With just two months to go until the US elections, Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris has failed to seal the deal. Everyone knows it, and no-one on the progressive side of things wants to admit it. Late this morning, Australian time, she will go up against Donald Trump in their first and possibly only presidential debate. Will this change the momentum, or create some?
It is going to need to. Harris is a distinguished politician, a compelling speaker at times, a woman of colour with a hero story that connects to many millions. Her opponent is a shambling incoherent convicted felon who has already lost one election.
They are running neck and neck, and the shambling felon is winning in the electoral college.
The failure of Harris and the Democrats to crush Trump is just beginning to dawn on people. It is all the more bewildering to them, since there was such a rush of enthusiasm and energy when Joe Biden was finally detached from the nomination. But that was merely great relief, masquerading as a movement.
With Biden in place, the polls made clear that the Democrats would be eviscerated in a Trumpslide. There would be collateral damage in the House and Senate; all would be lost. Harris’ elevation immediately corrected those polls, bringing half a dozen states back into play.
Then, nothing. Everything locked. The polls are as they were as soon as the changeover occurred. The Democrats had a mixed strategy with Biden: a bit of incumbency, a bit of record, and a bit of being the old white guy who wasn’t mad.
Then it was clear Biden was going lollygaga, and Trump looked like the least worse option to a bunch of people. These people have now gone back to Harris, or have simply decided they won’t have to vote now. But their shift has not been sufficient to give Harris a solid majority.
She will have also lost a tranche of voters Biden knew he was holding on to. This was one reason, aside from drive, desperation, that he wanted to stay in the race: to keep those voters, Democrats and independents, who want an old white guy in power, especially one with a labour heritage.
It appears Harris hasn’t gained that final tranche of “independent independents”, those genuinely swinging voters who are persuaded by programs, etc. Since Harris doesn’t really have one, but has no real incumbency factor either, she is caught between two sides.
This is showing up in the polls. The trouble for the Democrats is these days the election runs on a knife edge. Biden won the 2020 election with 306 electoral college votes to Trump’s 232. But that’s a zero-sum game, which is only 36 points above the 270 needed to win.
Facing a candidate like Trump, the Democrats getting to 270 is made difficult because of the swing of two big states to Republicans in the past decade or so. Ohio and Florida have 47 electoral college points between them. They used to be up for grabs; now Trump is running 5-8 points ahead in both.
Ohio has been hit hardest of any state by deindustrialisation. It’s a state of mid-size and small cities, many of which were dependent on one large subsector — Buttfuzz, OH, with two factories making steering wheel covers for every US-made car — which are now gone beyond gone, hollowing out the entire community. The anger, despair and disconnection from anything like politics or power is palpable.
Florida is a southern state that looked like a northern one for a while. Its south was its north, with a liberal culture shaped by northern retirees, Brooklyn on Key West, freebooters on the forgotten coast, and Jimmy Buffett fans who think Margaritaville is a member of the UN. That coalition is now yielding to deep South Republicans in the state’s north, Christians and a vast Cuban-American community.
In 2020, the Democrats took Arizona and Georgia for the first time. That was 27 of their 36-vote margin. These are now running at evens, more or less. The election will be around Trump trying to win those back, and get one of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and maybe Nevada. Or Pennsylvania and Georgia. Or Pennsylvania and Michigan for a draw. And a couple of other combos.
The trouble is, there are almost no swing states left. Iowa, Colorado, and New Hampshire were up for grabs regularly, recently. One can’t see any of those being battlegrounds. Nor one-offs like North Carolina and Indiana. Ohio and Florida, gone.
The republic was founded on the electoral college system to give small and distant states equal sway. Instead, it has, in the presidential race, de facto disenfranchised tens of millions of voters. Who cares if you’re a California Republican or an Oklahoma Democrat?
This new division is based on what is the rock-solid division in Western societies now, between the college-educated — and those who live in cities dominated by them, and their economic production — and those outside of it. In interests, ideologies and attitudes, it now supersedes old industrial class division and struggle and is a new form of class struggle.
Were class, in the old sense, to be the dominant factor, Harris would be killing it, cruising to 400 electoral college votes. But the white and Black working- and middle-class want to stop the flood of immigration, and the Democrats do not. These voters want a trade war with China and a revival of a national economic plan. They are not particularly concerned if that involves lower business taxes, smaller government — which barely serves them in any case — and privatisation boondoggles.
Should Kamala Harris lose in November, with an overall majority but an electoral college loss, maybe, maybe, finally, progressives, the political class, the media class, the whatever, will get it through their thick skulls that the old progressive-working/middle-class alliance is dead, gone, over. These classes have to be listened to, a conscious alliance has to be made, progressive interests have to be ceded to the groups that still have the numbers.
But it will be an expensive lesson to learn, for America and the world.
Okay! Let’s see if Harris can turn this round in two hours!
