US Presidential Election

The US election matters to the entire world, and this one has been more newsworthy than most, but that's about to end.

Before 1972, a dozen or so old, white, Republican men, and a dozen or so old, white, Democratic men chose the Republican and Democratic nominee for president in late summer of the election year. The campaign started after the nominees were announced, and lasted about three months.

In 1968, a slender majority of Democrats wanted the US to leave Vietnam. So a large minority of Democrats, plus a large majority of Republicans, thought leaving would be worse than Chamberlain at Munich, more like if he'd been PM in '17 and decided the Allies should surrender and turn all of Europe over to the tyrannical Kaiser. (The UK's official position was that the First World War was absolutely necessary and the British senior generals were brilliant in finally managing to single-handed defeat the evil Kaiser's armed forces. And after losing WWII unconditionally, German historians have been forced to write that Germany was the sole aggressor in WWI,  that the Kaiser was evil, and that Germany was very lucky that the Allies liberated them from the Kaiser).

So, in '68,  the Democratic leadership chose Humphrey, who said the US could never win the war, since China and the USSR were supporting the North Vietnamese, but neither could it withdraw, since that would lead to a Communist take-over of the entire world. Young Democrats rioted after the party leadership chose Humphrey (who lost by a narrow margin when many Democrats stayed home for the '68 election), and the Democratic leadership said, beginning in '72, the voters could choose the nominee.

The slender majority of Democrats against the war chose McGovern in '72, who lost to a massive majority for Nixon. But the '72 system is the one we've got. And the campaign for the nomination starts before the mid-term elections.

We've only had 11 elections with the new rules, and so we got a Trump for the first time.

Normally, most candidates are senators or governors, known only to voters in their own state. So the national vote is spread many ways, and the holder of the plurality changes weekly until the voting starts, after which many run out of money, one gains first the plurality and then the majority and then is nominated at the Convention.

Trump was a TV figure, and so had much better name recognition among the voters than any other candidate. And 1/3 of Republican voters really like him and keep telling pollsters they'll vote for him, and so he's kept his plurality for more than 6 months, which has never before happened in any US Presidential nomination campaign.

The first vote is on 1 February. There are only four small states voting all during February, but some of the throng of Republican candidates for the nomination should finally realise that their run is hopeless, donors will realise it and cut them off, and the field should be winnowed. Once that happens, Trump disappears.

Meanwhile, some try to mould the Democratic nomination campaign to fit the Republican one. Which it ain't. Secretary Clinton has a massive majority of those who will vote in the Democratic primaries and caucuses (except maybe the first two). Most African-Americans will vote for the Secretary, as will most Hispanics. The white, male liberal Democrats prefer Sanders, but they are a tiny majority of Democrats (except in the first two states).

So, by the end of February, it should be down to Secretary Clinton against some Republican who is NOT Donald Trump.

After which, it looks like Secretary Clinton will coast to an easy victory.