No matter how the vote count in the US presidential election ends, the results predictions made by the opinion polling companies have turned out to be a resounding failure. As with the 2016 victory of Donald Trump, they were again incapable of diagnosing the extreme polarization of the vote or of forecasting that the final outcome would end up being determined by one of the key group of middle American swing states via a few thousand crucial votes.
Until the full completion of vote scrutiny in those states, we may be faced with the unusual situation in which both Trump and Joe Biden proclaim themselves winners of the election. In fact, the former has taken this step already, in line with his usual arrogant behaviour, without even waiting for the count to reach a suitably advanced point. In the case of the Democratic candidate, the decision has been to wait until the results are more definitive and victory can be assured.
The significant deviation from the pollsters' predictions has a lot to do with what can happen to the vote when a candidate is as reviled by media opinion as Trump. The margin of polling error widens because his voters are reluctant to tell the truth, in the face of what they read, hear or see, and from there, no prediction can be made that will hold up to the real result. This has been amplified by an innocuous Democratic candidate like Biden, unable to arouse the necessary sympathy throughout the campaign, and an election in which the vote, in the end, was, however you see it, in favour of Trump or against Trump. In fact, Biden won the nomination in a pre-pandemic situation and at a time when it was considered very difficult to shift the president from the White House.
The end result of all this politico-legal, or better said, legal-political rancour is enormously uncertain, as experience suggests that Trump has no intention of giving in easily and his announcement that he intends to challenge the results of several states and take the matter to the Supreme Court is not just more bravado but a real threat. In fact, he has already asked for more financial help - not that he needs it - from his supporters to challenge the results, and has begun to take legal action in states such as Michigan, where he has called for the count to stop, and in the key state of Wisconsin, where he has asked for a recount. With a few differences, the United States previously experienced a similar but much more limited situation in 2000 in the state of Florida, where George W. Bush ended up winning the 29 votes electoral college votes that he needed to become president almost 50 days after the election, and only after Al Gore threw in the towel, heavily pressured by many in his own party. Democrats will not make that mistake again 20 years later and, from here on in, we will see the functioning of the instruments that are available in the United States, which has never been in such a convoluted situation as this after a presidential election.
One last consideration: Europeans, including Spaniards and Catalans, must stop interpreting the United States through the eyes of the old continent if they want to reach an even slightly useful understanding of what has happened in that country. The prejudgments of many analysts on this side of the Atlantic on that emotional Tuesday night, and the simplistic summing-up of the American way of living, only contribute to presenting the fact that such an outrageous candidate as Trump wins votes as sheer idiocy on the part of that country's public. And explaining the actual state of affairs is never so straightforward.