Chunk 4: Greedo, Admiral Ackbar and Wicket walk into a Mos Eisley bar …

For those of you who don’t get the obvious Stars Wars reference in the title (heretics!), allow me to explain. Greedo is a Rodian, Admiral Ackbar a Mon Calamari and Wicket an Ewok; three species that have absolutely nothing in common. Now, imagine trying to get the three of them to sit down together for a drink in a Tatooine spaceport.

American presidential elections are a lot like this; finding a way to tie together different groups of people that somehow add up to 270 electoral college votes. Political pundits call these groups “coalitions”. It can prove tricky, because you need to develop policies that attract one group without alienating (get it?) the others.

Take, for example, Barack Obama (Michelle's husband). He won 95% of the African American vote in 2008, which is plain ridiculous. If you win 95% of anything in life, well done, freak. But African Americans only constituted 13% of the total number of people who voted that year. To be president, Obama also needed to win the majority of votes from women, Hispanics and Asians to reach his 365 electoral college votes. 

(Worth noting: the different groups that this year’s candidates will target are much more specific than I am being here, e.g. white men without college degrees, suburban white women, evangelicals, etc …)

In 2012, Obama put together a similar coalition to win with 332 votes.

Lightspeed forward to 2016, when Hillary Clinton (Bill's wife) tried to recreate Barack’s coalition. She won 89% of the African American vote, so she was off to a very good start. They constituted 12% of the total number of people who voted that year, so slightly less than Obama, but no need to panic yet. She also then won a higher % of the votes from women (because: duh!) as well as the majority of Hispanics and Asians, just as Obama had done. And the result was …?

She lost the election with just 227 votes.

Pardon moi?

So why, dear readers, did this happen? And, more importantly, for you Joe Biden supporters out there, what does he need to do to prevent it from happening in 2020?

Well (broad brushstrokes here), it all boils down to three things:

1. While Hillary roughly put together the same coalition as Obama, overall, she didn't do as well with any of them. For example, she won slightly less % of men, of Hispanics, of Asians and, as mentioned earlier, of African Americans. Biden must perform better with those groups.

2. Hillary didn't pick up votes in the right places. Remember that old Electoral College chestnut we talked about earlier? The US electoral system isn't just about how many votes you win, it's where you win them. Hillary lost swing states she simply couldn't afford to. So far, Biden isn’t only ahead in those states, he’s also eating significantly into some states that are reliably Republican, like Texas and Georgia. But it’s very early days ...

3. The American people just weren't that enthusiastic about the 2016 election - and this is a huuuge deal. When Obama ran in 2008, a record 131.5 million eligible Americans came out to vote. Now, not all of those people voted for Obama (RIP John McCain), but the total number of voters that year constituted 58.2% of the eligible population*. That was incredible - in fact, it was the highest % of Americans who had participated in a presidential contest since 1968, when 60.7% of people voted in Richard Nixon. Come 2012, Obama runs against Romney and, with a fair bit of voter fatigue having set in, just 54.9% of eligible voters show up. 2016 rolls around and it's a whole new race, Clinton vs Trump, and yet, billions of $ later, the voting % increases just 0.8% from the election before, to 55.7%. Totes disappointing.

In a country where voting isn't compulsory, increasing your turn out, (or suppressing your opponent’s, but that's another story) can make all the difference between whether a candidate wins or loses an election. For Joe Biden, it comes down to these three things:

1. Put together a working coalition.

2. Make sure that coalition spans across states with enough votes to add up to 270 electoral college votes.

3. Get Democrats to show up to the polls - create genuine enthusiasm. 

Do that, and the force will be with him.

*Registered citizens over the age of 18