Commentary No. 52, November 15, 2000
"The U.S. Presidential Elections: An Interim Report"
As I write, the election results are not yet definitive, and may not be so for a while yet. There are three issues: where we are at, how we got there, and what difference it makes.
Where we are is simple in outline, and complicated in detail. About 100 millions votes were cast. Al Gore has a lead of some 200,000 votes, which is 1/5 of 1%. But U.S. presidential elections are not decided by popular vote. Instead, there is an Electoral College, whose "electors" are chosen by each state, and who vote in mid-December. Winning the majority in a state gives you the votes of that state. At the moment, 47 of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, have awarded their electoral college votes. Three states are still in the balance: Florida, New Mexico, and Oregon. Gore is leading in New Mexico and Oregon and it is expected he will win their votes. This makes the Electoral College vote so close that the 25 electors of Florida will make the difference.
As of Nov. 14, the official count in Florida, where over 6 million persons voted, is that George W. Bush is exactly 300 votes ahead. However, there are still some 4000 overseas votes to be counted, the deadline being Nov. 17, and in these the guess is that Bush will do better than Gore. And Palm Beach County is conducting a manual recount. There are reasons to believe that this recount may favor Gore, and may be enough to make the difference. However, it is not sure that this recount will be taken into consideration. A court case looms, which will decide this. In addition, two other counties may recount manually. In any case, the Palm Beach recount will probably take a week. So the actual figures are uncertain, and the legalities are uncertain as well. There are a host of other possible developments, too numerous to outline, and it is not at all sure that any of them will come into play.
What should be noted is that the disputed counts are a question of errors in the procedure or faulty voting mechanisms. No one to this point has suggested any question of fraud or malfeasance in office. Errors are normal, and people usually ignore them, because they don't really change the results. This time, because everything is so close, every error does indeed make a difference in the final result, which is why there is so much energy being put into the issue of the recount.
How did we get there? The first thing that must be noted is that this is an extremely close election. But most elections in the U.S., and indeed throughout the Western world, are close. They are simply seldom this close. The elections are close because the basic system is that there are two parties or two coalitions in each country, one right of center and one left of center. This means that the parties or coalitions have a perpetual political dilemma, how to attract "undecided" voters in the center of the political spectrum without losing their own base, especially that part of the base which is more to the right or more to the left.
So we often get what we got in the U.S. this time: two candidates pushing a centrist agenda, with covert appeals to their more militant supporters. The net result usually is that elections are only exciting to the true centrist voters if the candidates are exciting. And neither Bush nor Gore was able to fire up these voters, who voted for them, if they did, with hesitation and low passion. However, the militant supporters are militant, and they tended to vote strongly for their candidate. The breakdown in the U.S. of militants is rather straightforward and quite traditional. The militant Republicans tend to be better off economically, more conservative in their social mores, and a clear majority among white males. The militant Democrats tend to be less well off economically, often more liberal in their social mores, and a clear majority among females, "minority" groups (Blacks, Hispanics, Jews), and union members.
In addition, there is the problem of "third" parties. The U.S. electoral system, unlike the system used in most European countries, is particularly hostile to third parties. They emerge, usually for a single election, to "punish" one of the two major parties. In 1912 and 1992, such parties took enough votes away from the Republicans to elect a Democrat. This year, the Green Party may have made the difference. Certainly, without it, the Democrats would have carried Florida easily.
Does all this make a difference? That is really two questions. Does the turmoil of the electoral count this year make a difference in the politics of the coming years? And does who is the actual winner make a difference? The answer to the question about the impact of the turmoil is that it may make some difference. It further erodes the legitimacy of the U.S. state, which has been undergoing a process of erosion for some 30 years now. Tempers are up because of the recount process. And whoever ultimately loses will undoubtedly feel grumpy, maybe even cheated. But the United States bounced back remarkably well from the high passions of the Clinton impeachment debate, and the country could forget about Florida by next year.
So we come to the crucial question, does it matter if it is Gore or Bush? The answer has to be yes and no. Let us start with the no. I have already argued (Comment No. 47, Sept. 1, 2000, "The U.S. Elections and the Rest of the World") that U.S. foreign policy will be essentially the same with either candidate. There are nuances, no doubt. And it is true that this electoral turmoil will further weaken the U.S. political position in the rest of the world, but not dramatically.
The U.S. President is extraordinarily powerful in the U.S. political system, but he does need to get legislation through Congress, and that is never easy even if his party commands better majorities than we have this time. The counting on the voting for the Senate and the House of Representatives is also not yet fully completed, but the Republicans will hold an extremely slim majority in both houses. Either Bush or Gore will have to water down proposals considerably to get them through. This holds especially for the more important legislative issues on which they differed: tax reduction, widening of health coverage, changes in the social security system.
This brings us then to those matters a President can more or less (I emphasize more or less) decide by himself. One issue everyone has talked about is the nomination of Supreme Court judges (and of course of the federal judiciary in general). Here who wins clearly makes a difference. A Bush win will undoubtedly push the U.S. judiciary, and the Supreme Court in particular, in a more conservative direction, and for a long time. A Gore victory will more likely keep the status quo in the judiciary. The single more controversial judicial issue still before us is abortion, and it is clearly the fear of a lot of people that a Bush court will overturn the key decision, Roe v. Wade. But there are many other judicial issues which matter as well.
The President also appoints the members of the regulatory agency boards. And here a Bush victory will undoubtedly mean reducing or eliminating pressure on Microsoft, on the tobacco companies, and on the pharmaceutical companies. There are also decisions on the environment. And Bush has already announced that he will allow oil drilling in Alaska fields to which environmentalist groups and Gore are strongly opposed.
So, the militants had some reason to be militant. But the centrist voters (undecided, bored, disinterested) had some reason to feel undecided and indifferent as to the results.
Immanuel Wallerstein
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen
from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
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