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With just over six weeks until the US election, the Listener’s Washington DC columnist Jonathan Kronstadt begins a weekly column which surveys the weighty, the weird and the wonderful from the Harris vs Trump race for the presidency.
Context is king, so here’s some to help you understand just how bizarre this election season has been of late in the United States where Vice President Kamala Harris is running against former president and current Republican candidate Donald Trump.
First, the two “stories” that launched the furore over illegal Haitian immigrants allegedly eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio, have been proven utterly false and retracted by their originators. Yet Trump and JD Vance, the two men on the Republican Party’s presidential ticket — both of whom know the stories are false — continue to trumpet them on the campaign trail, which has led to dozens of bomb threats that have closed schools and terrorised the town. Trump stumbled into a truth at a rally on Monday night, saying “Springfield will never be the same,” but somehow failed to claim credit for its new reality. And, just for fun, the Haitians are here legally.
Then there’s the case of Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in all-important North Carolina. In endorsing him, Trump called Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids”, and now it appears that Robinson frequented the comments section of a porn site called Naked Africa and, among other incredibly horrifying statements, called himself a “Black Nazi” and called for the reintroduction of slavery, saying “I would certainly buy a few.” It’s a cliché, but if you tried to pitch this script to a movie studio it would be rejected for implausibility.
For those of you who run screaming from the above madness and seek sanity in the safety and reliability of numbers, not so fast.
This week saw the usual barrage of national and state polls, virtually all of which fell snugly within their margins of error and are therefore either meaningless or contradictory. The mad math persists when turning to the candidates’ war chests — a lovely metaphor to fold into a process that ideally ends in the peaceful transfer of power — as Trump, despite backing from the toxic masculinity twins (Elon Musk and the crypto-currency bros), has been massively out-raised and out-spent by Harris, backed by the holy trinity of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
We’re even fighting over how to count. Georgia’s beet-red election board recently mandated a hand count of all ballots in a bald-faced effort to sow confusion and undermine confidence in election integrity and Mississippi Republicans are working to take national a drive to eliminate mail-in ballots that are postmarked before but arrive after Election Day.
But the grande dame of US democracy’s math miasma is surely the Electoral College, whose persistent existence means that about 80% of those who vote in November’s presidential election will have zero influence on its outcome.
Only the 20% who live in the seven “swing” states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — have a say in choosing the world’s most powerful person, save perhaps the residents of one congressional district in Nebraska. This could be Harris’ 270th and deciding electoral vote, but only because Trump loyalists lost their battle to get the state legislature to change its non-traditional, non-winner-take-all distribution system. Don’t try to understand our electoral math, as it just spoils the magic.
Will there or won’t there be another debate? Can Harris get her economic and border security message out with enough muscle to satisfy independents and those who are still on the fence — and how on Earth can anyone still be on the fence? Can Trump find enough message discipline to calm moderate Republicans, and if not, can he demonise Harris enough to scare them into voting for the red team? And could everybody please stop shooting at him?
No one truly knows the answers to these and most of the other pressing questions going into the election’s final weeks, and the uncertainty, combined with the dire dichotomy inherent in the choice we face, some leftover PTSD from January 6th and concern about a possible repeat of that carnage, has much of the US on edge.
Harris and running mate Tim Walz are trying their “joyful warrior” approach while Trump pounds his dystopian drum of an America that is going to hell and won’t exist any more if he doesn’t win. No matter the outcome, the US will remain a deeply divided, difficult-to-govern nation, which makes one wonder why anyone wants to be president in the first place.
Jonathan Kronstadt is a freelance writer working in Washington, DC.
