The Biden-Trump debate won’t have changed voters’ minds – America is as divided as ever

As might have been expected, the presidential “debate” – it hardly qualifies for the term – created few surprises. It was as personal, harsh, chaotic and unenlightening as feared. It was like listening to two guys in a bar arguing about the football game, and not from any particular base of knowledge or insight. If the session had any value at all, it was to confirm the candidates’ respective supporters in their existing preferences, and to leave the remaining swing voters none the wiser about who to plump for.

More than most presidential contests this is between two extremely familiar figures. Biden has been in politics for a half century, launched his first presidential bid in 1988, and spent eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president. Donald Trump was a celebrity and reality TV star even before he became president. Biden and Trump’s virtues and vices are well known. 

Even the recent revelations about President Trump’s tax affairs, impressive as the scoop was for The New York Times, came as no great shock to anyone. It might have been more of a story if the returns then revealed that the tycoon paid the same share of his income to the federal government as most working Americans do, and that he was debt-free. The activities of Mr Biden’s son Hunter in the Ukrainian energy market, and Trump’s “beautiful” phone call to the Ukrainian president about Biden Jr, are also well publicised.

Nothing, in other words, seems likely to move the political needle in the last weeks of this long and arid campaign. America is as divided as ever, and the trend actually seems to be towards further entrenchment and a shrinking pool of floating voters. The culture wars and Mr Trump’s aggressive, personalised style of politics have exacerbated the extreme partisanship that has overtaken much of American politics in recent years.  

To be fair to Mr Trump, were it not for Covid-19 and its economic impact the president might now be heading for a narrow victory and a second term, albeit constrained by an uncooperative Congress. As things stand, his woeful mishandling of the coronavirus crisis has eroded confidence in his executive abilities, and changed minds (or, more precisely, those minds prepared to be changed) many months ago. Other Americans will have also decided long since that President Trump is ill-equipped to heal America’s racial divides.  

Mr Trump is on track to lose, albeit with some heavy caveats. Allowing for margins of error in the polls, the possibility of “shy” Trump supporters not declaring their allegiance, and a disproportionately strong showing in the swing states in the electoral college, Mr Trump obviously still has a chance of beating the odds, just as he did against Hilary Clinton four years ago. But still, he looks unlikely to reach far enough beyond his base to hold on to power.

What is even more predictable is that Mr Trump will try to litigate, cajole and bully his way to a second term, backed by an angry base of support fired up by talk of a rigged election. The result, as with the comparatively calm 2000 Bush-Gore election, will end up in the hands of the Supreme Court. Conservative as that body may now be, it is difficult to see the court simply awarding the election to Mr Trump, or setting it aside and ordering a rerun in the spring, either nationally or in some states with no postal balloting permitted.  

The constitution gets in the way of that, as does judicial common sense and plain politics. The fact that the president keeps talking about the election being stolen is a transparent ploy to pre-empt the result of a poll he fully expects to lose. It won’t work, but it will hurt. America will suffer many further traumas before the Trump era is finally over.