Tony Nash joins Rahul Tandon at the BBC for Business Matters podcast where they examine how diversity of Hispanic groups in Florida, voted and how this influenced Trump’s winning of the state in this election.
This podcast was published on November 5, 2020 and the original source can be found at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w172x192dk8khr8
BBC Business Matters Description:
Democratic challenger Joe Biden says it is clear he is winning enough states to take the US presidency, despite key results still outstanding. We get the latest from the BBC’s Michelle Fleury in Pennsylvania, one of the decisive states still counting votes. We examine how diversity of Hispanic groups in Florida, voted and how this influenced Trump’s winning of the state in this election. Will President Trump soften his stance towards China if he is re-elected? And how might relations with Sino-US relations change with Biden in the White House? We ask Stephen Vaughn, General Counsel for the Office of the United States Trade Representative under Donald Trump until 2019.
All this and more discussed with our guests throughout the show. Nicole Childers, executive producer of Marketplace Morning Report in Los Angles, Tony Nash, founder of Complete Intelligence, in Austin Texas and Samson Ellis, Bloomberg’s Taipei bureau chief.
Show Notes
RT: And you confused, Tony, from above, from the messages coming from from the Trump family, from some within the Republican Party, Mitch McConnell Lasalle’s Mitch McConnell says, look, this is part of American life. You get lawyered up and that’s how it works.
TN: I’m confused about things like your reporter who said that Republicans are claiming they’re irregularities without evidence, but she herself said in her report that they’re showing her photos of irregularities.
RT: So I suppose she wouldn’t be able to check. She wouldn’t be able to check what those photos are. But on the general point here of where we are at the moment, because this seems to be an election that may well be decided not by the public, but by the courts.
TN: Oh, it definitely will be. We’re not even close to finishing this up. This thing won’t be done on Friday. It won’t be done next week. We’ll be in the courts for weeks, if not months, because if you look at things like Wisconsin’s voter turnout, it was 89 percent of the voting population.
Turned out that’s a five and a half standard deviation event, which is like one in 100 million. OK, there is no likelihood that 89 percent of registered voters in Wisconsin turned out because unlike places like Australia, it’s not mandatory to vote in the U.S. And so you normally have 60 to 70 percent of a voter base turnout in a place like Wisconsin with 89 percent of people turned out of five and a half standard deviation event.
It’s just not normal. And so there’s…
RT: But not normal doesn’t mean that it’s not possible, does it, Nicole? Or is Tony right here? We do need to look at some of these figures and understand why there’s a different.
TN: Well, I’m sorry, but it’s statistically impossible for that to happen. A five and a half standard deviation event is statistically impossible to happen on an election day.
RT: Nicole, I really should have concentrated more in school, but on statistics. But here we go.
TN: These are the reasons that they’re looking at legal action and these are the reasons they’re looking at recounts.
RT: If you could come back on this point, because then we’re going to move on to Florida.
TN: We can be sure that Pennsylvania is going to the Supreme Court. There was a court action that went to the Supreme Court before the election, before Amy Meconium was on the Supreme Court. So now there is a clear Republican majority on the Supreme Court. So at the time, the Supreme Court said we’re going to leave this alone until after the election, unless there are grounds for the court to review it. And so this is why there’s plenty of photographic evidence you can look at all over Twitter. You can look all over. I’ve spoken to a number of very senior Republican Party officials today. Pennsylvania is definitely going to the Supreme Court and there may be other states as well. So we’re not even close to deciding this thing. And if these cases are at the Supreme Court, these state level safe harbor laws mean nothing.
RT: Let’s see what happens…
TN: If there are federal violations when these just don’t mean anything.
RT: Let’s see if there’s a long way to go. Clearly, as you both said in this story, we’re going to be continuing to cover it here on the BBC World Service.
An interesting discussion there on the Hispanic vote in Florida, There in Texas, where, of course, there is also a large Hispanic community. But it’s too easy to generalize in this election, isn’t it, because the Hispanic community is so diverse, it’s not one vote at all.
TN: I live in Texas, we have about 40 percent Latino or Hispanic population and about 40 percent Caucasian or white population. So it’s pretty even and the rest of the population is very diverse. So now this is a pretty deep red state.
And there was a huge move about, I think, three or 400 million dollars that came into Texas from Democrats out of state to try to turn Texas blue, which means turn out to be Democrat. And it utterly failed. There was not a single seat that turned to Democrat in the state of Texas that wasn’t already a Democrat.
RT: But that gap of victories is narrowing, isn’t it, in Texas?
TN: I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s happening, I think that’s more wishful thinking than anything. And I think when you see the amount of the Latino population that is voting Republican, it’s growing, actually.
And if you look in Florida, in Miami, you actually see a very large amount disproportionately Hispanic community that actually voted Republican. So the Republican Party is appealing to African-Americans and Latinos and Asians. In a way, if you look at the Indian population, meaning the Indian population in America, they’re generally very heavy supporters of Republicans under Trump, not before.
RT: That’s a global trend. I want to move to Nicole very quickly, but that is a global trend because we see it here in this country as well with a move towards a conservative candidate that’s often to do with economic success. And Tony, I’m sad to see you go, but thank you very much for your contributions. It’s a difficult subject that you’ve managed to make some sense of, I think, for us. So thanks very much for Tony for giving us some of your time on what’s been a very busy day for.