Dangerous Illusions
Barack Obama, whose Americans have just made their first black president, won 52% of the vote nationally against 46% for his Republican opponent John McCain, American media reported on Wednesday. It is the first time a Democrat has won a majority of the popular vote since Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Mr. Obama did so with the highest score since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Mr. Obama received 62.98 million votes and M . McCain 55.78 million, according to NBC. Figures similar to those of the Fox News channel, which attributes 62.95 million votes to the Democrat and 55.75 million to the Republican. Nearly two-thirds of registered voters participated in the vote nationally, or 64.1%, according to Michael McDonald of George Mason University, cited by the independent site RealClearPolitics, which points out that this participation rate had no longer been achieved since 1908. At 6 :00 pm Belgian time, according to the results of 48 states and the federal district (Washington DC, the capital), Barack Obama had obtained 349 electoral mandates against 163 for John McCain. To be elected, he had to obtain the majority of mandates (270) out of 538. (Belga 05/11)
Yes, this election is historic… like the others.
f we look at the numbers, however, we see that candidate Obama was elected with 52% of the vote. In terms of the popular vote, this is ultimately a slimmer victory than what people say, especially after this media hype, bloated financing, the explosion of the stock market crisis in the middle of the electoral campaign, and eight years Republican administration that became late but deeply unpopular with Americans.
It turns out that in the United States, the president of the federal state is not elected by direct universal suffrage, but by a college made up of 538 electors distributed among the states according to their demographic weight. In all states except Nebraska and Maine, the candidate who obtains the majority of voters’ votes receives all the votes of the voters – this is the “winner takes all” rule. Obama’s lead in the popular vote therefore only turned into a “crushing” victory in the electoral college. It is only because of this significant dose of “majority” voting that his victory could be qualified as such – at the “censal” level of the major voters.
We also note, contrary to what is claimed by the press, a relative coherence of the political map, with the states of the Midwest and the South remaining Republican, sometimes in a very significant way. Certainly Obama was elected in Florida, Indiana and Virginia, but in politics it is common that, when the population aspires to change and a national movement occurs, constituents move from one camp to the other, without necessarily that this is irreversible.
Deep disarray, need for change after 8 years of Republican administration, need for protection in the face of new economic uncertainties, aspiration of the ethnic population to be rehabilitated – the motivations are not all positive which led the American people to elect a rhetorical stranger and inexperienced, with a difficult family history, and who is not even a Black American strictly speaking, but the product of the ethnic mix which developed from the 1960s. The person concerned skillfully presented his own ambiguity as an argument in favor of the American dream of openness to all possibilities. Let us hope that this rhetorical inflation will not be a simple speculative bubble.
