Dr. Bangura
Dr. Yusuf Bangura, ex-Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria academic and ex-UNRISD researcher is a keen sighted observer of politics. He has been in a conversation on changing conditions of electoral politics in the United States and has drawn a few inferences thereon. He thinks they are just casual observations yet. Intervention thinks even as casual as they maybe, they are worth putting in the public domain even if only to insert a decolonial voice into one of the main issues in contemporary world politics – the direction of the United States of America. It reads as follows:
The Republican Party has lost the popular vote in six out of the last seven elections. The only time it won the popular vote was in 2004, when George W. Bush attracted a sympathy vote for the 9/11 attacks.
The chances of Republicans winning the presidency have increasingly depended on mobilizing their base in critical battleground states and suppressing the votes of the Democratic Party, especially black votes.
This election has demonstrated the limitations of the Republican strategy: black voter suppression has been largely ineffective; and the Republicans have lost control of the white suburbs.
The current Republican nightmare is that they will lose both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote for years to come, especially as Red states like Georgia and Arizona are slipping out of their grip, and Texas may not be far behind.
The Nobel Laureate economist, Paul Krugman, posted two insightful geopolitical maps on his Twitter page yesterday. They show the dramatic shifts that have occurred in US electoral politics.
The key predictor of electoral behaviour is no longer regional orientation based on the old civil war cleavage but education and metropolitan growth.
The more educated a state is, the more it is likely to vote the Democratic Party and the more a state becomes metropolitan, the more it also votes Democratic. These developments are brought out in bold relief in Georgia which must give Republicans sleepless nights.
The chances of Republicans winning the presidency in future elections seem very slim. This may explain why the Republican Senator, Lindsey Graham, said a few days ago that Republicans will never win the presidency again if they accept the media’s announcement that Biden has won the election.
US democracy is, sadly, at a crossroads.
