People who talk about the impact of Trump's "election" on the auto industry

Since the US presidential election began on November 9, my friend circle has been flooded with articles about Trump and Hillary. Various automotive media have also joined in the fun, digging up various remarks made by Trump on the automotive industry during his previous campaign. Without understanding the US presidential election system, they began to talk about how Trump's "election" would affect the automotive industry. Some of them interpreted it from a political perspective, some from an economic perspective, and some from a trade perspective... So much so that some people jokingly said that the US presidential election has enabled the Chinese to achieve "all-people participation in politics and policy-making." But after reading dozens of such articles, no one has been able to get to the point.

The election system of the US president is different from that of Europe and Russia. It is not a direct democracy of universal suffrage. Instead, the people first elect the electors of their state to vote on their behalf. Then, the electors are entrusted by the voters to go to Washington, the capital of the United States, for a second round of voting to select the presidential candidate who represents the will of the voters in their state. This is indirect democracy (the number of electoral votes in each state depends on the population of each state). The number of electors in each state is equal to the total number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate in the U.S. Congress, totaling 535 people nationwide. In addition, according to the 23rd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Washington, D.C. is given 3 electoral votes. Therefore, the current number of electoral votes is 538 (corresponding to 100 senators, 435 representatives and 3 votes for Washington, D.C.), and presidential candidates need to get at least 270 electoral votes to be elected. The electors may change their minds or betray in the second round of voting for the president. Although Trump won more than half of the electoral votes on November 9, he seems to have been elected as the president of the United States in name. But according to US law, it will take until the results of the second round of voting by the Electoral College on December 19 to determine whether he is officially elected as the President of the United States.

Generally speaking, state governments or the political parties to which electors belong will require electors to swear to vote for the candidate who won the first presidential election in their state before the second round of voting, and most electors will do so. But there are exceptions. In the history of the United States, there have been a total of 158 electors who changed their minds or broke their promises in the second round of voting. Among them, 71 were because the presidential candidates they were supposed to support died before the vote, 2 abstained for different reasons, and the remaining 85 voted for others for various reasons (changed their minds). The reasons for changing one's mind are sometimes related to personal preferences, and some are accidents. More recent examples include: the 2000 US presidential election: Barbara Wright Simmons, an elector from the District of Columbia, swore to vote for Democratic candidates Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, but abstained in the vote as a "protest against the colonial status of the District" (due to historical reasons, residents of the District have the right to elect the president, but there are only "attending representatives" without voting rights in Congress, and no members, which has caused dissatisfaction among many residents of the District). 2004: Minnesota's 10 electors were supposed to vote for John Kerry for president and John Edwards for vice president. But one elector cast the wrong vote. In other words, there is no precedent in American history for electors to change their minds and defect in the second round of voting (although this is a low-probability event).

So what does this mean?

This means that after the electors of each state are selected in the U.S. presidential primary on November 9, there is still one month until the second round of voting by the electors on December 19. If the presidential candidate who won the majority of electoral votes in the first round is exposed to a major scandal, or encounters an accident, or is even assassinated (many presidents have been assassinated in U.S. history), it is possible to change the voting results of the first round of primaries.

After the US presidential primary on November 9, major Chinese media outlets began to join in the fun, talking about the impact of Trump's presidency and how US policies would change in the future. The automotive media also dug up various remarks made by Trump during the campaign related to the automotive industry, and based on them, talked about the "possible shocks" that Trump's presidency would bring to the US auto industry and the "possible challenges" that Sino-US auto trade would encounter - the presidential election process hasn't even been completed yet, so why are they making such a fuss?

You guys are naive!

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.