There Aren’t Really 2 Candidates: The Election Is Either against Trump or for Him

Biden was never an exciting leader, and in the 2020 elections Trump is running against himself: the connection between the presidential contest and Boris Yeltsin and the meaning of the unexpected battle over Minnesota.

In the home stretch of the race for the presidency of the United States, the image of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin bears a resemblance to both candidates for a number of reasons. On the one hand, the personality of Donald Trump; on the other, the strangeness of Joe Biden's campaign. Like Trump, Yeltsin was the archetype of an exciting leader able to stir people into identifying with him, but on the other a hand is also capricious and behaves in ways that are unexpected for a president. Like Trump, Yeltsin was a voracious vote gatherer and was one to “shoot from the hip” in his scathing remarks. Since the bratty days of Nikita Khrushchev, which famously ended when he banged his shoe on the lectern in front of a full assembly to drive home his point at the United Nations, there had never been another leader like him.

But raising the ghost of Yeltsin in the context of Biden's campaign is especially justified because of the similarity between Yeltsin's last run for president of Russia and Biden’s current one: Yeltsin entered the presidential race when he was sick and barely functioning, and it was doubtful that he was fit to run a country. But all the leaders and the state elite rallied around him, covering for his blunders and limitations in order to block the threat of the alternative. In the case of Yeltsin, the threat was the return of the Communist Party. In the case of Biden, the elite are lining up to cover up the candidate's lack of fitness in order to bring down Trump.

Biden was never a thrilling candidate. He doesn’t have a shred of the magic Bill Clinton had or the charisma Barack Obama projected. He is more or less a pale version of Al Gore, without the Nobel Prize and without the Oscar (although it could be said in Biden’s favor that he never tried to take credit for inventing the internet). He was hit hard in the early primaries this year until the Democratic Party’s strategists finally figured out that he was the candidate of their dreams.

The 2020 election is a race with one candidate. The only candidate is Trump. No one is voting for Biden; they are voting against Trump. But Biden, a walking sleeping pill, is the essential weapon against Trump, a man who portrays the Democrats as those who will turn the United States socialist, into “The People’s Republic of the United States.” If the candidate had been Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, people would have snapped up Trump’s campaign merchandise like hotdogs at a Fourth of July picnic. But Biden, on the other hand, is a little hard to paint as Che Guevara. It is easier to portray him as a necessary evil that the voter has to swallow in order to prevent Trump's reelection.

At the moment, the “Never Trump” movement is leading with a sizable margin in the polls. A week and a half before the election, Trump appears to be on the way to losing voter support. If there is no repetition of the 2016 upheaval in the final 10 fateful days before the election, Biden will be sworn in as the 46th president of the United States in January, with his vice president, Kamala Harris.

In this case, it’s the narrative. Once again, there is a connection to Yeltsin, or, more correctly, to the one who replaced him under similar circumstances: Vladimir Putin, the guy who came from out of nowhere, stepped into Yeltsin’s worn-out shoes and grabbed the reins of power. Putin, a former KGB officer who knows his flock, created a novel, hybrid version of an authoritarian regime. On the surface it was democratic, but for the Russian people, it fulfilled the longing for a tsar: a deep, ancient yearning for a compassionate leader who advocates for justice for his citizens, but who strikes his enemies with an iron fist, whether they be domestic or external enemies.

Harris is a tough former state prosecutor who is very close to being the first female to lead a superpower. An important parenthetical note: There is a common denominator between Harris and Putin. Both were peripheral figures but they were always central to people in power. Both moved up as outsiders, in that they both loved Jews, despite being raised in environments soaked with hatred for Israel. On the one hand, it was the Soviet secret service, on the other, the congressional social groups of the extreme left, which are growing in number in the Democratic Party.

The Road to the White House

Let’s return to the history of the next 10 days. After an impressive speech in Chicago, one of the listeners said to Adlai Stevenson, who had lost twice to Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s, “Governor, every thinking person will be voting for you.” He retorted, “Madam, that is not enough. I need a majority.”

Voters for Trump are nostalgic for an America that is free and God-fearing, an America that prizes hard work and loves country and the rule of law. The problem is that Trump needs a majority in order to win. At the moment, there is no such majority. On the other hand, it is not out of the question.

In order to understand why a slight change in the percentages and the right distribution (even a little) could turn the contest on its head — despite Biden's almost 10% lead in the polls — you have to understand how the election is conducted. The United States is divided into 51 electoral areas: 50 states that make up the United States, and the District of Columbia, where the capital is located. The candidate who wins a state's majority gets all its votes from the Electoral College, which has a total of 538 electors.

The number of representatives sent by each state to the Electoral College is determined by the size of its population, but each state gets two additional votes no matter what its size, a fact which gives a bit more weight to the smaller states. Over the years, various state voting has crystallized into patterns that have not changed dramatically. As a result, in tight races, the decision comes down to a small number of key states. This is what happened in the 2016 election. Because of a small shift in direction in the final week, Trump won a majority in the swing states and in another three states in the northern Midwest that had leaned toward Hillary Clinton — and won the election.

Biden has a secure lead, but there are still 197 votes available to the Electoral College from swing states. This is the battlefield. The remainder of the votes are not yet in play. Biden has 216 in his pocket and Trump has 125. Remember, the magic number to win a majority is 270. Among the 14 states currently considered to be a toss-up, there are four states that, in 2016, gave a majority to Trump, who won with 306 votes versus Hillary Clinton’s 232. In other words, Trump can lose the 36 votes he received in 2016 and still be elected.

Trump can lose in Pennsylvania and in Wisconsin (which he won in 2016) and in another small state. If he keeps the rest of the states that he won in 2016 (but in which he is currently behind by one or two percentage points), he will be president. Furthermore, if he wins in Minnesota, where he is doing surprisingly well, as long as he keeps Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, he will be able to lose Michigan and still win the election. If Trump wins in Minnesota it will be sensational. Minnesota is the state with the longest stretch of Democratic victories. A Republican candidate has not won there since 1972.

Minnesota was the only state that Ronald Reagan lost in 1984. But in 2016, Clinton won there by a tiny margin of 1.5%. This time, the mayhem and murders following the horrible death of George Floyd raised support for Trump, in contrast with the general trend, and his chances there are considerable. If he wins there, he can afford to lose in all the other three states where he had surprise wins in 2016 — and still be reelected.

To summarize: In 2016, I predicted that Trump would surprise everyone and win. This time, all I will say is that the jury is still out. We can expect 10 dramatic days that are not only important to the United States and the world, but it's no exaggeration to say that they are fateful for a little country in the Middle East located southeast of Cyprus.