Analysis: Why is turnout for this US election so high?

When the votes are finally tallied on Friday or Saturday, there will be one certainty beyond  who has won. 

That will be that Joe Biden has secured the largest number of votes for a presidential candidate in US history.

But that’s just half the story, the second most popular candidate in US history will be incumbent President Donald Trump.

Biden is heading to around between 75 million and 80 million votes, while Trump will get a number as high as 75 million.

Those numbers reflect a turnout higher than any other US election in over a century with between 68 and 72 percent of the electorate casting a ballot. In 2016, the number was just around 60 percent.

So what’s changed?

The numbers and the narrative emerging in the US media at the moment tells the story of a hugely polarised and mobilised population, psyched up with the belief that their opponents pose an existential threat to their way of living.

This is being demonstrated in the streets of Philadelphia and Phoenix where Trump supporters have turned up at polling stations baselessly demanding that vote counters stop trying to manipulate the election result.

For Trump’s opponents, their fear, which they argue is beginning to materialise, is that Trump was setting himself on the path to turning the US into an authoritarian state.

The last four years since Trump’s 2016 win have been defined with bitter media debate over the president’s performance and ideological leanings.

Liberals and progressives have accused the president of far-right sympathies and undermining legal processes. Conservatives, including an increasing population of conspiracy theorists, such as the QAnon movement, believe Trump is the underdog in an uphill struggle to drain the Washington swamp of an out of touch and corrupt political class.

In key urban areas, many Black anti-racism activists have similarly vested interests in seeing Trump lose. Although their concerns are rooted in the reality of police brutality and systemic discrimination, instead of QAnon style conspiracies. 

When each side sees the immediate future of the country in such a high stakes way, they are simply more motivated to turn up to the polling booths or send off that postal ballot.

That sense of crisis has been ramped up by the coronavirus pandemic and two prevailing concerns that have stemmed from it.

One holds that the mishandling of the pandemic by Trump has cost the lives of more than quarter of a million Americans and brought the country to a standstill.

The other holds that Trump is right in attempting to mitigate the impact of pandemic control measures on the economy.

For the latter camp, there is a fear that Biden in his attempts to control the virus spread will institute mass lockdowns like those seen in April. They say that would be a death blow for many businesses, who are already struggling to stay afloat.

For the former, Trump is quite simply the cause of mass death from the virus. The US has the worst pandemic death toll of any country.

Again, when the issues being debated are existential matters of life and death, people will be motivated to do whatever is in their power to act. In this case, that means voting.

It’s not that issues like racism, contempt at Washington corruption, and so on, did not exist before 2020. Instead, it’s that Trump has drawn very clear lines on where he stands in a way few politicians have before him.