We Go to the Scorecards

Those of you who have watched championship boxing on TV will recognize that expression, which is what they say when, after a fierce battle in which both fighters land devastating blows on each other, neither goes down. With no knockout, the determination of a winner is made by a panel of three judges, whose individual scores are combined to determine the winner. When the fight is especially tough to score, that process can take a long time. And usually, the result is unsatisfying to a big portion of the fans.

Joe Biden was never the strongest of candidates. His nomination came not on the strength of primary debate performances but largely through the backing of a single influential Black congressman. His speeches came from the heart but lacked the engagement value of those of President Trump, though the latter’s often never made much sense. Biden’s main attraction as a candidate has been that he is not Donald Trump, and though it may be insensitive of me to say this, one of Biden’s biggest allies – whose help he certainly did not seek – has been the coronavirus. COVID was the supreme test of leadership, which Mr. Trump appears to have failed.

Most analogies fail too. My comparison of this election to a boxing match fails, of course, because we voters are the judges who have made our decisions. If there has been any suspense, it’s a little false, caused by our screwball method of arriving at a result.

The biggest losers are neither of the candidates but the pollsters. This is the same industry that forecast a knockout for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Polling is largely misunderstood and certainly misused. A poll is a snapshot, It’s about forecasting, and forecasting is the attempt to apply science to speculation. We can eliminate polling, but I think we will always have speculation, our constant human need to give ourselves a feeling of control over the future.

As many observers have noted, it’s a great thing that so many of us turned out for this event, mailing or dropping off our ballots or standing in those long lines. Would that there would always be such involvement  in the political process here, as there is in many other countries around the world.

But the same divisions in our United States remain: the racial ones, the economic ones, the social ones, and the philosophical ones. An election by itself doesn’t instantly heal those divides - certainly not this one.