American "democracy" in an election that no one wins

And te Pāti Māori's slender majority in Tāmaki Makaurau comes under scrutiny

I was recently talking (randomly) with a beef and dairy farmer who, when he found out what I did for a living, immediately told me how much he liked Javier Milei, the recently elected president of Argentina. Milei is a radical libertarian, nicknamed El Loco (the madman). He’s often compared to Donald Trump for his eccentric and disruptive behaviour. (You can read about him on Time magazine in which the best quote is: “If the President says there are five dogs, there are five dogs, and that’s the end of it.”)

The dairy farmer explained to me why leaders like Milei are needed – which I liken to my explaining to him how to milk cows. But, in politics, everybody has an opinion, and every opinion counts. It pays, therefore, to hear a person out – without milking their cows. I daresay that the dairy farmer likes Donald Trump too, but we didn’t get on to that.

A jury has found Donald Trump guilty on charges of falsifying business documents. He used corporate money – disguised as legal fees – in an effort to pay for silencing a woman who had some salacious facts to reveal. This was effectively an election campaign expense, however, and not a legitimate business expense. Following the announcement of the jury’s guilty verdicts, campaign donations to Trump as presumptive Republican nominee soared.

Mr Trump will appeal the conviction, but he faces more serious charges relating to possession of classified documents, conspiring to alter election results in the State of Georgia, and obstructing congressional confirmation of Electoral College results. The latter two sets of charges – alleged interference in electoral processes – are of special interest here because Trump’s actions threatened the integrity of the US Constitution. And yet he’s most probably going to be a front-running candidate for the presidency.

There are two main opposing ways in which people try to resolve this dilemma:

One way is to say that the trials are all political (and not impartial applications of law) and that the prosecutors, judges and juries are biased. The system is rigged against the accused. Trump’s accusers, affiliated with the Democratic Party, want to make him a political prisoner. Even though the recent guilty verdicts came from a jury in the State of New York, and not a federal court, the blame is levelled against President Biden. Simply because he smiled weirdly at a reporter’s question about it, Biden’s “pure evil”, according to the Republican National Committee’s X account.

Trump has tried to claim legal immunity as a former president. It’s also been argued that there’s been a convention of not prosecuting political contenders for their wrongdoings – case in point: Hillary Clinton getting away with using a private email server for official communications, which may have included classified information.

The opposing view holds that no one is above the law and that the courts can’t be (and aren’t being) used for purely political goals. Presidential immunity only applies while actually in office. And, as many of the charges relate to the integrity of the electoral system itself, then the accused must face the full force of the law. Anyone who willfully undermines the electoral system should really be disqualified and not appear on any ballots. (The US Constitution doesn’t bar a person from running for office from prison, however.)

Because of the nature of the charges – regardless of the party affiliation of the accused – such a trial is inevitably “political”. A fair trial, especially with intense media coverage, is always going to be a challenge. This is complicated by the fact that judges and prosecutors are politically appointed or elected in the American system. Alvin Bragg, the district attorney who prosecuted Trump in the hush-money case, was elected to the post as a Democratic Party nominee. A key issue in that election was who would be best at prosecuting Donald Trump. Complaints from Trump about “a rigged trial” are supported by the politicised nature of the American justice system.

Mind you, Trump must have been pissed off that even some judges whom he’d appointed threw out his applications (following his 2020 election loss) to hold hearings on electoral fraud – for lack of evidence. So, one of his policy aims, if he gets back into office, is to exert even more political control over more federal officers of all kinds. That’s just a tad hypocritical, as he wants to rig the system to suit himself. But his politics run on loyalty to him, and not on fidelity to facts or to principles.

If Trump gets back into the Oval Office, then his assault on the system will have been vindicated by electors themselves. After the recent guilty verdict, Trump said, “the real verdict is gonna be November 5th by the people”. His revenge against his accusers (whom he describes as “evil” and “sick”) will be unforgiving. His left-wing opponents will cause mayhem in the streets. All together, that would be a loss for America.

If Biden returns to the Oval Office, then the right will go ballistic, mobilised by an instinctive distrust of government and possession of weapons. Americans will be at war with one another, and the only hope is that the violence is somehow muted or restrained. Republican senators have made it clear that they’re determined to shut down the federal administration by blocking appropriations and nominations, and there’ll be no cooperation across the aisle – not that there was much lately anyway. That too would be a loss for America.

Hence, the US presidential election on November 5 will be a lose–lose outcome. No one really wins.

If Biden can get his proposed three-phase peace deal in Gaza agreed and implemented (instead of just aiding and abetting Israel’s military) before the election, then that would help to redeem him. Trump is likely to go softer on Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners.

Political polarisation and toxicity have reached new heights in the US. Under those conditions, extreme voices and simplistic solutions from both sides get the most attention. There are people in the middle offering good advice about “what we should do” to overcome the distrust (for example here), but they’re not having much impact.

The US is setting a bad example for the rest of the world. But NZ has its problems too.

On a much smaller scale, New Zealand has seen political actors undermine confidence in the electoral system. In a recent post, I covered the failure to declare candidate donations by David MacLeod, National MP for New Plymouth.

Andrea Vance’s article “Stats NZ investigating potential misuse of Māori census data” reveals another significant instance. It raises concerns about activities on Manurewa marae: gathering census data and then serving as an election polling place, including the provision of kai and vouchers. The aims may have been to get more people onto the Māori roll and hence allegedly have them vote for the local Te Pāti Māori (TPM) candidate.

One possible offence could be “treating”: giving or providing food, drink or entertainment to influence a person to vote, to procure a vote, or to reward a person for voting. While this may be seen as customary manaaki from the marae, there’s a video copied on Vance’s piece that invites people on to the marae to vote, offering them kai, including ice cream for the kids, while in the background there are ads for TPM and its candidate.

At a glance over election numbers, there was no apparent boost from 2020 to 2023 in the total votes in the Tāmaki Makaurau constituency, nor in the votes for Te Pāti Māori and its local candidate, above what might have been expected anyway, given the swing away from Labour across the board. Nonetheless, the winning margin in Tāmaki Makaurau was only 42 in favour of TMP’s Takutai Tarsh Kemp. In 2020, Labour’s Peeni Henare won by 927 votes over TPM’s John Tamihere, who’s now party president.

It’s hard to say whether or not the marae’s activities could have caused an unfair advantage that effectively won the seat for Ms Kemp. But it’s now a question in our minds – and it’s a question that we shouldn’t have needed to ask.

My dairy-farming acquaintance would probably smell a rat, confirming his distrust in “the system” and his desire for wrecking-ball politicians.

A Lowy Institute survey in Australia shows support for Biden at 68% there, compared with 29% for Trump. But it’s reported on ABC that Australian Trump supporters have grown from 11% in 2016 to 23% in 2020 to 29%. Based on past surveys between 2016 and 2020, I estimated support for Trump in NZ at around 10% back then. I now wonder if that’s grown too.

Do the straw poll below.

Biden’s smile below was interpreted on the right as evidence that he’s “evil”.