Tribune. Why did Donald Trump and his supporters claim that the only “legal votes” would be those of voters who physically showed up at polling stations, while postal votes would be “illegal”? For fear of a Democratic tidal wave, amplified by the Covid-19 crisis. This Democratic tidal wave did not take place, but the generalization of postal voting, already present in 2016 on a smaller scale, clearly facilitated the mobilization of the Democratic vote and the victory of Joe Biden.
This victory, accompanied by unexpected successes in the Sun Belt (Arizona) and the Deep South (Georgia) heralds a profound change in policy: the questioning of a certain “Tyranny of the minority”, in the happy words of Bruce Cain, professor of political science at Stanford University. This tyranny is based on two key elements. On the one hand, a college of large voters favoring small, over-represented states. On the other hand, removal techniques votes, aimed in particular at African-Americans, little by little dispossessed of right to vote the day after the Reconstruction period [qui signe, de 1865 à 1877, la fin du régime esclavagiste et le retour des Etats du Sud dans l’union].
And even after the late acquisition of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ethnic minorities remained under-represented, through new techniques of dispossession of the vote based on redistribution of electoral districts, the requirement of identity documents, or banning the right to vote for former inmates who have served their sentence but have not yet paid their fines (approximately 770,000 African Americans in Florida, in 2016).
Trump and the America of nostalgia
By proclaiming the alleged illegality of postal voting (yet ratified by the legislatures of 43 states), Trump has sought to further refine the voting suppression devices, to the detriment of his political opponents. He needed at all costs to consolidate a certain national-populist ideology, intended to keep in power as long as possible a white minority, supremacist, little educated, more male than female and much older than the average population.
Trump supporters remain captivated by the image projected by the outgoing president: that of a crusader of white, Christian, patriotic and xenophobic America. Now, this America of nostalgia and resentment is losing momentum today. She now faces a new America of diversity, marked by the rise in the number of young people born after 1990 (“Generation Z”) and “ethnic” people of all conditions and all religions, so well embodied by Kamala Harris, the future vice-president – with the notable exception of hispanics in Florida, firmly anchored in the Republican Party for old historical reasons: Castro’s obsession with socialism.
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