But why did Trump claim victory even though he didn't (for now) win? What does it really gain?
Of course, his words don't affect the count, and even friends have criticized him. So why did he do it?
He said he would do it, then he messed around, reiterated, let the communications manager say that he had changed his mind, and finally he really did it: early this morning, addressing his electoral committee crammed without masks in the east wing of the House Bianca, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, prematurely claimed victory in the elections, despite the swing of the counts is still ongoing. Threatening, as if that were not enough, to take everything to the Supreme Court to stop the carousel.
The "leader of the free world" was not a spur of the moment. For weeks, Trump has been discussing this scenario that is no understatement to call "subversive" with his advisers, weighing various hypotheses on what to say in case the projections didn't paint a clear picture on the night of November 3. Many experts have even considered a worst case scenario in which the head of the White House would not have wanted to go with the good, forcing the country into a grueling civil battle that would have eroded and polarized it more than it already was.
In fact, everything goes as planned. In these hours, the Trump re-election committee is repeating it to its supporters, bluntly, in several newsletters that point to the Republican hard core, and on social media: fight for Trump, respond blow for blow; because although the numbers are "obviously in favor of your president" the "radical left" will try to "cheat the elections". Tones of an aggression that would have been considered unacceptable by the international community in any other country in the world, and instead at this point normalized by the very democracy whose "spectacle" was celebrated until the day before yesterday.
Trump has therefore already declared victory in states where the competition is still too open and there are still hundreds of thousands of votes to count, such as in North Carolina and Georgia. States in which he could win, if only he waited for the ballot to end. He also pointed to the counts in Michigan and Pennsylvania, two states crucial to his re-election path, where a large number of mail-order votes have not yet been included, saying he was winning there too. A speech that, moreover, comes after months of accusations - judged by political scientists without foundation - against the vote by post, which according to Trump favors fraud at his expense.
A reason for optimism for the Democrats and for the left: among the reasons that prompted Trump to squeeze out there could be the fact that he does not have much faith in his means, and in the data that will come from the polls. In Nevada, and even more so in Wisconsin and Michigan - territories where Trump has tried to stave off economic anxieties related to closures by saying the Dems would bankrupt casinos and factories - the ever progressive big city vote is looming in these hours an overtaking of Biden. Furthermore, even the ballot packets that remain to be counted in Pennsylvania should be more blue than red.
In any case, Trump's outrageous and unprecedented statements change little in terms of the ballot, which will go ahead as planned, and therefore on the results. In these hours, however, many are wondering what would happen if one of the two candidates did not accept the results, if the vote was contested in one or more states, or if the race even ended in a draw: 269 electors on each side. Scenarios that at this point are not so unlikely, also considering that in several states the results may not be known for days: such as North Carolina, which will continue to receive cards for
correspondence in the nine days following the vote. The memory goes back to 2000, with Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore divided by only 537 votes in the last decisive state, Florida, which at the time guaranteed the winner 25 electors. During election night, some media attributed Florida to Al Gore, but then the recounting went on for days and eventually the legal dispute was resolved in the Supreme Court, which stopped everything and pushed the Republican to victory.
Yesterday the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi of the Democratic Party, stressed that Congress is ready to decide the race for the White House if necessary. But things would become even more complicated in the case of legal battles within individual states, which would almost certainly end up in the federal circuit and on which the Supreme Court could finally be called upon to rule, where judge Amy Coney Barrett has just been confirmed, decidedly trump-wire. Whatever will happen in the courts and in the political buildings, however, the plan of public order is decidedly different: we are still talking about an electoral round, more tightly than ever, which takes place after a summer of riots in the streets following the death of George Floyd, with white supremacist militias on the other side that already have at least eight arrests in Seattle, where groups of demonstrators have blocked the streets in the city center, while countless traders have barricaded the shutters. However the counting of the ballots ends, the democracy of the richest and most powerful country on Earth seems discredited for several years to come.
