic affairs, and the Arab world.
Has Trump been good for Israel?
Few countries have been as invested in Donald Trump’s presidency as Israel, where a recent survey found that Israelis favor the incumbent by an almost 45 percent margin. (Conversely, only 27 percent of American Jews are expected to vote for Trump, who divulged in August that “the evangelicals are more excited … than Jewish people” about elements of his Israel strategy.) That said, an answer to the proverbial question of whether Trump has been “good for Israel” remains elusive.
Whereas other world leaders have often strained to maintain constructive relations with the Trump administration, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has managed to stay high atop the president’s short list of favorite allies over the past four years. Now, after having been a conspicuous beneficiary of U.S. diplomatic bounty throughout Trump’s tenure, Israel is bracing for the impact of what could soon be a different reality.
Much of what Trump has bestowed on Israel has been rhetorical or symbolic in nature. In December 2017, Trump extended official U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and in May 2018, a new U.S. Embassy was unveiled in the city. In 2019, Trump signed a presidential proclamation affording recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed a declaration that the “establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law.” Last week, Pompeo announced that Israeli citizens born in Jerusalem could now elect to list their place of birth as “Israel” in U.S. consular documents.
The recent conclusion of the Abraham Accords, which normalized Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, formalized and expanded an entente that had been fast-tracked already amid the dangers of an ascendant Iran. Trump’s determination—and sweeteners that he may have provided—to close this deal and a subsequent one with Sudan appears to have played a pivotal role as well.
More importantly for Israel, this newly tailored diplomatic paradigm has effectively revoked a de facto Palestinian “veto over peace and progress in our region,” in Netanyahu’s words, with a new cohort of Arab states prepared suddenly to reach agreements with Israel despite the stalemate in its conflict with the Palestinians.
On the flipside, Israel has not been spared tangible fallout from Trump’s erratic conduct of global affairs. In May 2017, an indiscreet Trump raised hackles in Israel when he shared privileged Israeli intelligence with Russia.
Israeli defense officials are sounding the alarm that, after consenting to deliver the F-35 stealth fighter to the UAE, Trump—ever the transactional figure—could also prove amenable to additional weapons sales that would erode Israel’s qualitative military edge. And on Iran, the premier external threat to Israel, Trump’s America First policy has often meant America alone: Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal and imposition of tough prohibitions on Tehran notwithstanding, a diminished United States has been unsuccessful at persuading its former great-power partners to activate snapback sanctions against an emboldened Iran.
A Trump victory would likely see the continuation of these countervailing trends, with the United States acquiescing to Israeli unilateralism while continuing to step back from active involvement in the Middle East. (Russia could perhaps maneuver, as it has in Syria, to fill that vacuum.) The laconic foreign-policy agenda that Trump has proposed for a second term offers no hint of new directions.
But things will almost certainly change for Israel if pollsters are correct and Joe Biden captures the White House. Committed to restoring traditional U.S. alliances that have frayed under Trump, a new Democratic administration will be more inclined to work by international consensus. Israel’s position as a valued wingman of the United States will not be in jeopardy—Biden has so far rebuffed efforts by progressives to circumscribe the U.S. friendship with Israel—but Israelis should prepare for the return of a more measured approach that features, among other things, greater understanding for Palestinian viewpoints and a renewed push for compromise with Iran.
Shalom Lipner is a nonresident senior fellow of the Middle East program at the Atlantic Council. From 1990 to 2016, he served seven consecutive Israeli premiers at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem.
Don’t call the race too early
A disputed and violent election in the United States threatens to undermine the credibility of the political system and lead to a further loss of U.S. prestige around the world. As President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden trade insults and accusations, entrenching deep social divisions, trust in the electoral system is faltering.
With armed civilians marching past polling stations and fear of unrest prompting some individuals and communities to mobilize themselves in self-defense, a controversial outcome could trigger clashes across the country. If the 2020 election does explode, the way that the result is communicated to the American people is likely to be the trigger.
That’s because how the result is announced can be as important as the result itself.
The controversial Kenyan election of 2007 provides a good example of how important the process of announcing the results can be. The presidential election was expected to be tight, but some opinion polls suggested that the main opposition candidate, Raila Odinga, had a slight lead. The early results appeared to confirm this, in part because some of those numbers came from Odinga’s political heartlands. Then the results stopped coming, and opposition leaders warned that the election was being fixed. When President Mwai Kibaki was finally declared to have won in a rushed announcement—from which most of the media was excluded—it appeared to confirm Odinga’s fears. In the political clashes that followed, more than 1,000 people died.
The outcome of the election would have been controversial whatever the process, but the way it came about poured fuel on the fire.
The United States is heading in the same direction. On the one hand, Trump has already implied that a victory for Biden would mean a rigged election. On the other hand, favorable opinion polls mean that the Democrats are confident of winning and are unlikely to view a Trump win as credible.
Against this backdrop, the way the results will be announced seems almost designed to cause trouble. The United States lacks a centralized and unified electoral commission responsible for presidential elections—in stark contrast to most democracies. This means that many Americans take their cue from television stations, which have tended to announce the outcome early based on exit polls and other projections. This is always a risky strategy, but could be catastrophic in 2020.
This year, many Democrats have voted by mail because of public health concerns. Republican voters are less concerned about COVID-19 and so more likely to vote on Election Day—and in many states, in-person votes are counted before mailed ballots.
This means that the early results and exit polls conducted at polling stations could suggest a Trump win, which will encourage the president, his social media followers, and perhaps some of the media outlets that support him to declare an early victory before all votes have been counted. Things will look very different however, when postal ballots are finally counted—which could take days. Once postal votes are added to the totals, we may well see a clear Biden victory.
As in Kenya, a late change of electoral fortunes, with both sides claiming victory, would inflame passions and foster accusations of manipulation. It could also lead to a political impasse in which the U.S. Supreme Court—now loaded with Trump appointees—would have the final say. This would be unlikely to lead to the kind of loss of life witnessed in Kenya, but it would generate remarkable political instability, especially if rival parties trade accusations of voter suppression and ballot-box tampering, further reducing public confidence in democracy.
By Nic Cheeseman, a professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham and the author of How to Rig an Election
Tracking the US house races like a foreign policy pro
Democrats are widely expected to retain control of the House. In fact, David Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report predicts that the Democratic Party will pick up anywhere between five and 20 new seats. Here are the races that foreign-policy pros should be watching most closely:
Texas 10th District: Michael McCaul (1), the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is in a toss-up race against second-time Democratic challenger Mike Siegel, according to the Cook Political Report. (Siegel lost his bid to represent the Republican-leaning district by just over 4 percentage points two years ago.)
Texas 22nd: Sri Kulkarni (2), a former foreign service officer, is running for Congress in Texas’s 22nd District—an area where voters have helped turn Texas from a deep red state to a potential battleground for Democrats.
Texas 23rd: Gina Ortiz Jones (3), a US Air Force veteran, is in a heated race to gain the sprawling 23rd District of Texas that spans nearly one-third of the US-Mexico border. Republican Rep. Will Hurd, a former CIA officer, announced last year he would not run again.
Michigan 8th: Rep. Elissa Slotkin (4), a former CIA analyst and senior Pentagon official, is running for reelection in Michigan. She has been vocal about fears of homegrown extremism and how the hyperpartisan and ultra-politicized atmosphere across the country could become a grave national security threat.
New Jersey 3rd: Rep. Andy Kim (5), a former National Security Council staffer in the Obama administration, is running for reelection in New Jersey’s 3rd District after winning by a narrow margin in 2018. He is one of a group of national security experts who ditched the Beltway to run for Congress in 2018. He’s also co-chair of the House’s National Security Task Force.
New Jersey 7th: Rep. Tom Malinowski (6), a former senior State Department official in the Obama administration, is running in a tight race for a second term in Congress. From his perch on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Malinowski has been one of the Democrats’ most vocal critics of Trump’s foreign policy and of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Virginia 7th: Once represented by two-term Republican insurgent Dave Brat (who knocked off House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a 2014 primary upset), this suburban Richmond district is now the site of a close fight between Rep. Abigail Spanberger (7)—a Blue Dog Democrat and former CIA official who sits on the House Foreign Affairs committee—and Republican challenger and Army veteran Nick Freitas (8).
Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Jack Detsch is Foreign Policy’s Pentagon and national security reporter.
The senate races that are crucial for US foreign policy
The race for control for the US Senate is much tighter than for control of the House of Representatives. Whichever party wins will have a razor-thin majority, according to projections. We’re not likely to have final results on election night.
Who controls the committees? The Democrats stand a good chance to lead key foreign-policy oversight committees, including the Senate’s armed services panel, where many members are in close campaigns. Republican Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, David Perdue of Georgia, and Martha McSally of Arizona are all in toss-up races. Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan faces a challenge from Republican businessman John James, who has run ahead of Trump in state opinion polls. Likely to lose his seat is Alabama Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, who also sits on the Armed Services Committee.
South Carolina: A potential game-changer could come in South Carolina, where the well-funded Democrat Jaime Harrison has consistently outraised Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the congressional panel overseeing the State Department’s appropriations. Graham has been one of the Republican Party’s most dogged defenders of funding for US diplomacy and aid amid repeated attempts by the Trump administration to make deep spending cuts.
Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Jack Detsch is Foreign Policy’s Pentagon and national security reporter.
Get ready for a November foreign-policy surprise
Although the international system is filled with threats and uncertainties, there is a strange public quiet in the days before the US elections. Hackers and propagandists from various countries are burying deep into foreign systems, military forces continue to clash in numerous conflict zones, and competition for resources and markets has intensified, particularly between China and the United States. Nonetheless, the focus of national security in early November is internal for the US government: securing a peaceful and legitimate election.
Regardless of what happens on Nov. 3 and the days after, foreign crises will almost certainly rise in importance for US national security. The historical record reminds us that foreign adversaries pay close attention to American domestic weaknesses.
First, conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, the South China Sea, the Indo-China border, and other regions are escalating. With the world distracted by electoral instability in the United States, local actors who believe they have the upper hand (and external support) will be tempted to expand their attacks, widening the violence.
Second, our near-peer competitors will surely recognize that the messy presidential transition will weaken the ability of the United States to act abroad with decisiveness and coherence. They might also perceive a defeated President Trump as a potential collaborator against American national interests, in return for payments and other personal benefits. Trump’s undermining of long-standing American commitments to Ukrainian security, in return for investigations of his domestic rival, are a tempting model for President Vladimir Putin, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and others eager to exploit America’s leadership vacuum for their own purposes.
Third, and perhaps most concerning, smaller actors, especially North Korea, will surely see the post-election instability in the United States as an opportunity for more aggressive behavior aimed at strategic goals and their own domestic audiences. We should expect more North Korean missile tests at the end of the year, and perhaps other forms of aggression around the demilitarized zone. Why wouldn’t Kim want to show his strength, and highlight America’s limited will to respond?
More than ever, we need a bipartisan group of current and former national security officials to assemble and prepare for the likely international crises of the next few months. Speaker Nancy Pelosi should convene this group, perhaps under the auspices of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and she should reach out to Republican members of the House and Senate to join. At the very least, this initiative will encourage a substantive and productive public discussion of foreign policy, which might temper the actions of foreign adversaries, encourage some sound judgment in the current administration, and lay out a path for the next president and his team.
Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor in the University's Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.
The view of the vote from Asia
The 2020 US presidential election will have seismic long-term implications, whichever way it goes. But it is the short-term threat of violence that is most catching Asia’s attention ahead of tomorrow’s vote.
“Here is Bloomingdales boarded up today,” a friend wrote a few days back to a sprawling WhatsApp group, mostly filled with political obsessives from India, of which I’m a member. The image showed the high-end retailer’s flagship location in Manhattan apparently preparing for rioting. “Oh, that’s crazy,” one replied. “Wow! Bloomingstan,” another member of the group replied.
The threat of post-election disorder ought not be quite as shocking as it is, given the United States’ recent history with violent political protests and plots such as that launched by supporters of US President Donald Trump to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, and given that many of Trump’s supporters seem unlikely to accept a victory by former Vice President Joe Biden under any circumstances.
But there are two other things about the election that Asian observers are more justified in being surprised by. First, there are the seemingly unbridgeable divisions in US society, which appear likely to remain whoever wins. And second is the sheer ricketiness of US election infrastructure, which increasingly looks like something from an emerging economy—Bloomingstan, or Americanistan perhaps—in its unfairness, unreliability, and vulnerability to interference. The fact that Monday’s news was so dominated by stories about court cases and post-election legal challenges will only have deepened this alarm.
Perhaps one should view all this as a perverse sign of American strength. Unlike China, the United States has traditionally been able to endure moments of political protest, even extreme street violence, without anyone suggesting the republic itself is actually in peril. And perhaps this time either Trump or Biden will win so convincingly that the threat of unrest simply dissolves on election night, beaten back by the sheer size of the victory.
Viewed from Asia, however, that threat of ever deeper division looms large, and behind it the reality that the United States is no longer anything close to a model democracy. Rather, US democracy seems fragile and potentially ready to crack, whoever wins. “A weary world is watching,” as one Singapore news channel put it this week, but an alarmed world, too.
James Crabtree is an associate professor in practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and the author of The Billionaire Raj.
Why the Middle East’s strongmen are rooting for Trump
Over the past few weeks, there has been a fair amount of speculation about what the US presidential election means for the Middle East. I’ve chatted with American, Turkish, and Egyptian journalists about this, and no matter how you slice it, it seems clear that a victory for US President Donald Trump would be good for the region’s leaders and their supporters. Not so much for Iran, the Palestinians, or the democratic opposition in the rest of the region.
The Middle East’s pro-US strongmen and their backers seem to know it. Saudi social media, which has become one immense propaganda campaign for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has sought to reinforce the Hunter Biden laptop story. Many Israelis also openly favor four more years of Trump. And a pro-regime Egyptian singer, Wissam Magdy, has taken an old ode to former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and turned it into a paean to Trump.
None of this should be surprising. Just look at Trump’s record: He is tough on Iran, doesn’t care about human rights, has moved the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, has shielded regional authoritarians from congressional criticism and legal jeopardy, has produced a plan to resolve the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians that reads as though it was written in the Israeli prime minister’s office, and wants to transfer more high-tech weapons to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. That’s a list that should make nearly all the Middle East’s kings, presidents, and prime ministers happy. The exceptions being, of course, the people in the Middle East who dare to resist.
There is also the issue of style. In many ways, Trump conducts US foreign policy in the same way the Middle East’s leaders do—informally and based on personal ties. It is easy to pull an end run around the US State Department when a prince or minister can just WhatsApp the US president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
If Trump plans to run his second administration like he ran his first one, the worst thing Middle Eastern potentates and leaders for life can expect from Washington is to make them really sick of winning.
Steven A. Cook is the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book is False Dawn: Protest, Democracy, and Violence in the New Middle East.
If Biden wins, Lebanon is afraid of losing
BEIRUT—When Donald Trump moved the American embassy to the disputed city of Jerusalem in 2018, Lebanon, a country that has been at the frontline of the Israeli-Arab rivalry since the start, witnessed muted protests. One year later, the Lebanese emerged in the thousands against their own political elites and demanded they be replaced, along with the country’s sect-based power-sharing system.
To the extent that Lebanese people are now thinking about the US election at all, they are hoping the winner will recognize that the economy, not Israel, is their country’s top concern. They want more US diplomacy—just not filtered strictly through the prism of Palestine.
They should be careful what they wish for. Such diplomacy will inevitably focus on what Lebanon can do for US strategic interests—and it has already started. Last month, Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, and its Shia ally the Amal movement gave in to American pressure and greenlighted Lebanon’s government to engage in talks with Israel to resolve their dispute over maritime boundaries. It was a de facto recognition of a state they do not officially recognize.
As the two delegations met in Naqoura in southern Lebanon, under US mediation, hopes were raised that the discovery of gas in the disputed area might alleviate Lebanon’s economic misery. Some went as far as to say that Lebanon would earn billions annually if an agreement is reached. But many in Lebanon—oil and gas experts, political analysts, and civil society activists—have been skeptical. They say everyone benefits from the talks, except for the Lebanese. Gas has not yet been discovered and the only offshore drilling attempt revealed a dry well, according to Laury Haytayan, a Lebanese oil and gas expert. Even if gas were discovered, it could take up to a decade to put the required infrastructure in place. Activists say that the politicians were using the talks to create a false impression that they would be able to pay the country’s debts with revenue the state might earn from gas, without ushering in political or economic reforms.
“You need to drill, find gas, do your analysis to find out if it is commercial and economically viable; you need to build necessary infrastructures and then start production,” Haytayan said. “It is a long process, time that Lebanon does not have to save its economy.”
Hezbollah’s acquiescence to the talks with Israel would not have come without Iran’s counsel. Both conceded to avoid more American sanctions from the Trump administration. But the extent to which Hezbollah, and Iran, agree to further concessions to reform the Lebanese economy could depend on what the next US administration decides it wants for the region.
Joe Biden has said that, if he wins the election, the United States will rejoin the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal, and end Trump’s maximum pressure policy against Tehran. That is music to the ears of Hezbollah, and of course its Iranian patron. “But if Biden wins then Iran and Hezbollah may make fewer concessions,” for instance on reforms in Lebanon, said Sami Nader, a Lebanese political analyst. Many in Lebanon feel that, although Trump’s pressure campaign did not force Hezbollah to give up its weapons, it at least squeezed Hezbollah financially. A deal with Iran that again allow it to easily sell its oil on international markets would flood Iran with cash—some of which would eventually fill Hezbollah’s coffers.
Whether Biden wins or Trump returns, Lebanon’s wily politicians have used their recent deal with Israel to show that they, not the activists or the demonstrators who oppose them, can deliver on US strategic interests. Many Lebanese now fear that in the larger battle between global and regional powers, their cause might turn out to be a casualty.
Anchal Vohra is a Beirut-based columnist for Foreign Policy and a freelance correspondent for Voice of America and Al Jazeera English. She is also a TV commentator on the Middle East.
If Trump wins, Washington’s brain trust is eyeing the exit door
National security professionals across US government agencies fear an exodus of senior experts from government if Donald Trump is elected to a second term, according to a dozen current and former officials across multiple agencies, who said that the president’s disdain of government expertise and political attacks on seasoned diplomats could spark a massive brain drain.
During his four years in the White House, Trump has drawn fire for dismissing or undermining senior intelligence and law enforcement officials dealing with Russia, ignoring top government health experts on the response to the coronavirus pandemic, and shutting out career diplomats from decisions on foreign policy.
Already, Trump has vowed to fire more senior government officials if he is reelected, including CIA Director Gina Haspel, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious diseases, who has been at the forefront of the US response to the pandemic—and who rendered a scathing judgment of the administration’s failed response in a Washington Post interview last week.
The onslaught of politicized attacks, scattershot approaches to policymaking, and Trump’s norm-shattering methods of governance have worn down many veteran national security professionals, said the current and former officials, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“It’s not simply a question of policies that may be difficult to support, it’s a deliberate undermining of the way we protect the integrity of government services,” said one former senior State Department official who served under multiple administrations. “I can’t remember another administration in which there was such a wholesale assault on the professionalism of the mid- and senior-levels of bureaucracies in the US government.”
Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy.
Jack Detsch is Foreign Policy’s Pentagon and national security reporter.
In Latin America, democracy itself is at stake
The Trump administration’s Latin America policy brought a welcome and necessary focus on parts of the region’s authoritarian club, particularly Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. As part of its so-called maximum pressure campaign, in the last few years, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has erected an immense architecture of individual and sectoral sanctions on these regimes and their corrupt ruling classes; the Justice Department has issued indictments of political leaders; and the State Department has rallied allies and provided a needed jolt of energy to fractured opposition movements. An impressive maritime dragnet has further curtailed the illicit activities of these regimes. However, while the United States focused on authoritarian consolidation in the hemisphere, attention on broader governance challenges has suffered—all while the region’s quality of governance has plummeted.
Both left and right populism have returned in Latin America’s largest countries—Mexico and Brazil—and the region’s voters have embraced power-grabbing strongman candidates with disdain for the press, democratic institutions, legislative oversight, and checks and balances. In the Northern Triangle of Central America, where weak and corrupt governments are the norm, political leaders have steered El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras decisively toward autocracy. These trends all augur ill for the quality of governance in much of Latin America.
Whoever wins the November 3 US presidential election will need to renew the United States’ focus on anti-corruption initiatives, institutional reform, and consolidating democratic commitments first made in the Inter-American Democratic Charter. In order to aspire to the charter’s high-minded aspirations—it declared in Article 1 that “the peoples of the Americas have a right to democracy and their governments have an obligation to promote and defend it”—the United States will need a less transactional, more committed approach to bring wayward countries back in line. Indeed, although the charter may be most relevant in the cases where its principles are most obviously lacking—Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—the US focus should expand to highlight the erosion of democracy regionwide.
To be sure, the transactional approach had its upsides; given the United States’ leverage over smaller countries, it was often able to win out on single-issue matters. Witness the Trump administration’s prodding of Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries to establish so-called safe third country agreements in order to stem the flow of migrants to the United States. But that didn’t compensate for the fact that the approach often encouraged a highly circumscribed view of the region. With a range of important benchmarks effectively reduced to monthly migration figures and progress on squeezing the “Troika of Tyranny,” US foreign policy toward Latin America has suffered from a paucity of political vision.
For a variety of reasons, it is in the United States’ national interest to see an integrated, prosperous, and deeply democratic Latin America. Foremost among them is that the region’s challenges tend to spill over into the United States. The region desperately needs to clean up the systemic corruption and the institutional rot that have festered unchecked for too long.
In turn, at stake in this election for much of Latin America is nothing short of the quality of democratic governance in the region. The Trump administration deserves credit for confronting the brutal dictatorships in Caracas, Havana, and Managua, as well as the great powers—such as China, Iran, and Russia—that provide them a critical lifeline. However, if in the next four years Washington cannot find a way to widen the aperture of engagement and reverse the deteriorating quality of governance in the region writ large, China, Iran, and Russia may find the door wide open to their influence anyway.
Ryan C. Berg is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where his research includes Latin American foreign-policy issues.
Here’s what Israeli oracles are saying about Trump vs Biden
In most countries, predicting election outcomes is the job of pollsters. In Israel, a newspaper closely aligned with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose to consult a different cohort on the question of Donald Trump versus Joe Biden: astrologists, numerologists, and palm readers.
Their unanimous projection was not exactly a surprise given Netanyahu’s close ties to Trump: The US president will win a second term, according to the mystics, though only after a prolonged fight.
“Trump will get reelected, but it won’t be via knockout but on points,” one of them divined in Israel Hayom, the country’s highest-circulation daily. The newspaper is owned by Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson and serves largely as a mouthpiece for Netanyahu.
“The Democrats won’t respect the outcome, and Joe Biden will steal the presidency,” leading to a crisis in the United States, the astrologer added.
The election is dominating headlines in all the Israeli media, alongside news of the gradual easing of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. In a country often consumed by its own turbulent politics, the American vote has eclipsed just about everything else.
For observers of the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu over the past four years, the fixation shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. The US president has given Netanyahu huge political gifts at critical moments, helped Israel forge ties with Arab countries, and crushed Palestinian hopes for viable statehood.
Some 63 percent of Israelis prefer a Trump victory, seeing it as better serving Israeli interests, according to a poll released on Monday by the Israel Democracy Institute; only 17 percent said the same of a Biden win.
The coverage in Israel has become so granular that Amit Segal, a reporter for Channel 12 news, scolded his colleagues on Twitter for wasting their time on issues like “which polling station is more accurate in Pennsylvania.”
“Who cares what you think?” he said. “You’re in Israel.”
The soothsayers of Israel Hayom predicted it would take days or weeks for the election results to become clear in the United States—echoing the projections of more temporal forecasters. They also offered predictions about politics in Israel—where voters might be called on to cast their ballots once again in the coming months.
“Whether or not there will be elections in Israel in the near future, Netanyahu will remain [prime minister]a and the [US-Israel] alliance will continue,” one of them predicted.
Neri Zilber is a journalist covering Middle East politics and an adjunct fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Fear gives way to pity as Canadians await US election
US President Donald Trump once inspired angst among Canadians. Modern Canada grew rich with free trade—and there was a real fear following Trump’s 2016 election victory that the United States might renounce the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and spark an economic meltdown north of the border.
But as Canadians wait for Tuesday’s election results, all that seems like ancient history. NAFTA was indeed renegotiated in 2018, but the fallout was hardly cataclysmic—a small blip compared with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Demagoguery against foreign trade practices was part of Trump’s campaign rhetoric once again, but Canada got scant mention. It’s hard to remember that, just a few years ago, Trump went on a Twitter rant about—of all things—Canadian milk.
Surveys suggest that only about a quarter of Canadians have confidence in Trump, a sharp drop from the 80 percent or more who typically said the same of Obama. That number hasn’t moved much since the early period of Trump’s presidency, when NAFTA hung in the balance. To the extent Canadians are deeply invested in the outcome of Tuesday’s election—and I assure you they are—this concern is coded in primarily moral terms. Few still worry that Canada is under actual threat if Trump is reelected.
A reflexive hostility to US power has long been a defining quality of the Canadian intellectual class. But during the Trump era, that hostility has gone mainstream—and the way it’s expressed has changed. Before the age of social media, Canadians looked to their political leaders to peacock their independence and moral superiority. Liberal former Prime Ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, in particular, made a great show of opposing US unilateralism, surrounding themselves with sharp-tongued cultural nationalists who hectored former US President George W. Bush endlessly.
This approach is gone, both in style and substance. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, his heir apparent, generally have been professional and statesmanlike in their dealings with Trump (right down to Trudeau’s statements during the US election campaign), having sensibly concluded that there’s no point in antagonizing a vain US president with 87 million Twitter followers and a penchant for spite. In 2020, moreover, Canadians simply no longer depend on their public officials to criticize the United States and its leaders. They can do it themselves on social media.
As to how Canadians actually feel about the United States, the dominant sense is no longer fear. It’s something closer to pity, as there is a belief that Americans might be headed toward some kind of sociopolitical meltdown no matter who wins the election. Several snowbirds I know are selling their Florida condos—not because of COVID-19 but because they see the United States as a potentially dangerous and unstable place.
Yet, paradoxically, even as Canadians become geographically estranged from the United States, they have never had a closer connection to its internal politics—thanks to a borderless English-speaking social media universe that allows everyone to jump casually into everyone else’s feeds. This is a world in which a Globe and Mail Trump takedown can go viral as easily as a Ben Shapiro burn on Trudeau. Indeed, one of the reasons why a growing number of Canadians now question whether they still need the CBC—the Canadian public media network—is that much of its news content consists of rehashing US political commentary. Canadian nationalists have long warned of the siren song of US cultural hegemony. Who could have predicted that its most irresistible earworm would be crooned by none other than Trump?
Jonathan Kay is an editor at Quillette, a host of the Quillette podcast, and an op-ed contributor to the National Post.
The Middle East has a lot riding on the US election
Across the Middle East, there is no shortage of speculation about what a change inside the White House could mean.
After a decade of protest and turmoil across the region in the wake of the Arab Spring—uprisings that removed some long-standing dictators (and US allies) and plunged several countries into war and crisis—the Middle East has spent the last four years coming to grips with US President Donald Trump’s sharp break with his predecessor.
The biggest change has come on Iran, where Trump pulled out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and ramped up a so-called maximum pressure campaign on Tehran in a so-far-unsuccessful bid to force concessions from the Iranian regime. Democratic challenger Joe Biden has said he would attempt to revive the pact–provided Iran were to return to its commitments as well. (After Trump pulled the United States out of the deal, Iran broached many of its nuclear commitments, including by ramping up production of enriched uranium.) But even if Biden wins, there would be big questions about the fate of any renewed Iran deal: Tehran has learned not to trust the durability of any commitment made by one US administration, and even European allies agree that any revived accord with Iran should be broadened to include curbs on Iran’s other nefarious activities—which might not fly with the country’s leadership.
When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Biden has also staked out a different position from Trump’s, advocating for a return to the two-state solution outlined under the 1993 Oslo Accords. Biden has opposed Israel’s recent unilateral moves, including a seemingly stalled plan to annex Palestinian territory in the West Bank, and said he would restore the funding and diplomatic relations with Palestinians cut by Trump. But after Trump’s one-sided intervention in the conflict, it’s unclear if the United States could again position itself as the neutral broker for peace it long claimed to be.
Likewise, when it comes to Saudi Arabia, a change in administrations could bring a big shift. Trump, and particularly his son-in-law and envoy Jared Kushner, has cozied up to the Saudi kingdom and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, despite ongoing atrocities in the Saudi-led war in Yemen and the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi agents in Istanbul two years ago. Biden has pledged to reassess the relationship with Riyadh and hold global human rights abusers to account.
But supporting, or at least tolerating, abuses from strongmen who had close ties with Washington has been a keystone of American Middle East policy for decades under both Democratic and Republication administrations. That’s one reason the Syrian opposition will be watching the election closely.
Trump appeared to be tougher on Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad than former President Barack Obama—launching more strikes and sanctions—but that had little impact on the regime’s legitimacy or its ability to resist what’s left of the opposition. However, despite Trump’s reputation as anti-Muslim, his tough stance on Iran, one of Assad’s key backers, won him some fans in the Arab world, and there is concern that a warming of US-Iran relations under Biden could further strengthen Assad. At the same time, Trump has allowed Turkey, which backs rebel forces, a much freer hand in Syria.
That came at the despair of Kurdish forces in northern Syria, who had partnered with the United States to battle the Islamic State. Trump rushed to pull out the bulk of US troops from Syria, abandoning Kurdish fighters and sending a message to local allies that the United States may not be a reliable backer.
Rebecca Collard is a broadcast journalist and writer covering the Middle East.
Afghans just want an end to their own national nightmare
Since the United States invaded Afghanistan almost 20 years ago, the Afghan people have experienced four US elections and three different US presidents. Each vote brought feelings of uncertainty, hope, and trepidation. But this year, with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden saying they finally want to withdraw US forces from the country, this could end up being the most consequential vote for Afghans since 2001.
There’s the question, of course, of whether and how either candidate will actually carry out this withdrawal. Trump’s tweets about pulling out troops by December were quickly corrected by military officials; Afghan security officials for their part doubt the United States can dismantle a decades-long presence in a couple of months in the middle of a pandemic. And then there’s the Taliban.
On Monday, terrorists attacked Kabul University and killed at least 19 people, wounding dozens more. Afghan government officials blamed the Taliban; the militant group denied it was behind the attack, though both the Taliban and the Islamic State have targeted schools in the past. Since signing a deal with the United States in February, and promising to curtail attacks against US forces and cut ties with al Qaeda, the Taliban have been emboldened in Afghanistan.
The peace agreement has done nothing to curb violence against Afghan civilians and security forces, with violence reaching record levels in recent months. Over the last year, the Trump White House has offered the Taliban a lot while proffering Kabul very little, continually criticizing the administration of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and cutting US aid.
But it’s not clear where Biden—who as vice president long favored an enduring US counterterrorism mission in the country—really stands on the Taliban or Afghanistan’s future. And Afghans worry that he’ll have enough nation-building to do at home after four years of Trump’s wrecking ball. That could leave an early Biden administration distracted and looking anywhere but at Afghanistan. The upshot, many in Kabul fear, is that Washington will continue to string the country along—even as the carnage continues.
Ali M. Latifi is a freelance journalist based in Kabul.
Misinformation season is over
A Russian hacker group known as CyberBerkut knows what to do during elections. If needed, it can falsify electronic voting records, for example, to make it appear that a candidate who received 1 percent of the vote in fact won the election. The group was almost able to pull that off in Ukraine’s presidential elections six years ago. The hack was discovered in time, but US voters should keep it mind and prepare for confusion on Nov. 3—and Nov. 4, and possibly beyond.
The purpose of CyberBerkut’s attack was “to discredit the election process,” as a Ukrainian official later told Wired reporter Andy Greenberg. Although many Americans assume that China, Iran, and Russia engage in election interference because they support either President Donald Trump or his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, the reality is much more straightforward: These countries interfere with US elections to sow confusion. A United States whose citizens can’t even agree on what constitutes a fact is a dream scenario for anyone trying to outflank it. It is far less risky than betting on a particular candidate, after all, who will have their own constituencies to serve. As Konstantin Sonin, a professor at the University of Chicago, pointed out last week, Russian leader Vladimir Putin sees all American leaders as adversaries.
In that way, the puny amounts Russia spent interfering with the last US election (the Facebook ads were around $46,000) were a spectacular investment. Much of the electorate mistrusts the validity of the result. Meanwhile, election interference remains a dominant theme in the US coverage of this cycle, with a staggering three-quarters of Americans convinced that foreign governments are likely to interfere in this election too. Whether they will (the FBI says they already are) or won’t, the public will always have doubt about the credibility of the result.
Given the bang for the buck in interfering with US elections, it is worth watching to see whether Russia, China, and Iran get creative. It would be a good investment for them to spend more than they did on the 2016 election, but these countries may already consider Americans sufficiently confused and disunited, making 2016-style misinformation campaigns not worth it. They could instead bank on something that would require a distracted United States to swiftly take action, and where it would be unclear what the right response would be. An armed attack on a neighboring country, perhaps? A string of cyberattacks on hospitals in a swing state? Disruption of COVID-19 vaccine research?
But such stunts would just be icing on the cake. As things stand, neither Russia nor any other country really needs to try any old tricks or even new ones to sow disarray: The United States is so busy confusing itself that its adversaries can just sit back and watch as what is sure to be a hectic few days unfold.
Elisabeth Braw is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
An Election Everyone Is Too Scared to Call
It takes an awful lot to unseat an elected incumbent president, even an unpopular one. It has happened only three times in US politics in the last century—1932, 1980, and 1992—and despite Democratic challenger Joe Biden’s substantial, steady lead over President Donald Trump, pollsters and pundits alike are doubly reluctant to call this one.
That’s not just because Trump has been openly suggesting he might not accept the results—even declaring the first night of the Republican convention that the only way he could lose “is if this is a rigged election”—but also because the media and pollsters have still not recovered from their embarrassment over the titanic miscalls of 2016. There was a lot of crow eaten the week of that year’s election, and the bitter taste still lingers, as does concern over the damage to reputations.
Though some respected polling outfits such as FiveThirtyEight are now giving Biden almost as high a chance of winning as that 2016 prediction, TV networks and major news organizations such as the Associated Press are pledging to be restrained in their predictions and open up their data to the public. Because of the massive number of mail-in and absentee ballots this time, in part due to COVID-19 measures—and because of Republicans’ many legal challenges to them—some networks are suggesting they may not call the race by Tuesday night, as typically happens. “CNN is deploying resources to keep viewers apprised of updates on vote counts and reports, which may extend beyond November 3,” the network said in a press release.
But the odds are clearly stacked against Trump. On Saturday, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver wrote on his website that Trump has just a 10 percent chance of winning and “things aren’t likely to change all that much in our forecast between now and just after midnight on Tuesday, when we’ll freeze it.”
Biden’s other major advantage may be that not only is he well ahead of polling in the national vote, but that he is also ahead of where Clinton was against Trump in most battleground states at this juncture. Even so, Biden is still thought to be vulnerable in some of the same states that Democrats in 2016 described overconfidently as their “blue wall,” including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Michael Hirsh is a senior correspondent and deputy news editor at Foreign Policy.
What International Election Observers Will Be Looking For on Tuesday
As someone who has led or managed more than 40 election observation efforts in 22 countries over three decades, I have seen many problematic elections in struggling democracies and authoritarian states. Unfortunately, the 2020 US elections already resemble those in many of the world’s fragile democracies, as I described in Foreign Policy on Oct. 24. Since then, the parallels have only gotten more disturbing, with US President Donald Trump and his campaign continuing to accuse the challenger of planning to “steal” the election, last-minute legal challenges to voting procedures in key states, and Trump tweeting encouragement to supporters whose threats had led former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign to cancel an event in Texas.
As millions of Americans go to the polls tomorrow, among the many people watching closely will be the international election observer community, including me. Official observation efforts monitoring the US elections include those of the Organization of American States and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. For the first time, the Carter Center has a domestic election program that somewhat resembles their election observation programs overseas. While we always emphasize the importance of monitoring the entire electoral process before, during, and after voting, here is what I and other election observers will be looking for on Election Day itself.
When monitoring in-person voting in the United States, observers will look for compliance with local voting procedures—for example, whether polling places are open as scheduled, operate efficiently, and protect ballot secrecy. Observers also assess the process of checking voter registration and eligibility, which in the United States varies significantly from state to state. Observers also look for signs of voter intimidation, such as from unauthorized individuals inside or outside polling stations. As I pointed out in my article, this could be a serious issue following Trump’s and his campaign’s repeated calls for his supporters to go to polling stations to “go in to the polls” and “defend” the vote against alleged “fraud.”
Election observers will also evaluate how long voters must wait to cast their ballot and whether there are other obstacles to participation—issues that are especially important in the US context. With the COVID-19 pandemic still raging in much of the country, observers will also want to note whether the local process protects the safety of voters and polling station personnel, including whether officials, poll watchers, and voters are wearing masks and maintaining social distancing. Election observers usually also estimate voter turnout independent from any official numbers.
When election observers visit polling places, they typically use a checklist or questionnaire provided by their observation mission. By using a standardized list, a mission can systematically collect comparable information from diverse polling stations. That’s more complicated in the United States than just about every other democracy, because the United States lacks a uniform nationwide election process. Election procedures vary not only by US state but often by locality as well.
In order to make a final judgment on the integrity of an election, the observation missions will aggregate local findings—which may not be typical—and compare them with findings from other places. The question for an observation mission is not whether problems occur at all but whether they are systematic and capable of making a difference in an election’s outcome.
Of course, millions and millions of Americans will already have cast their ballots through mail-in, early in-person, or absentee voting. The balloting on Nov. 3 will be only a part of the overall process. And given the legal challenges already announced by Trump, and his refusal to commit to honoring the results, the biggest threats to a democratic election process may not occur until after Election Day.
Eric Bjornlund is the president of Democracy International, chair of the Election Reformers Network, and author of Beyond Free and Fair: Monitoring Elections and Building Democracy.
