“We have already won”, “tonight's results are phenomenal”.
As often, Donald Trump exaggerates a bit.
The outcome of the American presidential election of Tuesday, November 3, 2020 is far from certain for either of the candidates, and it will probably take days or even weeks to know the final winner. .
But the outgoing president has, indeed, something to celebrate.
The electoral horizon appears much less gloomy for the champion of the Republican camp than what had been predicted by most opinion polls.
The eternal "It's the economy, stupid"
One of the reasons for this new failure of pollsters can be read in the interviews conducted at the exit of the polls by the Edison Research institute.
Only two in ten voters said the Covid-19 pandemic played the central role in choosing which ballot to slip into the ballot box.
The Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, had however made criticism of Donald Trump's management of the health crisis one of the main axes of his campaign.
On the other hand, the economy - a subject dear to the outgoing president - was decisive for one in three people questioned.
It was even for the more than 80% of voters who admitted to voting Trump.
The perennial "it's the economy, stupid" - in reference to the famous sentence launched in 1992 by the campaign manager of the Democrat Bill Clinton to motivate his troops to put the economic themes forward in order to win - would he have struck again?
It's a little more complicated than that, explains Richard Johnson, specialist in American politics at Queen Mary University in London, contacted by France 24. The Covid-19 remains central in the minds of Americans, "but not in its dimension purely health care which was beginning to tire voters, "he said.
"What interests them now is to know which of the two candidates will succeed the best in getting the country out of the economic crisis caused by the pandemic," he adds.
On this point Donald Trump seems to have succeeded in being as convincing, if not more, than his Democratic opponent.
The outgoing president received a serious boost from the employment figures in September: in the third quarter of the year, nearly 11 million jobs were created.
Good news that the Republican candidate did not fail to repeat during his last campaign meetings and which even figures prominently on the White House website, even though this improvement is due very little to the government action itself.
Donald Trump as an economic dream merchant
Donald Trump was also able to make the best possible electoral use of his Covid-19 contamination at the beginning of October.
Shortly after his remission, "he began to develop the discourse according to which he would succeed in putting the country back on its feet as he himself had recovered from the disease", summarizes Richard Johnson.
This promise, which may not be based on anything tangible, "brought a little hope to voters who were sorely lacking elsewhere," he said.
For this expert, it helped make the home stretch of Donald Trump's campaign more impactful than that of Joe Biden with part of the electorate.
"He managed to develop an optimistic economic message that resonated better with voters than that of his opponent," he said.
The Democratic candidate, for his part, struggled to convey to the undecided his central idea which was that the mismanagement of the health crisis by the Trump administration had worsened the country's economic situation.
The fact that in putting on his economic dream merchant clothes, Donald Trump hit the nail on the head;
and demonstrates the need of a part of the population, seriously affected by the health and economic crisis, to cling to any glimmer of hope - however small it may be.
But the fact that despite this, Joe Biden still appears to be in the best position to secure the final victory proves how difficult the outgoing president's handicap was to overcome.
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