Trump v. Harris: democracy, gut and luck

If Kamala Harris beats Donald Trump to become the 47 th President of the United States it won’t be because she’s earned it. She hasn’t. It’ll be because she’s lucky. 

It’s not looking peachy for the incumbent Vice-President. The national polls are pretty much tied. So are those in the key swing states – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Other states that might make a difference in the all-important contest for the Electoral College (Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona) are just too close to call. It’s on a knife edge. 

The bump Harris enjoyed after Joe Biden announced he wasn’t running and anointed her as his successor has flattened out. At this stage of the race in the 2020 presidentials Biden was comfortably ahead. He had a steady four to eight percentage point lead in the popular vote. The voter turnout was the highest in since 1900. Biden got 81 million votes, the most cast in any presidential election. 

The complexities of the American voting landscape are such that making broad brush predictions is fraught with tripwires. The pollsters got it wrong in 2016 and 2020. Support for Hilary Clinton was wildly overestimated in 2016. Four years later the pollsters, both nationally and in the battleground states, correctly forecast a Biden victory, but significantly overestimated his margin. 

Victory or defeat may come down not just to a few swing states (what we in the UK call marginals), but to a handful of America’s 3,143 counties. As demographics change, these boomerang from one party to the other. 

To use a military analogy: imagine you’re fighting for control of a vast territory — in this case 3 million square miles of America’s 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia. The frontlines are static. The opposing armies have fought each other to a standstill and are digging in. A possible breakthrough lies – maybe – in a few tiny, isolated pockets visible only to the naked eye at a granular level. 

Or perhaps the polls are looking for differences that aren’t there or, at any rate, no longer there. American politics have become intensely polarised. The margin for change – the undecided voter – appears to have shrunk to a rounding error. 

American voters have been serving up 50-50 elections since 2000. That speaks to a country that’s stuck in opposing mindsets, hardened by personal experience, immune to the polished arguments of spin doctors. 

For all his malapropisms, weird behaviour, dark rhetoric and outrageous wind-ups (“Kamala Harris is mentally disabled”), Trump’s base remains solid. His oratory is about as subtle as slap in the face with a wet cod fish. But it works. 

Trump threatens to prosecute his enemies, order mass deportations of immigrants, use soldiers to quell citizen protests, start a trade war with China. His extended riffs are aimed at stoking fear. The particulars don’t matter. The thousands who flock to Trump rallies (even those who leave early as he rambles on) are not there for analysis. They’re there for the mood music and for validation. 

Trump delivers a kind of emotional balm, for which a generation of Americans who feels the world has passed them by yearns. He will make America not just Great Again, as he claims, but Safe. “ You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger.” This is dog-whistle politics of the most elementary kind. But it works because it taps into people’s own experience. 

Hilary Clinton made the fatal mistake in 2016 of looking down her nose at Trump’s supporters. She labelled them a “basket of deplorables”. It was a shocking but entirely predictable error, from a beltway politician who valued speaking in rounded sentences over getting to know the voters she wanted to attract. 

Harris has chosen to define her pitch as a choice between democracy and authoritarianism. Trump is a danger to the constitutional freedoms of American citizens. The spearhead charge is that voting for a fundamentalist Republican will rob American women of their reproductive rights. Gender is turning out to be a defining feature of this election. 

Abortion rights, now under threat in a number of states, are undoubtedly a key driver of how many Americans will vote. The overturning of Roe v Wade created a new coalition of centrists, moderate Republicans and independents which led to victories in the 2022 mid-term elections. 

But it may not be as simple this time. There’s some evidence that a small but significant segment of voters may oppose a ban on abortion, but would still vote Republican, because they prefer Trump’s message on immigration, the economy and jobs. Like so much else, we just don’t know. 

Has Harris run a bad campaign? Has she run the wrong campaign? Or is the task just too great? The damage done to the confidence of voters by a small clique of advisers around a failing Biden who persistently denied what was obvious to the rest of America will have merely served to convince voters that Washington is a kind of Forbidden City, where mandarins’ first and last duty is to protect the emperor.  

Harris’s focus on the vital but abstract threats to American freedom, from a man who still insists he won the 2020 election, doesn’t seem to be cutting through. Her failure to build a clear, distinctive argument about what she stands for and what kind of America she wants has hurt her. She has not, as far as we can see, explained to Americans how she will make them better off. What is her big idea? 

And then there’s what pollsters call the Bradley effect. Tom Bradley was a hugely popular Democratic mayor of Los Angeles. He was also black. He lost the race for Governor of California in 1982  because voters told pollsters they were undecided, rather than admit they wouldn’t vote for a black candidate. Harris is not just black. She’s running to be the first female president. Is it a coincidence that young men are apparently increasingly turning to Trump? 

We shall soon know. The final New York Times national poll before the November 5 election has the candidates tied at 48% each. Perhaps the millions pumped into local Political Action Committees to get the voters to the polling booths – especially young voters – will haul her over the line. 

A Trump victory would be a wild ride. It would be bad for business and therefore for the world economy. The support of tech billionaires — above all, Putin’s new best friend Elon Musk — notwithstanding, business relishes stability and that’s a commodity in short supply in The Donald’s worldview. It would be bad for Europe and worse for Ukraine. 

If half the things his opponents say about his intentions for America’s constitutional arrangements are true, Trump could will turn division into a chasm. 

Nate Silver, the American statistician and poker player who developed a system that accurately predicated the outcome in 49 of the 51 states in 2008, thinks it’s 50-50. Pushed, he says his gut says Trump will win. But, he adds: “Don’t trust anyone’s gut. Even mine.” 

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