On October 8, we held yet another interesting online event in cooperation with the Pan-Baltic Amchams in Estonia and Lithuania. This time, we got to hear for exclusive U.S. Presidential election insights straight from the Hill, from the White House Correspondent for Fox News Radio Jon Decker. Decker has been a member of the White House Press Corps since 1995, covering the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. He is the only lawyer in the press pool and was among the few political journalists to correctly predict the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The discussion was moderated by Linas Kojala, the Director of the Eastern Europe studies center in Lithuania.

As we are 25 days away from the election day, we can already now see that the 2020 election will be quite unusual. In light of COVID-19, the election day may turn into a week or weeks, before all the mailed voting ballots will be counted and verified. As a side note, in the year 2000, it took 5 weeks to verify and announce the winner of the U.S. Presidential election (G.W.Bush)

Jon Decker prepared a comprehensive electoral map for our participants and in detail explained how the demographics have changed and which states could be potentially the game-changers. It is also important to note,  that the current polls do not necessarily reflect the actual situation in the country right now, so any assumptions might be misleading! As tension grows, we can only watch closely to what is going to happen in the U.S. and how it will affect the worldwide political and economic relations.

We would like to thank Jon Decker for his presentations and for answering the questions from participants! We are grateful to Linas Kojala for moderating the discussion, and of course, we would also like to thank our fellow AmChams -  AmCham Estonia and AmCham Lithuania for the continuous cooperation and making this event possible!