It’s less than four months until the US presidential election. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are basically neck-and-neck. Polling aggregation website 538 says its model “gives Donald Trump a durable lead in the polls, but based on additional indicators, still thinks the presidential election could go either way”.
“Right now, President Joe Biden is favoured to win in 535 out of 1,000 of our model’s simulations of how the election could go, while former president Donald Trump wins in 462 of our simulations,” the website reported on Wednesday.
Narrative-wise, the last few weeks have definitely been Trump’s. Biden’s disastrous debate performance has made Democrats seriously uneasy about the prospect of keeping him on as the party’s candidate. An Associated Press poll presented overnight found about two-thirds of party members would like Biden to withdraw from the race. Among Democrats under the age of 45, three-quarters want a different candidate.
Meanwhile, the failed assassination attempt on Trump appears to have boosted his standing with swing state voters: Florida Atlantic University found “some evidence” of voters in Virginia warming to Trump following the shooting.
And then there’s the Republican National Convention, which ends today, where Trump appeared with a bandaged ear to accept the party’s nomination and announce his pick of running mate, JD Vance.
Vance, who marketed himself as a form of Trump voter-whisperer with his 2016 publishing debut Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, and was a loud critic of Trump, has since become one of the ex-president’s staunchest defenders.
“He made clear on that book tour that he didn’t like Trump, and how he had really, really negative views of Trump, but then he changed [his mind] soon after Trump came into office,” United States Studies Centre research director Jared Mondschein told Crikey.
“He doesn’t deny he said those things about Trump, he simply says that Trump ended up being the best president of all time, and he warmly embraces Trump now. He’s very much embraced the Trump ideology.”
During these wild few weeks in US politics, Australia’s US ambassador Kevin Rudd has been there every step of the way. He tweeted of his shock at the attack on Trump and has been present at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, where he’s mingled with members of Trump’s inner circle and hopeful future administration officials.
Speaking with Joe Hockey, another former ambassador to the US, on the sidelines of the convention, Rudd said he’d told “many ambassadors in Washington it’s really important to chill, just chill”.
“If instead you think, my God, this is beyond the pale, and reach for your smelling salts, well, you know something that’s going to cruel you from day one … I say a lot, to the euros along these lines, which is chill, Bill,” he said during a Sky News Australia broadcast.
“I think Rudd has, by all accounts, done an admirable job engaging with all sides of US politics,” Mondschein said.
Trump’s diss of Rudd during an interview with Nigel Farage in March is likely of little consequence, Mondschein added: “If you pay close attention to that interview, it’s not immediately clear to me that he knows who Kevin Rudd is.”
Nor is Vance likely to stand in the way of one of Australia’s most important bits of business with the US: the AUKUS submarine deal.
“They’ve already sort of ‘Trumpified’ this agreement — it’s made in a way that’s advantageous to the US, regardless of who the president is,” Mondschein said.
Vance, whom Rudd texted following the shooting attack on Trump, has previously said he’s a “fan of AUKUS”.
“If you look at what’s important to the Trump administration, it’s military spending by allies. Australia is increasing that, and selling US goods to the world. In many ways I think it makes a lot of sense for any US president to be in favour of it,” Mondschein said.
