Trump promises $5,000 to voters to persuade them to vote for the Republicans

Almost two hours of a one-man show which, summarised in a single slogan, boils down to: vote for me. The mid-term elections are approaching, the Democrats are leading in the polls, and Donald Trump, speaking at the Republican convention in Dallas, repeats ad nauseam to voters that in the mid-terms they must do just one thing: imagine that it is he, and not other Republicans, who should be voted for in a few months’ time: “Pretend I’m the candidate,” he insists, “I am the candidate. Once again.”

Then came the big election promise: “If the Republicans win both the House and the Senate of the United States, I will distribute a dividend of $5,000 to every adult citizen of the United States of America.” A few words with a potential impact on public finances of over $1,000 billion – an exaggeration: sending $5,000 cheques to each of the approximately 270 million adults in the United States would cost more than $1,300 billion, making such a plan almost prohibitive for a country with a debt of $40,000 billion. The return of the old adage: if you can’t convince the voter, try to buy them off. It was said by the outgoing President Herbert Hoover during the 1932 election campaign. He lost that election.  

And yet the two-day event in Dallas had been conceived as an opportunity to reach independent voters who could decide the closely contested elections for the House of Representatives and the Senate. Trump turned it into an event to reignite enthusiasm amongst MAGA voters, who tend to turn out for presidential elections but not for mid-term elections.

In 2020, too, the Democrats in Georgia tried to win over the electorate with an economic stimulus plan linked to the election result: they promised $2,000 cheques to help tackle the Covid crisis should their party gain control of the Senate.

Trump is certainly no stranger to this sort of promise: he had promised $2,000 cheques funded by revenue from customs duties and suggested payments of $5,000 from savings made by cutting thousands of federal jobs and from various payments to Americans via government healthcare subsidies. These promises were never actually kept, despite last year’s tax cuts which were supposed to guarantee substantial refunds this year – a move designed to boost the Republican campaign ahead of the mid-term elections.

Trump’s promise is a costly one, but it does not address the real issue underlying the American public’s discontent with his presidency, namely the rising cost of living. According to polls, this is in fact the main reason why voters are unlikely to re-elect the current president. He has promised: ‘I will bring prices down drastically’. He emphasised that the cause of rising prices “is the Democrats” and that “we will solve the problem”. He also said that petrol prices “will fall as soon as we win the war with Iran”.

Will these promises be enough? The presence of several empty seats in Dallas could be a clue. Trump repeatedly stated in his speech that the arena was packed to the rafters, that there was a queue outside, and that those present should ignore whatever the ‘fake media’ might say on the matter. Yet those empty seats were there, and Trump’s insistence on the issue only made them more conspicuous.