A common refrain is that the race in the US presidential election between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is a ‘toss-up’, that it hangs on a ‘knife’s edge’, and could ‘go either way’. All that is true, insofar as both candidates still have possible paths to 270 electoral college votes—out of the total 538 distributed among the states. That said, there’s good reason to anticipate the unthinkable—that Trump might be on track for a landslide electoral college victory and a national mandate.
Trump has managed to stem the tide of the race in his favour. His ratings are growing, although not yet significantly ahead of Harris’s. He is strengthening his position in both the key states and nationally. This trend has steadily accrued through the past six weeks or so, and seems sustainable in the 10-day period ahead for the poll on November 5.
On the other hand, for two weeks in a row, while Trump’s ratings have kept up a strong momentum, Harris’s began losing ground both nationally and in key states. The rating aggregator RealClearPolitics still gives Harris an advantage of 1.3 points (as against 2.2 percentage points a week earlier), but that is a shaky lead within the margin of error. Remember, at this point in the presidential race in 2000, Joe Biden was ahead of Trump by 8.9 percentage points.
Harris’s popularity has also dropped from 48 percent to 43 percent during recent weeks, while Trump stands at around 46 percent. The Hill wrote last week, “During the late summer and heading into fall, Harris appeared to be the candidate with the momentum, with Democrats comparing her candidacy to former President Obama’s 2008 run… But recent polls suggest that energy has levelled off. While Harris still has a narrow edge over former President Trump nationally and in several battleground states, she has been losing ground… In the past two weeks, there has been a slight trend toward Trump in some of the battleground states.”
Simply put, the electoral struggle is escalating, and for the fight for key states, the scales may have already tilted in favour of Trump with an average advantage of 1 percentage point. Arguably, the presidential race is now actually reduced to a struggle for three ‘battleground’ states—Wisconsin, Michigan (which traditionally vote for the Democratic Party) and Pennsylvania (where Trump has a slight advantage of 0.7 percentage points).
Trump also appears to enjoy significant ‘hidden support’ among the electorate, which voters are simply afraid to communicate honestly with sociologists. Simply put, voters can claim that they will vote for Harris, but at the polling station actually vote for Trump. Another alarming signal for the Democrats is the results of ‘early voting’, which has begun in a number of states. The Democratic electorate usually prefer to cast their vote by mail or take to ‘early voting.’ But this time, the gap between Democrats and Republicans in terms of voting activity is not so great.
In a guest essay in the New York Times on Wednesday, Nate Silver, the famous pollster forecast that every single one of the seven swing states expected to decide the election — Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada — has been moving toward Trump over the course of both the last week and month. With ten days to go until election day, that’s a big deal — especially considering the positive ‘early voting’ returns for Republicans.
The NBC News (no friend of Trump) recalled in a report on Tuesday that the Blue Wall states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — “paved the path to the White House for the last two Democratic presidents. But… there are concerns within Kamala Harris’ campaign about whether the vice president can claim all three states. Losing Wisconsin or Michigan would mean that even if Harris secures Pennsylvania — where both Harris and Trump have spent the most time and resources — she would not reach the necessary 270 electoral votes to win the White House without winning another battleground state or possibly two.”
The New York Post had a similar report on the Democrats quietly panicking over the Harris campaign strategy as the ‘Blue Wall’ crumbles; MSN headlined ‘Crack in the Blue Wall?’ The Hill had an even more interesting twist to the tale. In a report titled ‘Senate Democrats running away from Harris in Blue Wall states’, the influential US political website—reportedly read by White House officials and more lawmakers than any other site vital for policy, politics and election campaigns—reported that Democratic candidates for the Senate in the Blue Wall states “are signalling that they are… careful about criticising Trump during the high-stakes debates. They have focused on policy and their own records without taking many—or any—shots against the Republican nominee”.
Pennsylvania’s incumbent Senator Bob Casey has even embraced Trump’s tariff policies. The Democratic candidate, who is seeking re-election, launched an ad campaign last week that described him as an ‘independent’ candidate. Apparently, he senses that party affiliation is a liability and he would rather run as an incumbent on his own record, distancing himself from an administration that is viewed negatively by the most part.
The crux of the matter is that the Biden-Harris record is a dismal one, especially regarding parts of the economy and the border. Americans are still stinging from the damage high inflation has done to their living standards. And they’re unhappy about the seven million migrants who are reported to have entered the country illegally, with many states now experiencing the crime and chaos previously limited to border states. Harris has no answers to these issues, and has not been able to distance herself effectively from Biden.
There is little about Harris that is authentic, and given her lack of policy depth and flip-flops on positions like banning fracking, defunding the police and decriminalising border crossings, people don’t know who she is or what she stands for. Her entire campaign strategy is pivoted on the tired ‘Trump is Hitler’ trope. For many Americans, it simply doesn’t add up.
(Views are personal)
M K Bhadrakumar
Former diplomat