Biden and Trump with strategic tie for the Presidency: research

Analytical summary of the competition March to August 2020

The strategic duel between candidates seems to be leading to a virtual duel, between positions in national polls, but above all between media strategies: virtual campaigns where antagonism and narratives do not appear with the power that is sought, perhaps because the energies that are unfolding in the struggle for the Presidency seem dispersed by more powerful events that cloud what the candidates do: the pandemic catastrophe and the deep economic recession.

However, J. Biden's campaign advances with promising tactics and from July to August, in two important months, he has managed to tie with Trump, confirming the beneficial effect of appointing a woman as Vice President candidate.

Kamila Harris represents a trajectory of impeccable personal, professional and political courage, but above all, she can work to resolve the lack of greater charisma / mobility on the part of the Democratic candidate, the ability to return political blows to the Pence / Trump duo and the staging of a reversibility strategy as a campaign axis: anticipating everything that is imaginatively possible to expect from Trump and Republican allies, such as preparing to constitutionally litigate the defense of an eventual electoral victory lost at the hands of a fraud in the College Electoral or the Supreme Court of Justice.

The 13 Dimensions of DISENSUM 2.0 have been thought and structured methodologically based on strategic political thoughts [Machiavelli / SunTzu], studies by US electoral experts [Christopher Wlezien and Allan Litchman] and experiences of political consulting in Latin America [Jaime Durán Barba], as well as key factors and scenarios noted in presidential electoral processes that occurred in the last 20 years in Argentina, the United States, Chile, and with special emphasis: it is a matrix of strategic dimensions that integrates cross-impact variables noted in the electoral competition processes for the fight for the presidency over Mexico from 2006 to 2018 [Pedro Isnardo De la Cruz Lugardo at UNAM, Mexico] and now for the US Presidency in 2020 [Pedro Isnardo De la Cruz, Juan Carlos Barrón and Francisco Javier Jiménez Ruiz at UNAM, Mexico].

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Biden y Trump, con empate estratégico por la Presidencia: estudio

Analysis of Biden/Trump campaign strategies

Joe Biden / K. Harris
Strategy: Oblique reversibility

Joe Biden advances in a kind of a strategic nucleus that contains four tactical floodgates around a nucleus of electoral political reversibility engaged in the weaknesses and advantages of the Trump Presidency: self-preservation / cohesion / dismantling / disturbance / reversibility.

Self preservation. Stay up.

With a kind of mature athleticism, since the primaries in which he gave the surprise against the sung winner Bernie Sanders, Biden is deeply jealous in managing every inch of his energy at 77 years: his rhetoric, the speed and the distances of his travels. His physical appearances, his virtual campaign appearances, his nomination message at the Democratic National Convention, his detailed attacks on President Trump - all this is a metered melting pot of political energy.

While Trump's archetype of frontal medial political charisma has so far no equivalent in the Democratic presidential campaign, Biden / Harris' strategic inability to offer a virtual campaign in this terrain is seeking to be confronted with a permanent spectacle of voices, testimonies. , leaders and national and local politicians, prominent, partisan and from anonymous citizenship.

The Barack / Michelle Obama duo and the arrival of Kamila Harris as his Vice President, allow him to maintain and recover the breath he needs to be firm, articulated as much as possible in his interviews and at the same time, not show signs of fading: he will seek avoid at all costs sending signals that he is vulnerable in the campaign and that he would not resist the presidential term.

Her decision to run in her formula as Vice President candidate for Harris shows that her bet is to have chosen a woman respected for her career, her character, her charisma, her legislative and government experience, but above all, for her ability to react to the unexpected.

This tactic has a double shadow: I) Biden's delusional sense of resignation from frontal combat is actually a transfer from frontal combat to the Democratic Vice President Candidate, especially in the figure of the challenging presidential candidate and the excessive dependence on capacity of being called to build a charismatic sphere of its own that strengthens the pole and the anti-Trump mobilization -political rudeness that can be evidenced in the presidential debates- and II) the Biden campaign needs energy, resistance and a credible and sordid procedural battle in the scenario in which the eventual Democratic victory in the national vote is lost on the board of the Electoral College or on the collegiate finger of the Supreme Court of Justice: Harris has the fiscal fierceness to perpetuate the challenge and defense of his possible victory.

Democratic cohesion

By electing Harris he confirms that Biden / Obama seek the preservation and strategic consolidation of the campaign at the political center of the contest; However, for the Movement of Black Lives Matter and feminist collectives of national projection -such as the most mobilized and radical sectors among the Democrats-, this strategy will be challenged in fact due to its level of polarization and in terms of the difficult conquest of the vote. Useful.

The Biden / Harris / Obama campaign is festive, positive, a growing spiral crop of potential voters who have suffered extreme polarization, the onslaught against national minorities not only due to anti-immigrant policy, management errors and the formation of government professionals, the effects of the economic recession, stalking and deadly desolation from the coronavirus.

Against the dismantling and return to the establishment.

In the diagnosis of the Obama / Biden / Harris campaign, the Democratic electoral victory is sought in the pandemic crisis and in the non-leadership exercised by the Trump administration: it is emphasized that there is a lack of control and dominance of chaos in the face of the health catastrophe and crushes (pointing to the debris of systemic racism) as proof of the absence of government and Trump's inability to lead yet another term.

In the midst of old paradoxes, the common axis of the Clinton / Obama / Biden and Harris is that the Democrats promote the return to order before Trump: progressive agendas that in reality suppose a model of political conservatism, seeking to consolidate the return to the establishment and respect for American federalism.

Even when Trump renounces the search for US leadership in the world, so in the case of foreign policy, the Harris / Biden duo seem to seek that return, tending to overcome the tactic of economic / trade sanctions with China (Tik Tok / Huawei), to privilege a military hostility with the eastern world power.

Fueling unrest on the Republican side. Anti-corruption

Obama / Biden seek to question the foundations of the Trump project, reap the mobilization, protest and social discontent, show the dissidents / scandals of characters and former Republican officials as pieces of gold that shake the foundations of the magnate's campaign and that seek avoid his second term at all costs.

The shadow of this tactic is that the lure of division within the Republicans does not transcend its meaning, particularly to the loyal constituency of President Trump and the Republicans.

But the strategy seeks to prove that the Democratic helm can reverse in its favor orbits that are decisive to overcome Trump:

* Dismantle and deepen with Harris the Republican attrition by the presidential / government corruption scandals; In this same field of polarization, it seeks to show the presidential project as a project plagued by corruption and to disturb the republican doctrinal dominance in the defense of law and order.

* Show the main national drama desolation and risk of life for Americans in the face of the coronavirus, given the consummate government failure, presenting Trump as powerless in the face of the crisis and incapable of providing a solution.

* Dismantle the Trumpian narrative and style of exercise of power with a bet that Biden would represent a Presidency with virtues of decency, honesty and conciliatory in the middle of a divided country.

* Win the support of undecided voters and even Republicans dissatisfied with the current Presidency, radicalizing the Democratic position on those agenda items in which Trump has managed to strengthen his electoral base and leadership.

Reversibility strategy

where the confrontation seems to evade but in reality it seeks to nullify Trump's strengths: it is solved in a spectral, virtual way with refraction weapons: probes, lasers, images, spots, effects are sent that seek to hit the target : persuade, manipulate, defeat.

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Donald Trump / MIke Pence
Strategy: Evangelical supremacist patriotism

In the July-August period, the Trump campaign seems to have entered its strategic gray zone. It is the moment of greatest ambiguity in which the presidential candidate turns towards a path of permanent vertigo or resists and modifies the engines of disfigurement of his position.

Several events have taken place: the attempt to discredit China as the main instigating enemy causing the coronavirus; Trump's displacement of a supposed hegemonic advantage of Biden in national polls; the approval of budget resources of more than 3 trillion dollars to address the effects of the pandemic; the failed propaganda events in June, the interviews with national mass media in which it has been improvised and even the confession that "he's not prepared to lose the 2020 election" in addition to that at the end of July 2020, the President suggested the need to "postpone next November's elections due to the coronavirus and universal voting by mail, since they would make the most imprecise and fraudulent election in (US) history."

The Trump campaign, despite the shock and worsening of the crisis due to the coronavirus, has sought to evolve by showing the candidate as a character with pragmatic political discipline: his fierce defense of order and the police institutions in the outbreak and mobilizations raised by the attack on George Floyd by a policeman; The performance with the visit of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his commemorative act of July 4 before an emblematic podium staged on Mount Rushmore at the foot of four eminent figures in American history, suggests that Trump can transform the sphere of negativity and rejection to which his personality, his style of exercise of power and his campaign are exposed.

In the case of republican cohesion, Trump's patriotic narrative seeks to preserve, on the one hand, a call for ties of unity to his communities of captive voters but in terms of a divisive tactic for those who are more inclined to internalize or defend what the nation endorses their commitment to nationalist and supremacist values.

In contrast to the Democratic aspiration to recover the Democratic political center, precisely Trump / Pence will privilege a confrontational, divisive policy that moves away from the political center, stigmatized as mediocre, anodyne, failed, lacking in passion, for which patriotism , the American dream and the denunciation of the liberal democratic dispossession and the privileging of foreign interests over national ones, will continue to be a strategic backbone from the Trumpian pole.

Due to Covid-19 Biden / Harris will be able to bet on maturing their strategy by making the best virtual, artificial, spectacular campaign possible, as in a permanent shadow duel with flashes, but the events in which the seriousness of the political coups between the contenders.

While at the Republican pole, the figure of Trump practically eclips the figure of Pence, in the Democratic case, just the opposite can happen: Harris can consolidate a charisma and national projection that paradoxically weakens even more the non-charisma of Biden and - given. the anomalous character of this presidential election - may allow Trump as a second-rate character to hide behind a woman and her public image.

The media interface alone does not provide strength or rhetorical or narrative power, and the pandemic emergency forces its use and sophistication as a campaign tactic, a terrain in which Trump has already demonstrated that it was his lethal weapon in 2016 and that it is now a challenge for both presidential formulas.

Finally, the greatest paradox of Trump's strategy resides in the staging of a denial and offensive to the democratic system itself from the Presidency: the denunciation and anticipation that it may ignore the electoral results alleging a possible national electoral fraud; the attack on postal voting and the legitimacy of electoral institutions.

Biden and Trump with strategic tie for the Presidency: research

Biden and Trump with strategic tie for the Presidency: research

Disensum 2 Election Strategic Presidential Evaluation. Methodological Note: