Comment: America's distrustful voters

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Comment: America's distrustful voters Andreas Ross • 1 hour • 3 minutes reading time Earlier is safer? In the state of Georgia there was a huge rush for early voting, here on November 1st in a museum in Atlanta Good news from the polls on the American election: Almost eighty percent of voters are confident that the announced election result will be correct. A majority of Republicans also expect this, although Donald Trump's accusations of mass manipulation have made a greater impression on them. The good news quickly ends in the same poll by Siena College and the New York Times. Almost half of those surveyed expect Trump to use illegal means to try to manipulate the election result in his favor - and at least a third suspect Kamala Harris of planning the same. The fact that the survey found that Americans still have a lot in common gives little cause for optimism: around three out of four Republicans and Democrats see their democracy under threat. This is by no means just due to doubts about the electoral process or fear of Donald Trump's authoritarian tendencies. Many Americans doubt whether the people's representatives still represent the whole people and not just the interests of certain groups. The approximately 16 billion dollars in donations that the election campaign is likely to have swallowed up this year (estimated to be 174 times more than the previous federal election campaign) have not convinced anyone otherwise. It could take weeks The fact that the polls predict an extremely close race does not rule out the possibility that Trump or Harris could win quite clearly in the electoral college - namely if a clear national trend allows him or her to win in the seven states that are only seriously contested. But it is also possible that the victory will ultimately depend on a handful of votes in two or three states. Patience would then be required, as it could take days, even weeks, to get a result. Some states countered this by issuing new rules for faster counting of mail-in votes. It is not a good omen that Republican-dominated states rejected such initiatives. Rather, Trump's camp tried here and there to slow down the counting. This brings back bad memories of 2020, when the then president sold the supposed "delay" in the vote count as evidence of manipulation. At that time, Trump was in the White House. In theory, he had direct access to the FBI, the federal prosecutor's office and the armed forces. How far he wanted to go and who prevented what has not (yet) been legally clarified. What is clear is that Trump and his loyalists left no stone unturned to disenfranchise the voters of the victorious Democrat Joe Biden and stay in office. Maybe he will really win this time. It seems uncertain whether Harris will then congratulate him quickly in accordance with old custom and Biden will invite him to the White House - after all, both have declared Trump a "fascist" and sworn an oath to defend the Constitution. If Trump loses again, he would not have the power of a president to challenge the election this time. It makes a difference whether a local election official gets a call from the White House or from a golf club. Trump now has better lawyers than Rudy Giuliani In some respects, however, Trump would have better conditions than in 2020. Precisely because he was president, many people around him considered the Constitution more important than his ego, starting with Vice President Mike Pence. Trump had to rely on eccentrics like the conspiracy-minded Rudy Giuliani and the pillow producer Mike Lindell to challenge results that his own employees declared legitimate in court. In the meantime, however, the Republican Party organization is subservient to Trump, and after years of preparation, its renowned lawyers have already filed dozens of lawsuits to give weight to later allegations. There is no doubt about the Republican's determination to return to the White House at any cost: only as president can he be sure that he will not have to answer to several criminal courts. America's voters are exhausted after years of hardship. First, depending on your perspective, the "Trump chaos" or the "mass hysteria" of Trump's opponents. Add to that the pandemic, then high inflation - and all of this is accompanied by blanket moral judgments about large sections of the population, willfully distorted facts and competing "truths". The majority of voters will hardly know anyone who decides differently from them at the ballot box: right and left often live among themselves - not just in the online echo chambers, but in real life.