A panel beat of Shakespeare to fit modern elections, referencing last week’s graceful presidential concession in Botswana, would read, “Nothing in his political life became him like leaving it.”
We live in a rough political neighbourhood with stolen elections in Zimbabwe now normalised, violent killings recently visited on the opposition in Mozambique, and a feudal absolute monarch in Eswatini has been in power basically forever. Even here, the ANC’s apparent acceptance of its 29 May loss of power has been undercut by its imperious behaviour since.
Last week, Botswanan President Mokgweetsi Masisi lost power in a landslide defeat for his party, which had been in office for nearly six decades. Though he didn’t claim the poll was rigged, he didn’t call out the army and he didn’t declare an emergency to cling to office.
Rather he told Botswanans:
Most Americans will likely have difficulty placing small, landlocked Botswana on a map of the world. Its population of 2.5 million could easily fit into Kansas (2.94 million), which is only the 35th US state ranked by numbers in a vast country of over 334 million people.
However, many there and in the world, who are watching America this week with intense interest, might hope that when the tumultuous 2024 US presidential election result is finally declared, the loser will do an approximation of the outgoing Botswanan’s classy concession. Don’t count on it.
Though this used to be the norm for the world’s number one economic and military power, the home of more scientific and technological advances than any other country on earth (and 71% of all Nobel Prize winners, though tellingly 29% of them were immigrants).
Trump still hasn’t conceded 2020 loss
In 1980, when incumbent president Jimmy Carter lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan, he conceded even before the polls had closed on the West Coast.
Another Democrat, Al Gore, waited for 35 days after election day, on 7 November 2000, to throw in the towel to Republican George W Bush. This was due to ballot mayhem in Florida, which was only resolved when the US Supreme Court decided by one vote to end the recounting of votes in that state.
Still, Gore managed, doubtless through gritted teeth, to congratulate his opponent and offer a high-minded departure note:
If this sounds like a faint, disappearing echo from the chasm of yesteryear, it’s because it is. This year’s Republican candidate, former president Donald Trump, has yet to concede his loss to President Joe Biden four years after he incontestably and certifiably lost his re-election bid in November 2020.
Relitigating that loss, a “stolen rigged election” in his words, animated his comeback attempt on Tuesday. The Republican Party Trump now controls is unrecognisable from the version offered by Bush. This is testified by the fact that Bush’s vice president (Dick Cheney), one of his daughter’s (Barbara) and none of his successors as Republican candidates or their families (Mitt Romney and the McCains) are supporting Trump. Mitt Romney who lost the presidential election to Barack Obama in 2012, is what is termed in Republican circles a “Never Trumper”.
He declined in 2016 to vote for Trump as president and offered the view of the contest:
“Hillary Clinton [The Democratic presidential candidate] is wrong on every issue, but she is wrong within the normal parameters.”
When later elected to the US Senate, Romney – an intensely religious and deeply conservative person – became the first senator in US history to vote to remove from office a president from his own party, Donald Trump. This stemmed from the 6 January 2021 insurrection, when Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol.
As recently as last Sunday, at one of his final election rallies, Trump complained, ”I never should have left the White House.”
“Transgressive”, an apt term meaning violation of normal moral and social values, fits Trump literally to a “T”. The first convicted felon running for the highest office while on bail, a misogynist and arguably a racist, he paints his own country as miserabilist dystopia and brands his opponents “demons” not Democrats. Yet his hold on his supporters is total.
Much given to hyperbole and outright lying, Trump offered a deep truth back in 2016 when his improbable quest for the White House began in snowy Iowa. He told an audience there: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”
Despite or because of all this, in the closest presidential election in polling history, he has an even chance of reclaiming the White House. If he does so, it will be, in part, because veteran Democratic strategist James Carville is correct that “it’s the economy stupid”.
Heading in the wrong direction
Two-thirds of Americans think, due to inflation and rising costs and flatlining paychecks, that their country is heading in the wrong direction.
Like his Make America Great slogan, Trump borrowed the killer line from Reagan in 1980: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago.” Though with his grievances and rage, managed to often tread on his own message.
And if Trump is overexposed as the most well-known brand in America, his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is too undefined, and her policies too vaguely sketched to change opinions, thus the deadheat in the forecasts on outcome.
Trump is counting on the ‘bro vote’ disaffected and disengaged young men to turn up in unprecedented numbers to lift him to victory.
In his view, Democrats (under Biden and Harris) allowed a surge of migrants from Central America to enter the country, and his offer of a wall of tariffs to protect local industries and workers will do the deal for him.
In both respects, regardless of who wins, Trump has changed the debate with vast implications for the world beyond the (poorly protected in Trump’s view) US borders.
Harris, in most respects a mirror inversion of Trump, is betting on the opposite. A huge surge of female voters enraged by the (Trump-appointed) US Supreme Court decision to overturn long-held abortion rights to register their anger via ballots. Harris filched and repurposed the Republican mantra of “Freedom” for her election, while Trump is counting on long-time blue-collar Democrats to consolidate the Republican base.
Doubtless, Elon Musk’s $1 million daily prize giveaway to registered voters in swing states might also help. America’s antique electoral system, which determines the outcome not on popular votes but in an electoral college, means that 43 states and their tallies count for much less than seven defined battleground states, and one in particular, Pennsylvania. There, Harris, aided by the star power of Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin and Oprah among others, held her final rally on the steps of Philadelphia’s Art Museum made famous in the 1976 classic boxing movie Rocky.
Channelling her inner Sylvester Stallone, Harris said the venue was “a tribute to those who start as the underdog and climb to victory”.
For punch-drunk Americans, the final verdict can’t come too soon. Though in one case, at least, there will be no throwing in of the towel even if he is counted out.
