US Election: Never-Ending Story

Exhausted, angry and anxious, Americans are dragging themselves to election day 2024 on November 5.

Not only has it been an interminable campaign – ex-President Donald Trump began running for the presidency two years ago – but it has been marked by apocalyptic rhetoric and an electorate evenly split and fiercely divided for the entire campaign cycle.

The exaggerated and inflammatory rhetoric has been used by both sides to frighten and energize their voters. Events have also heightened tensions, including two possible assassination attempts on Trump and the July 2024 decision by President Joe Biden to withdraw from the race, tossing the nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s standard bearer. The nomination of the first woman of color dramatically transformed the political landscape, particularly because it suddenly allowed her to market herself as the voice of a new generation – she is almost 20 years younger than Trump – rather than simply an incumbent forced to defend the last four years.

Americans often wish that their election cycles had the brevity and relative restraint they see in other countries. In some ways, they did this year, for while Trump has been running for two years, Harris’s campaign has lasted less than four months. Regardless of the outcome, what she has accomplished in terms of support and fundraising in such a short time has been remarkable.

Her challenge has been that while most Americans long ago had made up their minds about Trump – this is his third campaign – they profess to be less certain about who Harris is and what she will do if elected. This has provided Trump with an opportunity to define her as both extreme and incompetent before Harris could define herself.

Pollsters have repeatedly told us that the economy is the greatest concern of voters this year. In the dramatic 1992 slogan of Democratic strategist James Carville, “It’s the economy, stupid.” The American economy is in the estimate of most economists quite healthy, having brought down post-pandemic inflation without slipping into a recession, with incomes rising and unemployment rates low. Yet many Americans remain unconvinced, complaining about inflation, the price of basic goods and the shortage of affordable housing that afflicts many urban/suburban areas.

Despite these economic concerns, neither campaign has fixated on the economy in the closing weeks of the campaign. Trump has raged against undocumented immigrants and focused on his plan to raise tariffs on imported goods, which he says will lower inflation. Regarding the housing shortage, he argues that the mass deportation of immigrants will free up housing.

Harris has focused on women’s health and “reproductive choice,” meaning abortion. This reflects the unpopularity of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning the landmark abortion decision Roe vs. Wade, allowing each state to determine its own abortion laws. Women’s outrage over the court’s decision to allow the restriction of what they had seen as a legal right fueled a stronger-than-expected Democratic showing in the 2022 midterm elections, something the Democrats hope will happen again.

But those issues also underscore what may be the most dramatic characteristics of the 2024 campaign: a gender gap of historic proportions. Women are tilting to Harris by a 9-point margin, while men are tilting to Trump by an 8-point margin, making the gap 17 points, according to Pew Research. This gap widens when one looks at levels of education obtained. Between college educated women and men without a college education, there is a 43-point gap.

Trump seeks to appeal to male voters by “speaking his mind,” saying he will defend the country from an “invasion” of immigrants.

The campaign rhetoric follows the sexual divide, often in crude ways. Trump and his surrogates cast sexual aspersions on Harris. The best-selling tee-shirt at Trump rallies call Harris a slang word for prostitute, and Trump has ridiculed her intelligence and what he says will be her inability to stand up to other (male) leaders. A religious supporter speaking in New York called her the Antichrist.

The Harris campaign appeals to women voters by focusing on family issues, such as childcare and eldercare as well as healthcare. She also has highlighted Trump’s disparaging and sexist language, which obviously angers many women, as well as accusations that Trump is a fascist who will run roughshod over the Constitution. (Trump in turn has called Harris a fascist, communist and Marxist, sometimes in the same sentence).

What will likely come as no surprise to non-Americans in Europe and elsewhere, American voters by and large seem to have shown little interest in foreign policy issues, despite wars in the Ukraine and the Middle East, the Chinese-Taiwan confrontation, possible trade wars and more. “All politics is local,” a famous American politician once said, and this is generally true even when the election has worldwide implications.

The even divide in the polling numbers means that the two candidates in the final weeks have been tirelessly looking for any advantage and hoping to win over the sliver of the electorate that is still undecided. In the campaign’s last weeks, Harris has gone after disaffected Republicans who don’t like Trump but may not want to vote Democratic. She has also pursued Native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans and others.

Trump has been appealing to African-American and Hispanic men, hoping to extend his lead among male voters in groups traditionally identified as Democratic. He has also been campaigning in traditionally Democratic states like California, New York and New Mexico, hoping to peel away votes.

A Trump rally in New York City October 27 made this effort more complicated when it featured a comedian who mocked Puerto Rico as a floating island of garbage. While residents in the U.S. Territory of Puerto Rico cannot vote for president, almost six million Puerto Ricans live on the mainland and could have an impact on the election in reacting to a joke widely perceived as racist.

The Harris campaign has also been highlighting officials in the first Trump administration who are calling him a grave threat to national security, and she has questioned his age and mental abilities, now that he, and not Biden, is the oldest candidate ever to run for the presidency.

Despite this flurry of activity in the final weeks of the campaign, polling numbers have barely changed. This means that at the end of the day, both campaigns are focused on two key factors likely to matter the most come November 5.

First, there are seven swing states predicted to decide the election, as they did in 2016 and 2020. While a state like California will surely go for Harris and Texas will go for Trump, strategists have focused their attention and hundreds of millions of dollars in ads on the swing states that could go either way and that will most certainly decide the election: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada. Each state has its own story to tell, but collectively, they will decide who is to be the next president.

Which brings us to the second key factor: turnout. Not every American who is registered to vote does so. Whichever campaign has the better “ground game,” that is, the better organization for getting prospective voters to actually vote, will likely win, particularly in those swing states.

Biden, long before he withdrew from the race, had already established a national network of campaign offices and local organizers. Harris’s entry into the race spurred a huge outpouring of volunteers and campaign cash.

On the other hand, Trump’s core followers are completely committed to him and just as determined to show up at the polls.

And so there it is. After two years, a few billion dollars, a gazillion television, internet and radio ads, and an exhausted electorate, it may all come down to this: who can get his or her supporters to show up and vote? Stay tuned.