Ante-postscriptum (April 2021): In April 2021, a memo came out in Washington D.C. stating a simple fact about the previous year’s electoral outcome. “Thanks to the quirks of the electoral college,” it stated, “the difference between a new administration and four more years of Donald Trump was merely 43,000 voters cast across Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.” The report was signed by a group of five leading Democratic polling firms —ALG Research, GBAO Strategies, Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, Global Strategy Group and Normington Petts— banded together in an effort to understand the “major errors” and failure “to live up to [their] own expectations” and predict how close the 2020 race actually turned out to be. They admitted having underestimated turnout, as well as a number of measurement errors, but, I think, their major problem was the lack of a deeper understanding of how politics work, especially when the incumbent is a populist. Eventually, the pollsters settled on the idea that “there is something systematically different about the people [they] reached, and the people [they] did not.” Or, perhaps, they reached the same people as usual. Only that, in populist democracies, people get energized, and act, in unusual ways.
I have been studying and writing about populism for over ten years. And, with just 56 days left before the U.S. presidential election on 3 November, I think it likely that Donald Trump is to win re-election. This view is based on my published comparative research on the sum of postwar liberal democracies that have undergone the full populist experience: Populist rise, populist rule, and populist aftermaths. While building the argument below, I provide links to previous works of mine, which you may find useful. Let’s go, then, with this judgement keeping one thing in mind while hoping for another. What is to keep in mind is that, unless in the following days or weeks the American market suffers a massive decline, in which case Biden wins, spiralling polarization is of advantage only to Trump. As of the hope, may this forecasting be wrong.
