Sunday 11 October 2020

Will it be a slam-dunk defeat for Trump or an extraordinary win?

I wouldn't normally regard Senator Ted Cruz as a politician with his finger on the pulse of the nation. But I reckon he has managed to summarise pretty well the voting dilemma now facing the United States. Basically in two separate interviews, the one contradicting the other, the Republican senator from Texas has made it clear, well not clear at all actualy, that either Trump could win a landslide and both the House and Senate become Republican-controlled, or Joe Biden could win a landslide and the Democrats take both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Well that's settled it then. Despite the contradiction I think he might be right. It could go either way, for sure, but the way things are in the US at the moment, it is just possible that either Trump or Biden could win big time. Never mind the double-digit lead for Biden at the moment. I bet there are a helluva lot of Americans who have yet to decide which way they are going to vote and they won't make up their minds until they walk into the voting booth or send off their ballot paper in the post. It's that sort of election. Cruz in an interview on Friday said he feared Trump and the Republican party could face a "bloodbath" in November, like the Republicans did in the mid-term elections 1974 after Watergate, losing the Senate and the House to the Democrats. If Americans felt optimistic about the future and Covid looked like being beaten, then Trump would win hugely, Cruz said. But if they felt angry and depressed Biden would win hugely. He rowed back in an interview on TV today, saying Trump would win the election, no problem. He must have had a phone call from the White House. But the deep divide in the country and the total opposite characters of the two presidential nominees make it more than possible that Cruz's first interview comments were right.

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