How Joe Biden Won? | US Elections Analysis 

Greetings, Friends! Who will be America’s next President has not been officially declared yet but after several days of counting,  it is quite clear that Donald Trump is going to lose and Joe Biden is going to become the new American President.  The preparations for the same have already begun. Our Indian Godi media which had once put Trump on a pedestal and Modiji had almost campaigned in favour of Trump. Today, just as the winds have changed, they too have flipped sides.  Now the Godi media is showing the rich old friendship between Joe Biden and Modiji . The BJP IT cell pages were earlier showing you the Pakistani links of Joe Biden, portraying him as anti-national because he has spoken against CAA NRC.  Who is he? He is a Pakistani.  The same pages today are searching for Modi supporters in Joe Biden’s team.  So, you can imagine the big influence that American elections have on India. So, let’s get to know , how this has been made possible? What does the election really mean?  How has Trump lost here and how and why does it affect India and the rest of the world? Let’s know more.

How US Election works? 

    

                                   

Let’s clear some basics first because it is important to know how much political power Joe Biden will really have after winning this election.  In India, the game is quite simple. You vote in the Lok Sabha election in your constituency for your MP.  This happens in the entire nation.  All the MPs together choose a Prime Minister.  So, for you as a voter, you do not vote for your PM directly, rather you just vote for your MP who either belongs to any particular party or can be an independent candidate as well.  But you only get to cast one vote. This is not the case in America.  When you go to cast your vote, you will have to vote not just once but thrice. The first vote is for your preferred candidate for the position of President.  The second vote is for the House of Representatives which is the lower house of America. You can compare this house to India’s Lok Sabha.  Therefore, we can say that your second vote will be for America’s Lok Sabha member. The third vote is for the Senate. This is their Upper House. You can compare it to India’s Rajya Sabha.  So, in the first vote you choose the President. In the second vote you choose, America's Lok Sabha member  and in the third vote you will choose America’s Rajya Sabha member from your area.  

What is interesting is that you can vote for three different political parties while casting these three respective votes.  For the first, you might vote for a Democrat President.  Second, the House of Representative you choose could be from the Republican Party.  And third, the Senate member you choose could be from a third party.  Joe Biden who is winning the election would want his party i.e The Democrats to hold a majority in the House of Representatives.  He would also want his party to hold a majority in the Senate as well.  This will make it easier for him to pass bills and make new laws when he eventually becomes the President.   But that is not how things are unfolding unfortunately. According to the current predictions, Democrats will be able to get a majority in the House of Representatives  but the Senate will have a Republican majority. 

The way of counting votes in America is quite interesting and in my view it is even bad in many ways.   Why it is bad, I will tell you.   But first I will explain what is it exactly?  In India, when you vote for Lok Sabha, you vote for a particular candidate in your constituency.  The candidate who has the highest percentage of votes wins the election.   But in America, the mechanism of vote counting is different for all three types of votes. 

First, let’s talk about the House of Representatives.  In this election, the counting system is similar to India’s Lok Sabha election. In your constituency, you will vote for one particular candidate for the House of Representatives.  The candidate who gets the maximum percentage of votes will win.  In the entire United States of America, there are about 435 constituencies who have been distributed according to population.  Where there is a higher population, you will find more constituencies there. 

In the Senate however, there are a total of 100 seats and these 100 seats haven’t been divided on the basis of population  but rather it has been divided on the basis of the states in the country.  There are a total of 50 states in the US and every state gets 2 senate seats. So, in total 50*2, there are 100 Senate seats.   For vote counting, the Senate election takes the vote percentage in the entire state into consideration  and the candidate who gets the maximum votes will become a Senator.   This is quite an ordinary system with not much complexity.  

But for the Presidential election, I consider the vote counting system to be quite bad.  For vote counting in a Presidential election, every state is given a fixed number of electors.  The state with a higher population will get more electors.  For example, California gets one of the highest numbers of electors due to high population.  In the entire USA, there are a total of 538 electors.  Every President must collect electors from each state and cross the majority mark. 

Winner Takes All

The majority mark for 538 is 270 electors.  Whichever Presidential candidate crosses the majority of 270 can become the President.   The problem here is the rule of winner takes all. Let me explain with an example. The state of California has 55 electors.  Consider that if 50% of people living in California vote for Joe Biden. So Joe Biden’s voting percentage is 50%.  And 49.99% people vote for Donald Trump.   So, Joe Biden leads with only 0.01% but according to the rules, in such a situation, all the electors i.e  all 55 of them will go in Joe Biden’s favour. Can you get what problems are created?  Irrespective of the number of electors the state has,  if a person wins a particular state by even 1% then all the electors of the state go in that person's favour . Such situations get created because of this mechanism that if you look at the voting percentage of the entire country a candidate could lose despite a higher percentage of people voting in his favour. 

This is what happened in the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton got three million more votes than Donald Trump but even after that Donald Trump won that election.  This is because due to the  system of electors, most of the people who voted for Hillary belonged to the state of California.  So, she got a higher voting percentage there but in other states she lacked a bit behind due to which all the electors went to Donald Trump and he eventually won the election.  This is exactly the reason which results in a situation where most of the citizens are ignored by politicians by not campaigning at some places.  Because , most of the US states, it is known that here 60 percent Democrats live and rest 40 are Republicans therefore this state will always vote for Democrats.  'I need not campaign or go there.  It is taken for granted that the state will vote for Democrats.' The trend is that states on the east and west coast of the USA normally vote for Democrats and the central part of USA normally votes for Republicans.

Urban areas favour the Democrats while rural areas favour the Republicans.  Urban areas have a higher population and the central rural area has more land, less population.  This is the reason if you look at the election map, Joe Biden’s party colour blue is seen lesser in the map even when he has won the election.  Red is seen more because Republican states have more land area.  This means that there are only a few states in the entire country where there is stiff competition. These are called swing states.  You cannot say from beforehand whether these states will favour the Republicans or the Democrats  because the percentage of Republicans and Democrats in these states are almost 50:50 percent.

In this election, the counting of votes was almost finished on the first day itself but a winner was not declared  because the competition in these swing states was quite heated up. Especially the four states  of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona, there was a close competition therefore the counting continued for many days.   Even after 90 percent of vote counting, it wasn't clear who was winning and who was losing. There was a time where it looked like Trump would win. The betting markets placed 70 percent of their bets on Trump.  But, one of these states flipped and Joe Biden moved ahead and won that state.

For this very reason, this US election was not any less thrilling than a Super over IPL match.  But like I said, this is a very controversial system.  People have demanded to change this system because if we look at total voting percentage,  Joe Biden has been leading for some time now when the counting was taking place.  So, the results should have been quite obvious that Joe Biden will win. But a situation like 2016 could have been created too.  A lot of people say that the system should be aligned with percentage as a vote  and on the basis of which electors should be distributed rather than winner takes all in the state which one wins. 

How Trump Lost!

If we talk about the election results, this is quite a shocking result for the American people.   This is so because prior to the election, all the opinion polls were consistently saying  that Joe Biden was leading  by approximately 8 percentage points from Donald Trump. 8 percent vote share makes a lot of difference.  This is why most of the people took it for granted that Joe Biden will win this election easily.   But in reality, on the day of election, we got to know how close the race is.  The opinion polls turning out to be wrong show that the USA has a big share of silent voters  who vote for Donald trump but are not vocal about their political opinions.

So, it is something that the Democrat party and the left leaning people of America should think about. It is something to self-reflect upon what was really their mistake in the campaigning  that even after so many wrongs of the Donald trump term, he came so close to winning.  On the other hand, if we talk about Donald Trump, what tantrums he threw after losing the election. This was an exaggerated way to show that Trump became a crybaby after losing the election.  But if you look at Donald Trump’s Twitter, you will see something similar. Stop the Counting!  Donald Trump was openly writing on Twitter to stop the counting when the counting was underway because he was winning therefore : stop the counting so that he could become the President As if the rest of votes hold no value because he was winning in the vote counting till now. After that, he even started using election fraud as a tactic. He said he is losing the election due to election fraud.

The ballots that have been brought are fraud, fake because Democrat’s votes are increasing etc, etc.  He held a press conference for the same. American news channels cut the press conference short therefore interrupting it mid way. They were like: Donald Trump is such a big liar that it is hard to believe therefore we will not stream it. Let’s chuck it! Twitter also started blacking out, hiding his tweets because he was openly spreading so much fake news.   I hope that next time Twitter also blacks out and hides the fake news spread by Indian politicians during Indian elections.   We just cannot expect this from Indian media and Indian news channels. 

Impact of Biden on World

So, what impact will Joe Biden becoming the President have?  In my opinion, it is not only good news for India but for the entire world.   Donald Trump’s policy was America first i.e our country should always come first.  I will keep my country first even if the rest of the world goes to hell! This is the reason his policies revolved around doing things for America while breaking the partnership with the rest of the world. Whatever international treaties are under play, should go; be it the Paris Climate Agreement, Iran Nuclear Deal, UNESCO,  United Nations Human Rights Council, Nuclear Force Treaties, World Health Organisations, Trans Pacific Partnership.  Trump either tried to back out from these treaties by completely withdrawing or he has tried to make them weaker.

In my opinion, I support all those politicians of the world who not only think about their own country but also the entire Earth.   If every country starts thinking for its own selfish benefits, the world will not be able to thrive.  Everyone will fight each other resulting in a world war like situation. The Earth will perish.  All the countries need to come forward on their own and think about the Earth and Donald trump would not have done that.  Today, the biggest threat to the world is climate change and environment destruction. With great difficulty, all the countries came together to try and curtail greenhouse gas emissions,  combat climate change to some extent in the Paris Climate Agreement.  

But what did Donald Trump do? He withdrew USA’s support from the Paris Climate Agreement.  Joe Biden’s first promise has been that as soon as he will become the President, on his first day itself, he will make US join Paris Climate Agreement again.    It is Joe Biden’s promise to try and achieve zero carbon emission in the USA by 2050. He promises to invest $2 trillion in green areas such as infrastructure, transportation, auto industries, housing and construction practice,  nature conservation efforts and environment justice. Additionally, he will be creating 1 million jobs in green areas.  If we talk about the economy, it was Trump’s policy to curtail America’s trade with other nations in order to encourage manufacturing in America.  Joe Biden too promotes this but he does not want to curtail trade with other countries to that extent.  Both of them are against China. There isn’t much difference here. 

But there is great difference in their policies when it comes to immigration.  Donald Trump ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Programme. What was this program?  Any illegal child immigrant who arrives in the US should be allowed to stay in the US. Donald Trump said no to the same.  Joe Biden says that he will initiate this programme again  and that if a kid arrives in the US as an illegal immigrant by mistake then he/she will be given the rights to live in the US.  Simultaneously, Joe Biden has also said that  he would stop the construction and funding of what was Donald Trump’s biggest promise; the US-Mexico border wall! He would also roll back the travel bans enforced by Trump. 

Effect on India

From India’s perspective, a specific section of people supported Donald Trump a lot. Some people even worshiped him.  And our Prime Minister Modiji almost campaigned for him in India.  An event was held in a jam packed stadium, as you all know.  But Donald Trump did not do much for India. In fact, it can be called neutral or even negative.  He temporarily suspended H1b visas due which India immigrants in the US faced a lot of issues.  Joe Biden on the other hand is in India’s favour. He said way back in 2006 that, “My dream is that in 2020,  the two closest nations in the world will be India and the United States and if that occurs the world will be safer”.  

Both Trump and Biden will be in favour of India is quite obvious because India is a regional superpower in Asia.  It is also China’s big rival and USA also being China’s rivals, USA would want to strengthen its ties with India. There is no doubt about that.  Additionally, as Joe Biden belongs to the Democrats party therefore his views on liberalism are quite strong.  He openly supports human rights, religious freedom, and secularism and minority opportunities and even shows his support.  This is the reason; it will irritate a lot of people in India such as the people who do not support secularism. In fact, only a few months back, Joe Biden openly took a stand against CAA-NRC which did not impress a lot of people in the Modi government.  I hope that you found this article to be informative. Please share if you like the  article .

 Thank You very much.