The American presidential election is still too close to call. What are the key determinants to keep in mind? How will it be decided?
Collectively we have made it this far and we now only have a week or so to go before America finally — finally! — elects its next president through its very own, unique process. But beyond this presidential race, it is important to remember the election will also be electing the full membership of the House of Representatives, a third of the Senate, and thousands of state and local officials — and people will be voting on referendums on women’s reproductive rights restrictions in many states.
The results of this election may also switch party control of the Senate (now in Democratic hands) and possibly the House of Representatives as well (now controlled by Republicans). Both of these majorities are razor thin.
So, election day is 5 November, but it is entirely possible we won’t be out of the woods, even several days later. If the election results for president are as close as the most recent polls seem to indicate, there will inevitably also be calls for recounts in various states.
That will mean fierce litigation over charges of voter fraud (whether they are real, or much more likely, feigned) will then take centre stage in America’s political landscape. This will especially be the case if Donald Trump fails to win a majority of the electoral college votes and he then starts to whine, “we wuz robbed” — as sports fans say when the umpire’s calls go against their team.
Even at this late point in the campaign, all reputable polls have Vice-President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump virtually “neck-and-neck”, as the horse race phrase goes, regarding the national popular vote. But much more important — the close numbers are echoed in the six or seven key battleground or swing states that almost certainly will determine how the electoral college results come out, and thus the election itself.
Obsessive world attention
According to almost all of the polling, Harris appears to be ahead of her rival, very slightly, in a majority of the swing state polls, but with the margin between the two depending on the survey being read. Crucially for her, it appears she is slightly ahead in the “must-win” states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan. However, the differences essentially remain within the usual qualifications about statistical margins of error in those polls.
As a result, between now and 5 November, there will be obsessive nail biting among politicians, political operatives, leaders at advocacy and interest groups, the media, and ordinary citizens. And there will be a fair amount of concern around the world — given how the choice between Harris and Trump will have real impacts pretty much everywhere else. Thus officials in Kyiv, Moscow, Beijing, Taipei, the capitals across the Middle East, as well as all of the European capitals and beyond will be paying close, even obsessive attention to the outcome.
Electoral college
By now, readers of our election reporting at Daily Maverick almost certainly have gained a sense of how the actual electoral process works, including that mysterious entity known as the electoral college. But to review the process briefly, an American president is elected through a somewhat indirect process by which the election is really carried out separately, state by state, even though it is a national election.
A candidate who gains the largest number of votes in a state gains the full electoral weight of that state. That electoral weight is broadly equivalent to the relative size of that state’s population.
Specifically, there is a total of 538 electoral votes (apportioned for each member of the House of Representatives from that state plus two more for the two Senate seats per state, as well as three more for the District of Columbia, the formal name of the nation’s capital). As a result, a winning margin becomes 270 electoral votes out of that total of 538.
Two states, Maine and Nebraska, now divide their electoral votes by congressional districts, but those two states’ electoral weights are quite small. Still, by some calculations, if the one vote in Nebraska coming from the congressional district surrounding the city of Omaha goes Democratic and is different from the rest of the state, in a hard-fought, close electoral count, conceivably that one vote could make the difference over who wins the whole enchilada. But that scenario is more likely to remain as the plot for a political thriller on the fiction shelf. Maybe…
The swing states
At present, the results in most big population states such as California, Illinois, New York, Texas and Florida are not up for grabs, what with substantial majorities in those states, one way or the other. But, as we have noted already, the swing states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — remain closely divided in terms of likely voter support for the two major party candidates.
Given how things might factor out, for example, a candidate who wins Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin plus one or two others, along with all the states assumed to be in their corner already, would be nearly certain to become the victor in the electoral count.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6stZtC6Ysa8&pp=ygURc3dpbmcgc3RhdGUgcG9sbHM%3D
This explains why in the final days of this campaign, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, their respective running mates, and all the surrogates and stand-ins they can muster, are now spending as much time as possible in those swing states, trying to lock down support for their respective candidacies.
Participants for Harris at her rallies have also included A-list superstars such as Bruce Springsteen, Samuel L Jackson, Tyler Perry, Eminem, Spike Lee, Willie Nelson, and Beyoncé, a roster that is well beyond what the Trump forces have mustered as an A-list for his rallies. In these final days before election day, the candidates and their surrogates are crisscrossing those swing states, meeting with gatherings that either represent already obvious supporters or are those who, even after all this time, still remain undecided about who they should vote for.
Final major events, core messaging
Interestingly, this past weekend, both candidates were in Texas, even though it is a state not seen as contested territory. In fact, for decades, it has been firmly on the Republican side of the ledger. But Harris is using her time in Texas to focus on the issue of women’s reproductive rights. This is a theme that transcends Texas and any easy partisan divide and so it is an effort by Harris to re-centre support for women’s reproductive rights as a key element in her appeals to voters.
As a footnote, Harris will apparently have her last major event in Washington, DC, just beyond the White House grounds, while Donald Trump plans to have a final rally in Madison Square Garden in New York City. It is very unlikely a Harris rally in Washington will generate large numbers of undecided voters suddenly swinging towards her. But she is still the incumbent vice-president.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MydUfvYWh2I&pp=ygUNa2FtYWxsYSB0ZXhhcw%3D%3D
Meanwhile, New York City is hardly on a course to side with Donald Trump after the city has rejected him in several elections already. But these two events will both make news broadcasts, will be streamed online, and they will represent the candidates’ final efforts to frame the core messaging of their respective campaigns.
There is another rationale for Harris to hold events in Texas — that is to boost the prospects of Democratic candidates for other offices in the state such as Congressman Colin Allred’s effort to unseat incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz. That contest matters in the struggle for control of the Senate as a number of other Democratic incumbents such as Senator Jon Tester of Montana are at risk of being defeated.
Dismal Trump statements
Meanwhile, in all of this, Donald Trump has continued his march through a dismal swamp of statements never previously heard in an American political campaign. In response, Harris got in at least one zinger about Trump in her rallies, charging that while Trump was hunched over his retribution against his enemies list, she, by contrast, was reviewing her to-do list.
As for Trump, he has increasingly referred to his opponent in obscene terms, well beyond deriding her policies as garbage or worse. Bizarrely, in one recent rally, he gave an extended riff on the imposing genitals of the late golfer, Arnold Palmer. This took place in a speech in Palmer’s home town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. On the plus side, this at least replaced that debunked nonsense about Haitians eating pet kittens and puppies in Springfield, Ohio, even though Trump continued his campaign of denigrating immigrants as scum, vermin, polluters of the national blood and worse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBMoPUAeLnY&pp=ygUPdHJ1bXAgam9lIHJvZ2Fu
On Joe Rogan’s vastly popular podcast, Donald Trump also said last week that “the enemy from within” in the United States posed a more serious threat than the dictator of North Korea, reprising the very phrase that has repeatedly drawn strong criticism, in his meandering, three-hour interview with Rogan. He added, “We had no problem with him [Kim]. I say it to people, we have a bigger problem, in my opinion, with the enemy from within.”
Here, the enemy Trump is talking about are people like Democratic congressional figures such as Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, headliner names in a list he repeatedly insults. He has also been advocating the use of the military to “deal” with them. (Parenthetical question: What cops and robbers or spy thriller film does he think he is acting in?)
Disgust
Meanwhile, an increasing number of former senior officials from the previous Trump administration, including his White House chief of staff, retired General John Kelly, have voiced their disgust for Donald Trump’s mental prowess and their fear of a Trump return to power — and some, like Kelly, have gone on to accuse him of being a fascist wannabe.
Thus the question that inevitably occurs to this writer out of Trump’s performances as a candidate: Are readers acquainted with another elderly person increasingly and sadly suffering from dementia, a growing loss of cognitive function, and someone whose mental filters about the kinds of things not to say in public have largely evaporated?
Donald Trump’s behaviour seems to be giving tangible voice to his decline, dramatically and worryingly. What a discussion of Arnold Palmer’s genital organs has to do with any president’s ability to manage foreign policy or negotiate with Congress is just totally incomprehensible. As The New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wrote the other day, “If any of us had an aging parent like Trump, we would gently remove the car keys. As a nation, we should keep him from the nuclear launch codes.”
Given all of the above, how will this election be decided? There are two key things to keep in mind. First, of course, is what are the issues motivating potential voters; and second is what is the granular detail of where and how the election will be decided.
Key voter concerns
The polling data has, over the past year and beyond, repeatedly pointed to several key voter concerns. These include immigration, the country’s economic circumstances, women’s reproductive rights and somewhat behind those, the protection and promotion of democratic values. Well below those items, are foreign policy concerns, but with one potentially important footnote.
Of those four leading issues, Donald Trump’s aggressive “bro-ism” (as with his threats to make use of the military against his enemies) and offering simplistic solutions to economic issues and immigration continue to reinforce support for the former president among voters who believe those are the most important issues. Harris, meanwhile, has continued to stake out support on the other two themes, women’s reproductive rights and a defence of democracy.
As that footnote, one particular aspect of foreign policy has, however, created a potentially troubling circumstance for Harris. The swing state of Michigan has something on the order of 300,000 Muslim or Arab American citizens.
The ongoing conflict in Gaza and strong support for Israel by the current administration in that conflict has made a number of those in the Muslim/Arab American communities increasingly wary of supporting Harris — despite their traditional allegiance to the Democrats. This is being articulated even as Donald Trump continues to signal his strong support for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s current policies and security strategies, no matter what they are or will be in future.
Some Arab-Americans in Michigan are effectively saying a plague on both your houses, urging voters in their communities to abstain from voting at all. In a truly tight contest in Michigan, the loss of such votes may become a disaster for Harris’s hopes to win Michigan’s electoral votes — and, thus, just maybe, doom her bid for the White House.
This response could be an electoral “for want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the battle was lost” nightmare. Many Democrats would not look kindly on such an eventuality if it handed the government to Trump and the Maga-ites in November.
Voter enthusiasm
As far as where the election will be decided, it is not enough to speak about swing states as if they were monoliths. Within each of those states, the battle is on for the minds and votes of suburban, college-educated, women (and some men) in the populous counties surrounding the big cities of the swing states. In this, as with the largely Democratic voters in big cities, turnout will be the key. And turnout hangs on voter enthusiasm.
Thus, two further factors must be taken into consideration. The first is the impact of the rise in advance voting and voting by mail. A generation ago, voting by mail was largely an afterthought, limited to people living or working overseas or too ill to go to polling stations on election day.
Now, increasingly, and partially in response to the Covid pandemic and changes in voter behaviour, the number of such advance voters has risen dramatically. Such voters have already made their choices, meaning their choices are already baked into the electoral cake and no last-minute publicity by candidates or appeals to voters can affect them. By the time you read these words, at least 40 million advance votes will have already been cast, although they will not be counted until election day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt9fgCqMfO0
The second is the question of turnout, as we noted above. At this point in the campaign, rather than the making of last-minute appeals on the issues, both campaigns (and all of the subordinate campaigns for candidates down-ballot) are really focusing on turnout — getting their supporters to vote, rather than just having them griping or attending rallies.
In the old days, for Democrats, labour unions played a major part in such efforts through their Committee on Political Education that focused on voter education and getting voters to the polls through lift clubs and making sure invalids or the hospitalised voted.
But the salience of unions in elections has increasingly declined and other efforts have risen instead. Computerisation of registered voter identification, their attitudes, past performance, and voter tracking along with automated phone banks are being used aggressively.
Now, such efforts are frequently funded by Political Action Committees. These funding vehicles are separate from candidates’ campaigns, and supposedly are not linked directly to campaigns, but focus closely on specific issues, even if that distinction is sometimes very hard to see in reality.
For this week, we shall leave aside the potential impact of Elon Musk’s million-dollar lottery for registered voters who sign a petition in swing states. There is the federal Department of Justice’s warning that such efforts may violate campaign funding laws.
There are also decisions by some major newspapers to decline to endorse a candidate, rendered right at the eleventh hour — at the decision of the owners, but to the chagrin and fury of actual journalists of those papers. There are already campaigns for individuals to cancel their subscriptions to The Washington Post because of the cowardice of its owner (billionaire Jeff Bezos), despite the extraordinarily consequential election upon us.
Without question, this has been the strangest presidential campaign in modern times. We still have a few days left for a few more October surprises to come before next Tuesday, so hang on tight. DM