campusreview . com . au industry & research
Biden win in Florida , and Trump had a fairly convincing , fairly safe win there in the end . And the polling failed to pick up , I think , the level of commitment , the level of agitation that existed in particularly the Latino community in Florida , and particularly because of those people being mostly made up of expat Cubans and Venezuelans .
These are people that have a great fear of communism , a very low opinion of anything that has a socialist tag on it . And that was the way Trump campaigned . So the polling in Florida failed to recognise the electoral power of that particular constituency .
I heard it can even come down to someone ’ s demographics , for instance , certain ethnicities are more unlikely to answer the phone . There ’ s also gender difference . It ’ s really interesting , actually , watching the American coverage , because they ’ re much more open about discussing disaggregating the vote along those categories . They would talk about African Americans or the black vote . They ’ ll talk about the middleclass vote , they ’ ll split those into male and female , and college-educated and noncollege-educated . They disaggregate them in a number of different ways .
And from that , we can see that Trump did better with African American males than was expected . And , not surprisingly , I suppose , he didn ’ t do as well with women , particularly college-educated women .
We probably had a little bit of it in Australia where we ’ ve become more conscious of , for example , the ethnic Chinese vote . That ’ s been a feature in a number of elections now , and the parties are much , much wiser to that , and are campaigning specifically to those sorts of subgroups of the electorate .
It was arguably the constituency that shifted in Bennelong back in 2007 , when John Howard not only lost the prime ministership , his party lost the majority , and Howard lost his seat of Bennelong . And it was thought that was largely on the strength of a significant Chinese population in that seat that had shifted to labor and which subsequently shifted back to the liberals .
What will a Biden presidency mean for America ’ s domestic and international politics . Do you believe Biden wants the US to retain global hegemony ? I think he does , and I think that a good many other countries in the world would like to see that as well . As China emerges the balancing role , the dominant role that the US has played for a long time in global leadership , global stability , has been under threat . It was in decline under Trump because of his isolationism .
So I think there ’ s a great appetite , an anticipation , an optimism right across the world and in a lot of the American population , to see the US reassert itself globally . And I think that is what Biden intends to do . I think Biden will be measured , to some extent , in the way he goes about that .
He will know that Trumpism is a legitimate force . There is a strong isolationist tendency in American thought , in the American electorate . Perhaps outside of the elites , particularly , the issue of American global dominance is looked at with far less interest . And so I think Biden will be very keen to talk to white working class voters , traditional Democrats essentially , many of whom had abandoned the Democrats and gone to the Republicans , so he ’ ll be looking to get them back .
I don ’ t expect to see as dramatic a return to the America of old , as some people would predict . I think Biden will go some way towards doing that , but perhaps not all the way domestically , and internationally .
I expect to see him re-engage with the WHO , for example , which has been so critical . Trump was incendiary in terms of blaming the WHO for its handling of the coronavirus in the early stages and , of course , withdrew US membership . Similarly , America ’ s going to rejoin the Paris Agreement and recommit to those 2050 emissions reduction targets , the net 50 target , and so forth .
I think that ’ s going to be a welcome return , as I saw someone write the other day , “ Welcome back ” is the overwhelming sentiment around the world , particularly from like-minded democracies who value the idea of a dominant US .
I think Biden will be placing his emphasis on reinvigorating the international rules-based order .
One of Trump ’ s strengths was his goal to fix so-called unfair trading relationships with China . How do you think Biden will approach this and other touchy issues regarding China , and how do you rate his chances of success ? I think if I knew the answer to that , I ’ d be able to tell the future with great accuracy because there are a number of different problems associated with that .
I think Biden will be placing his emphasis on reinvigorating the international rulesbased order . And to do that , you have to have a lot of force behind you and you have to have a lot of commitment . You have to be consistent and you have to be predictable .
There ’ s been a high degree of consensus , it ’ s one of the few things over which there has been any agreement recently , between both the Republicans and the Democrats , on the question of competition with China , it ’ s just really an argument about how you go about that .
Donald Trump did it with a lot of bluster , and of course his foreign policy was very strongly based around a couple of key principles . One was American isolationism , or he ’ s only really interested in the domestic agenda . And the other was relationships . He placed a huge amount of responsibility , or focus , on his personal relationship with various people , Xi Jinping being one of them that hasn ’ t amounted to much , when it comes to the coronavirus , for example , where Trump campaigned on the “ China virus ” and everything else .
But I would expect America to essentially marshal the forces of like-minded governments , with Europe , with countries like Australia , the Five Eyes network with other democracies , and with less autocratic states and to really assert the value of a rules-based order .
Collectively there is some power in that , but it is going to be , always , a game of incremental achievements , millimetres rather than metres or kilometres , as far as any changes that you can make . But I think that ’ s the way the US is going to move . It ’ s going to move with other countries and to reassert that kind of moral basis of there being an international rules-based order .
It ’ s not , of course , what superpowers always do . Great powers essentially take the rules they want and they break the rules they want , and the US has been no exception to that as well . But we ’ re seeing that from China . I think what the world is looking for at the moment , and what Biden probably will go about trying to deliver , is some sort of collective pushback on that , which has a moral core to it . ■
15