The final stretch of the US election
Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is covering the US presidential elections for Red Flag. Lance is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality.
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With a little over a week until election day, the polls show the closest race in a long time. The final New York Times poll had the race tied 48-48, and the most recent poll for CNN showed a 47-47 race. In the polling aggregator 538, Harris led Trump by 1.4 percentage points on 26 October. In the seven swing states that will determine the electoral college votes, surveys show the race to be tied or within a point or two for either candidate. Democrats believe that Harris leads in the bare minimum states she needs to win 270 electoral votes: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and a single congressional district in Nebraska.
Most people who aren’t Trump supporters continue to ask themselves how the race can be this close. After all, Trump was a terrible president who tried to overturn the last election. He is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, a fraudster, a bigot, a racist. Dozens of people who worked in Trump’s administration have called him a menace and endorsed Harris. Trump’s one-time chief of staff, John Kelly, a conservative former general, has labelled Trump a “fascist” and reported conversations in which Trump signalled admiration for Adolf Hitler. Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, J.D. Vance, may be more unpopular than Trump.
To understand how we find ourselves here, we need to take a step back and look at the national, international and historical backdrop to the 2024 election. There are conjunctural and structural reasons for Trump’s staying power.
First, the conjunctural. By many accounts, the US economy has had the strongest recovery from the pandemic of all its peers. Yet it still suffered from an increase in prices unseen in 40 years. While the inflation rate has dropped closer to historic averages, prices are still much higher than they were pre-pandemic. This means that for most of Biden’s term, working people’s living standards declined. And the Biden administration ended COVID-era social supports.
If we look across the world and elections over the last year or so, we can see that most COVID-era incumbent governments have lost to the opposition: Britain, New Zealand, Argentina and the Netherlands, to name a few. Polls currently predict a landslide loss for Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada. So Trump benefits from a “throw the bums out” anti-incumbent feeling.
From this viewpoint, the strength of the US economy and the unpopularity of MAGA (“make America great again”—Trump’s slogan) might be the only things keeping Harris in the race.
The “structural” point is that there is a large conservative bloc representing about 46-47 percent of the electorate that supports Trump no matter what. Half of these people are Christian religious conservatives. This is where most people who support conservative politics and are averse to social change and the like gather. Trump’s politics might be called “restorationist”, as in returning the US to the 1950s—or even to the idealised pre-COVID Trump years.
A second structural feature that keeps Trump competitive is the electoral college, a constitutional relic of the 1700s designed to preserve the support of slave-holding southern states in the early US republic. The votes that elect the president are cast state by state, and are disproportionately allocated to conservative and rural states.
Even though the Democrats have won more votes than the Republicans in seven of the last eight national presidential elections, the Republicans (including Trump in 2016) “won” the presidency twice while losing the popular vote. This is why the entire presidential campaign is focused on winning seven “swing” states, whose electorates are closely divided between the two parties.
While Trump winning the popular vote is conceivable, most observers assume that Harris will win the national popular vote. But Trump could still end up as president by winning enough “swing state” votes to win the electoral college.
Does all this mean that Trump will win outright? There is no way to tell. But we can assume that unless (or even if) Harris wins decisively, Trump will declare victory and claim that the election was “stolen” from him. Trump and the Republicans have laid the groundwork for a series of challenges to votes in states and to election certification, and other court challenges that might prompt the Trump-friendly Supreme Court to rule in his favour.
In contrast to 2020, when Trump relied on a Star Wars-bar collection of lawyers to prosecute his case, and when key Republicans refused to go along with his “stolen election” lie, the GOP is more firmly on board with Trump’s strategy today.
Moreover, as pro-Democratic Party legal expert Neil Katyal points out, for Trump to have succeeded in 2020, he would have had to reverse the electoral votes in several states. If the election is as close as it appears today, it could come down to the vote in one or two states. That would give Trump’s strategy a better chance of succeeding.
The Democrats aren’t without advantages. Harris has raised an astounding $1 billion in the last three months. Democratic ads dominate airwaves, and they have a huge advantage in the level of organisation, including paid staff and volunteers across the swing states. Democrats say they are more “enthusiastic” to vote than Republicans report. The Democrats’ most motivating issue, abortion rights, will be on ten states’ ballots, including swing states Arizona and Nevada. Those referendums could bring a more pro-Harris electorate to the ballot box. The key question is: Will all these factors overcome the conjunctural and structural factors that support Trump?
Harris’s campaign appears to be aggressive, with a media blitz, many rallies and ridicule of Trump. Trump’s appearances reveal his incoherence and malevolence. The Harris campaign also seems to think (and presumably they have data to back this up) that there is a non-trivial section of Republicans who will cross over for them. This is why the Harris campaign has emphasised support from Trump’s generals and has campaigned with the likes of former Republican representative Liz Cheney.
By some estimates, Biden won almost one-in-five of the minuscule number of self-described “liberal” or “moderate” Republicans in 2020. But overall, Biden won the support of only 5 percent of Republicans, compared to the 4 percent who voted for Clinton. Perhaps Harris will gain more Republican support than Biden did, but that’s hardly a mother lode of votes.
And what message does Harris’ courting of Republicans send to the Democratic Party’s core supporters? Harris and her team wouldn’t allow the symbolic concession of a Palestinian-American elected official to endorse her at the Democratic National Convention. And now she’s celebrating former Vice President Dick Cheney, who millions consider a war criminal for his role in engineering the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. If nothing else, Harris’s welcoming of anti-abortion, conservative Republicans into the Democratic “big tent” tells you what the Democratic Party really is: a centre-right party of the capitalist status quo.
With the election as close as it is, and it hinging on a few tens of thousands of votes in swing states, there could be a hundred reasons why one candidate wins and the other loses. The Arab Uncommitted movement said it couldn’t endorse Harris, but it didn’t want Trump to win. That can be interpreted as an indulgence to say that people who voted Uncommitted against Biden can still vote for Harris. But if they don’t or they vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, or sit out the election, or skip the presidential line on their ballots, could that cost Harris Michigan? If so, the Democrats would have only themselves to blame.
No matter how the election turns out, its political meaning will be contested. If Harris wins, her supporters will take it as validation of the outreach to Republicans and inoculating themselves by endorsing the military and a “tough on the border” immigration policy. If Harris loses, no doubt Democratic “centrists” will say that didn’t move far enough to the right. And social democratic progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders or Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will most likely say she wasn’t left wing enough.
Right now, both sides are holding their fire and giving cover to Harris. If Harris loses, most of her supporters will despair of the country’s condition and wonder if they have completely lost touch with it.
The Democratic side feels optimistic about what they are seeing “on the ground”. So far, the early vote and new registrations seem to be trending to them. Their side will oversee the election machinery at the state level in most of the swing states. It’s still too early to tell how the election will swing with only a few days left.
If nothing else, the current state of the election should point out the absurdity of the system, its complete domination by the rich and the fact that neither candidate is addressing the underlying issues facing humanity today: global warming, economic precariousness and a migration crisis.
