2 weeks Ago By Firstpost
The US presidential race has acquired all the trappings of a racy thriller—plot twists, suspense, high stakes, power play, violence, and sleaze! The excitement and anxiety are mounting as the contest gets progressively tighter and the day of reckoning draws closer. It is hard to believe that till the other day, one could barely stifle a yawn at two ageing gladiators sparring with each other. With the unprecedented withdrawal by President Joe Biden, the race has become a spirited generational contest between eloquence and bombast; between entitlement and accomplishment; between hope and fear; and between harmony and bigotry.
At least that is what the Democrats would have you believe! Truth be told, American politics is deeply and bitterly polarised. Sadly, violence has also crept into the discourse. Earlier this week, another person was nabbed in Florida who allegedly had come equipped with a weapon to target Donald Trump.
Emotions are running high, and scaremongering is commonplace. What sounds as demagoguery to the Democrats is gospel to the Republicans. To illustrate, Trump has been claiming that countries like Venezuela have emptied their prisons and mental institutions to flood the US with 21 million illegal immigrants comprising of murderers, drug dealers, and rapists under Biden’s watch.
And that Haitian refugees have been stealing and devouring pets of residents in Springfield, Ohio. These blatantly false and racist statements, lapped up by the Republicans, are stoking tensions and endangering the safety of immigrants. Again, Trump asserts that he will solve America’s economic problems by making foreign countries pay hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation for engaging in unfair trade practices through the imposition of tariffs.
Anyone with a rudimentary understanding knows that tariffs are paid by the consumers and not by the exporting nation. Trump’s tariffs would only fuel inflation and make the products more expensive for American buyers. Yet hardly anyone is willing to fact-check and call him out.
It is in this atmosphere that the first and perhaps only TV debate between Trump and Harris was held on 10 September. Most political pundits proclaim that such debates do not impact the electoral outcome. However, 2024 seems to suggest the opposite.
The June 27 encounter with Trump gutted Biden’s hopes of securing a second term in office. The recent one appears to have dented Trump’s standing. Kamala Harris, the self-proclaimed underdog, demonstrated forcefully that she was made of sterner stuff.
She came across as confident, articulate, well-prepared, and knowledgeable. Harris stole the initiative by walking up to Trump to shake his hand and introduce herself, taking him by surprise. They were meeting face-to-face for the first time.
She was relentless in attacking Trump whenever there was an opportunity but equally mindful of staying positive and articulating her vision for the future of America. She succeeded in rattling Trump and solidifying her standing with the Democrats. Trump, on the other hand, could not help being himself.
He ducked and danced around inconvenient questions, continued to claim that he had won in 2020, denied that he had incited his followers to march on Capitol Hill, and asserted falsely that the crime rate in the country had soared due to illegal immigrants admitted by the Biden administration. He incessantly harped on his pet themes, namely inflation, mismanagement of the economy, and erosion in the US’ global standing. Expectedly, both sides claimed victory.
However, it is unclear if either side succeeded in swaying many independent or undecided voters, who hold the key to the White House, to their section of the divide. The support base of Trump remains rock solid. Kamala Harris has a bigger challenge on her hands.
In a recent New York Times/Siena college poll 28 per cent of likely voters said that they needed to learn more about Harris. That said, the Harris campaign continues to steam ahead. It raked in $47 million in donations within 24 hours after the debate and $361 million in August, more than twice the amount raised by the opposition.
Significantly, for the first time ever, over 200 ranking Republicans have broken ranks, expressing support for Kamala Harris and saying that they were putting the nation above their party. The most prominent among them is former Vice President Dick Chenny, a staunch, lifelong Republican who has described Trump as the greatest threat to the country in its history. The Trump campaign has sought to put on a brave face by calling them RINO (Republicans In Name Only).
But what has really rattled the Republicans is the endorsement of Harris by pop sensation Tylor Swift, who has 285 million followers on Instagram. Her fans, mostly youngsters, called ‘Swifties’ have already formed a support group called ‘Swifties for Kamala’ that can tilt the scales in her favour. Trump lashed out, saying, ‘I hate Tylor Swift’.
Celebrity endorsements are quite common in US politics; their impact though is debatable. Oprah Winfrey’s support for Barack Obama in 2008 is said to have swung 1 million votes in his favour, which is huge in the American contest. She has now thrown her weight behind Harris.
If Swift’s endorsement can translate into even a fraction of additional votes for Harris, especially in the swing states, it can make a big difference. Believe it or not, in this country of 330 million people with an electorate of 244 million, a presidential race can be won or lost by a margin of merely 25,000 votes in key battleground states. Thanks to the complex electoral arithmetic in the US, the winner is not determined by the popular vote but by the number of electoral college delegates (electoral votes, or EVs).
A candidate needs to secure 270 out of 538 EVs to win. In 2016, Hillary Clinton polled almost 3 million more nationwide votes than Trump but trailed in swing states. She managed to secure only 227 EVs and lost.
Each state has been assigned EVs in proportion to its population. A large state like California, for example, has 54 EVs as compared to 3 with Vermont. The candidate getting the highest votes in a state pockets all the EVs regardless of the margin of victory (winner-takes-all system) except in Maine and Nebraska.
In the US, most of the states have come to be regarded as the strongholds of either the Republicans or the Democrats, hence acquiring the monicker red or blue states, respectively. However, a handful of states have changed colour depending on the appeal of the contestants in the fray. These are also known as purple states.
The number of such states has varied from time to time. Currently there are seven such crucial states, namely: Arizona (11), Georgia (16), Michigan (16), Nevada (6), North Carolina (15), Pennsylvania (19), and Wisconsin (10). The number of EVs held by them is given in parentheses.
In 2020, Biden won Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin by margins varying between 0.24 per cent and 0.63 per cent and by a total of less than 43,000 votes.
In other words, if Trump had weaned away roughly 21,600 of these votes, he may have continued to occupy the White House. This should give an idea of how close the contest was and still is! Naturally, both candidates are concentrating on the purple states, especially Pennsylvania. In the past 10 of 12 elections, the winner in Pennsylvania has become the president.
As of now, Harris is 2 to 3 percentage points ahead of Trump in nationwide opinion polls, but her lead in some of the battleground states is under 1 percentage point. The race is wide open. Both candidates know that any perceived misstep may prove fatal.
The author is a foreign affairs specialist and an ex-envoy to Canada and South Korea. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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