The US opens the most unusual campaign

The two won by a landslide, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. On Tuesday night in Connecticut, with little noise and even less emotion, the primaries of the two great American parties concluded. It is hard to believe that, until just six months ago, the conversation in the country was dominated by those massive primaries. Beto O'Rourke portrayed by Annie Leibovitz for the cover of Vanity Fair. The world learning to pronounce Boot-edge-edge. Elizabeth Warren's plans for everything. The mathematics of Andrew Yang. Michael Bloomberg's millions. The Strokes Singing by Bernie Sanders. Biden's resurrection in South Carolina. And Donald Trump nicknamed everyone from the pulpit of crowded auditoriums across the country.

Today, when the country prepares to enter the final stretch of the campaign towards a historic election, it all seems like a remote memory. A past without 5.3 million people with covid. Without almost 168,000 deaths. Without 16.3 million unemployed. No masks. No quarantines. Without confinements.

With the start of the Democratic Convention, the United States plunges this Monday into the final stretch of the strangest campaign in its modern history. The elections of the pandemic. In a normal 2020, the Democrats would have already officially nominated Joe Biden among crowds at the convention in Milwaukee (Wisconsin), which was initially scheduled for mid-July. All eyes would now be on Donald Trump, who would be about to make a show of force at the Republican Convention, in Charlotte (North Carolina), throwing flowers at the vigor of an economy rising to an unstoppable cycle of growth. Crowded rallies would follow. The airplanes. The thousands of volunteers knocking on the doors.

But the damn SARS-CoV-2 pathogen has changed everything. This, the democratic process of the great power, too. The way to campaign. The way to vote. The issues that will weigh when doing it.

These were long talked about as historic elections. The validation of the most polarizing and extravagant president in recent history or his reduction to a mere parenthesis. The definitive end of the world order in force since the end of the cold war or the beginning of its reconstruction and its strengthening as a default scenario. Now, to that must be added the election of the president in charge of rebuilding a country crushed by a virus, of lifting the United States from the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, of defining the new normal.

There will be conventions, like every four years, and they will last four days each. This week, the Democrat; the one that comes, the republican. There will be political speeches, including acceptance by Trump and Biden. The televisions will cover them in prime time . But, like so many things in recent months, the conventions of the pandemic will be something very different.

Speakers will not speak to euphoric crowds in funny hats, there will be no balloons falling from the ceiling. They will speak on a set or in an office, with no skin other than that of their advisers. On August 5, Biden announced that he will not be going to Milwaukee to deliver his acceptance speech. Trump also has no plans to travel to Charlotte, and the invisible enemy, as the president likes to call him, has teamed up his plans to move the sarao to Jacksonville (Florida). Conventions are traditionally an event that allows the party to come together, ending the divisive primary season. The union, in this case, will also be virtual.

Fundraising, another of the senses of conventions, has also moved to virtual territory, where there is still much to innovate. A screen divided into squares is not equivalent to the pull of rubbing shoulders with celebrities at dinners for thousands of dollars a place setting. But the trend towards online micro-donations , consolidated in the primaries by anti- establishment candidates like Bernie Sanders, opens up new possibilities.

After the conventions, Biden has also announced that he will not hold rallies. Trump assures that he will do them, but sounded punctures like the one he starred in his first pandemic rally, in Tulsa (Oklahoma), fill his determination with doubts. Not only was he unable to fill more than a third of the capacity, but the lack of caution of some bases that follow or exaggerate the denial speech of his idol caused, according to local authorities, a rebound in covid cases in the county. The following attempts have not been more encouraging, to the point that he canceled a rally in Alabama and another in New Hampshire, claiming in the latter a tropical storm that failed to hit.

They will send, then, the tele-meetings , a neologism already coined by the Trump campaign. But they will hardly make up for the lack of fan fuss. The absence of face-to-face mass adulation, a key element of Trumpism, will erode its mythomania. Biden will also lose without physical contact, where he performs with ease, but many in his environment rub their hands at a low profile campaign devoid of a spontaneity that would lead to the usual mistakes of the boss.

All this will put more focus on the debates between candidates, which will begin a month after the conventions conclude. The first two between Biden and Trump, on September 29 and October 15, have had to move from city to city due to the pandemic. The third and last is scheduled for October 22, and that of the vice presidents, on 7 of that month. Debating is not Biden's strong suit, and the Trump campaign has long gloated about it, which can lower expectations for the Democrat so much that it makes it easier for him to exceed them.

But the great challenge of these elections is called to be the management of remote voting. The last stages of the primaries have highlighted the difficulties of counting votes by mail. The pandemic has created logistical and even constitutional problems. Delays, lawsuits in court, technical challenges. In a state as little suspicious of marginal as New York, the dramatic increase in voting by mail meant that the count of the primaries held on June 23 could not yet be finished.

Remember that it rains when it is wet. That, sadly, American democracy has been tainted by numerous scandals in the recount in recent history, from the butterfly ballots in 2000 to the fiasco of the Iowa caucuses earlier this year. And that in the previous presidential elections there was massive Russian interference verified by the intelligence services.

Signs that paint a complicated scenario for elections on which the president himself has already dropped suspicions of fraud, insisting that voting by mail is not safe and that the election will be rigged. The prospect of increased remote voting and a tight result taking days or even weeks for a winner to be proclaimed, with a president obsessed with his ego and a legion of supporters addicted to conspiracy theories, heralds a hellish end to the election. of the pandemic.