PALESA MORUDU ROSENBERG: Why the US election can go either way

Over the next few days, we should know on which side of the knife edge the US election has fallen. Given the dead heat in key states, a clear result may take longer than usual. And given the likelihood of a dispute, a clear result may not be all that clear. 

If former president Donald Trump wins, he will become the second man in US history to win two non-consecutive terms after Grover Cleveland (president No 22 and 24). Cleveland was the first Democrat to be elected president after the Civil War, serving from 1885-1889, and returned for a second term from 1893-1897. Columbia University history professor Henry F Graff wrote that historians do not rank Cleveland as a great president. But as a party leader, he was able to “create a solid South for the Democrats by encouraging former Confederates to believe they had a friend in the White House”.

Fast-forward 127 years. Everyone has a view about who will have a friend in the next administration. 

If vice-president Kamala Harris defeats Trump, she will become the first US commander-in-chief who is a black woman. A first-generation American whose parents came from faraway lands, her victory would certainly underscore the narrative about the American dream, paradoxically as she leads what was once the party of slavery.   

Yet it could easily go the other way. In an electoral cycle more volatile than most, we have seen the dramatic withdrawal of a doddering incumbent from the race, two attempted assassinations and a newly minted candidate anointed by her party’s mandarins with just 10 weeks to go before the election.

The contest has stayed stubbornly close. Many ask how it is possible that a character like Trump could once again attain the highest office in the land. Trump has been in the public’s political face for about 10 years as a vile, boorish, vulgar, wannabe authoritarian. It is important to understand that his supporters extend well beyond Maga true believers.

Trump received nearly half the votes in 2020 in a result that he contested by unleashing a riot on Capitol Hill on January 6 2021. He has spent the past four years engaged in the politics of grievance, projecting himself as a victim of the Washington establishment, while reminding his base that he was a far better steward of the economy than President Joe Biden. Much of Trump’s popularity is rooted in the public’s dislike of the elite embodied in Democratic Party leadership circles.

Harris, on the other hand, is not the strongest candidate the Democrats have produced. She campaigned while vice-president to a deeply unpopular Biden, whose approval ratings have remained in the 30s throughout the campaign. Voters blame him for expensive fuel and high food prices. As the Harris-supporting New York Times notes: “Many voters say President Biden’s policies have hurt them — more than say the same about Mr Trump’s policies — and economic concerns are a large driver of those feelings.”

Harris has struggled to put forward a convincing economic vision. Instead, she has presented a set of proposals that sound as if they emerged from party focus groups: to crack down on “price gouging”, expand Medicare to cover home care and to provide first-time homebuyers with $25,000 for their down payment.

Neither candidate, it must be said, touches on anything like inequality, or the housing crisis, or reforming the broken health system, but those are subjects for another day.

Just last week, Harris faced criticism from within her ranks. A Democratic strategist told The Hill that Harris’ messaging on the economy “left a lot to be desired ... I still think there are folks out there who can’t tell you what she plans to do.” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont went further, telling the Associated Press that “she has to start talking more to the needs of working-class people”.

Trump’s economic proposals, if fully realised and more than a bargaining position, would likely be disastrous. As Princeton economic professor and former Federal Reserve vice-chair Allan Blinder wrote in the Wall Street Journal of Trump’s threatened wall of tariffs, “if you want to know how such a policy is likely to work out, google ‘Smoot-Hawley’.”

Harris has been more effective at making the case against the character of her opponent. There is a definite Trump fatigue among a large swathe of voters who would agree with Harris that “we are not going back”, especially when the Trump campaign flaunts the backwardness and nativism that were on display at his Madison Square Garden rally.

The US’s political language is part of the problem. Calling Trump a “fascist” and his supporters “garbage” is bound to harden attitudes. How do we expect tens of millions of voters who will make their mark for Trump — many of whom, by the way, voted for Barack Obama at least once — and those who are famously undecided to react to such accusations? This is a repeat of Hillary Clinton’s disastrous approach to “deplorables”. 

And something else. If fascism was knocking on the US’s door, Harris would not be standing at the precipice of becoming the first black woman president. That she has a one-in-two shot at the White House does not suggest that a Fourth Reich is about to take shape on the banks of the Potomac.

If Harris succeeds, she will need to lower the rhetoric that has polarised the US for more than a decade and return to the politics of common sense. Trump will do the opposite. But this, too, will be nothing new. The US survived Trump before, and so did the world.

To the degree that Trump really does want to realise his authoritarian self, he will once again discover that dictatorship is much harder to achieve in a country of 335-million people with a 248-year of history of trying to “form a more perfect union”. 

History is short, but memories are shorter.

• Morudu Rosenburg is a writer and director of Clarity Global based in Washington DC.