Two weeks before the US presidential elections on November 8, Democrats were confident Hillary Clinton would sail smoothly to the White House as the country’s, next and first female, President.
This confidence was largely because nobody other than President-elect Donald Trump and his voters thought he stood a chance
Indeed, the only major concern Clinton and the Democrats had was the possibility of their voters failing to get out and vote, thinking she had already bagged it.
Voter apathy is real and, often, it can result in good candidates losing while their opponents, who could be worse, get elected.
Preliminary analysis of voter turnout in the 2016 US elections provide anecdotal evidence one of the reasons Clinton lost to Trump is because of low voter turnout in key constituencies than was expected a byproduct of voter apathy.
Trump was the beneficiary of an unusually large angry voter base that wanted to have an outsider in Washington to turn the tables upside down and rock the place, which he’s thus far doing.
The voter apathy phenomenon is not confined to the US. It is in every country universal suffrage is allowed, including our own.
Where there’s significant voter apathy, one can expect usually the bad or less popular candidate at the presidential election to do everything they can to suppress his or her opponent’s vote, while revving up their own support.
This, to some degree, is what Trump succeeded in doing: He utilised some of the most extreme tactics the country has ever seen, to the point of even openly embracing the much-scorned and shunned extreme right wing white supremacists.
There’s no arguing, however, that the white supremacists alone would not have elected Trump but in such a close election, their mobilisation in the key states where the Republican candidate needed to win made the difference.
Similarly, no amount of mobilisation of one tribe or two alone can ever elect one President in this country, given the 50 per cent plus one constitutional requirement. A presidential candidate must win 25 per cent of the votes cast in each of more than half of the 47 counties.
Going strictly by the numbers of raw votes cast, this did not happen in 2013 — again, something diehard Jubilee supporters know but cannot publicly admit. We were nonetheless told by the Supreme Court that Uhuru Kenyatta’s election as President was constitutionally valid.
We accepted and moved on. But we now have another opportunity, in a few months time, to elect our next President.
Once he assumed office, President Uhuru had the opportunity to unite the country, ensure development across all regions and curb corruption. Had he done that, it would have assured him reelection with ease.
He did none of that. In fact, failure in all these could see him being sent packing next year. On fighting corruption and reducing poverty in the country, he probably has done worse than all his predecessors combined.
So much so that we now see the formation of forces akin to what we saw in 2002, when Kenyans, listening to the opposition, said enough is enough and rejected an extension of President Daniel Moi’s presidency, then packaged as the passing of the torch to Uhuru.
Oddly and ironically so, the election of Trump, though seen by some as good for dictators and other unpopular governments, what largely accounts for his win is the massive revulsion of many a voter with politics as usual in Washington.
Are Kenyans revulsed by what the Jubilee government has done or failed to do such that they will in huge numbers come out to vote against it and say ‘enough is enough’ as they did in 2002?
The opposition certainly thinks so. That’s why the talk of the National Super Alliance is giving many in Jubilee sleepless nights. This is because were NASA to successfully launch, it’s bye bye to all of them and hello to new leadership in this country.