Over the past week, very little has changed in the presidential race. The polls in the seven key battleground states remain agonizingly close, and the election’s political dynamics seem, for the moment, frozen in place. Harris has been doing more interviews, but still finds it difficult to generate news around herself. As the sitting vice-president, she is also still struggling to define herself as a candidate of “change.” As a consequence, she has had to fall back on positioning herself principally as the anti-Trump, as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, and Joe Biden in 2020. But will that be enough?
The two most important “wild card” factors in the race also remain what they have been for some time now. On the one hand, the Democrats have a more effective organization on the ground for getting out the vote in the key states. On the other hand, an unknown number of voters intending to vote for Trump will not admit it to pollsters. This may include a significant number of Hispanic voters, who have not fully rallied to Harris despite Trump’s demonization of Hispanic migrants. Yet another factor is that Arab and Muslim voters might swing the swing state of Michigan to Trump out of anger at the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel, either sitting the election out, or voting for far left candidate Jill Stein (on the other hand, strong criticisms of Israel would probably alienate many other voters—this is an issue on which Harris cannot win).
But it is not just the political dynamics of the race that seem frozen. So do the social and cultural dynamics behind them. A fascinating new Pennsylvania survey gives additional insights into these, and helps explain Trump’s surprising success among Hispanics (and perhaps Blacks as well). It suggests that social class has come to matter more and more in shaping American political divisions. Among Pennsylvania manual workers, Trump holds a twenty-point lead (56% to 36%). He is even ahead in the traditionally Democratic category of unionized workers. Workers who claim to have been unfairly fired support Trump massively (53% to 37%), as do, even more strongly, those who see their employment as “very or somewhat insecure” (58% to 33%). Meanwhile, Harris holds a solid lead among clerical and service workers, and a large one among Pennsylvanians with a four-year college degree (51% to 40%). These numbers reflect the split between manufacturing and knowledge/service sectors of the economy, and the eclipse of the former, described half a century ago by the sociologist Daniel Bell (my father) in his The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. An added dimension, unforeseen by him, is the rise of the “gig economy,” which has deprived many service workers of steady employment and benefits. Overall, despite the generally buoyant state of the American economy, many Pennsylvania voters still clearly feel left behind or economically threatened. They lean towards the candidate who speaks to their anxieties, identifies people to blame for their problems, and promises decisive action against those people.
To be sure, these working-class voters are not Donald Trump’s only constituency. As reporting has continuously stressed, he also does very well among relatively well-off white, suburban, exurban, and rural Americans who did not attend selective universities (wealthy automobile dealers, for instance). Here, the factors at work are more purely cultural: a resentment of Democratic “elites” as unpatriotic, anti-religious, out-of-touch with “normal American values” on issues such as gender transitions and affirmative action. These voters feel disrespected, despite their hard work and success, as well as over-taxed and over-regulated. They are receptive to the candidate who (as they see it) built a massive fortune through hard work but remained “one of us,” and hates the same people they do.
An unfortunate factor, which few commentators acknowledge, is that relatively low educational achievement has left many Trump voters particularly vulnerable to propaganda and conspiracy theories. American democracy, like all modern democracies, is founded on the grand idea that the “common sense” of ordinary people matters more than academic expertise in equipping them to function as citizens (see the historian Sophia Rosenfeld’s terrific book on this subject). The conservative William F. Buckley once quipped that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard faculty, and it was hard to disagree with him. But at the time, those two thousand people got their information principally from mainstream newspapers. Their contemporary equivalents get it in large part from social media and wildly partisan conservative broadcast media, and the atrociously low levels of basic civic education provided by most American high schools leave them dangerously unprepared to distinguish fact from fiction. Just in the past two weeks, the absurd idea that Democrats had manipulated Hurricanes Helene and Milton to target Republican areas received millions of views on social media, as did mendacious claims that the federal government was failing in its disaster response because it had given all the money to migrants. On Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter), conspiracy theorizing runs wild with very few controls.
Put all these factors together and you get… Trump. His rallies are getting longer and longer, his old man’s ramblings more disconnected and incomprehensible, his claims more offensive, his lies, if possible, even more numerous and extravagant. Just in the past week he has called Kamala Harris “retarded,” insisted again and again that migrants disposed to crime by their “genes” and their “blood” are coming freely across the border to rape and murder innocent Americans, claimed that schools are taking children away from their parents to perform gender reassignment surgery on them, has promised to cut energy prices by half, and called for television networks that interview Harris too favorably to have their licenses taken away. And this from the convicted felon and insurrectionist whose trail of crimes and misdeeds dwarfs anything previously seen in American political history.
But in our current political environment, these genuine outrages simply do not matter much. Many of Trump’s core supporters, worrisomely, believe everything he says. Others simply do not take his statements very seriously, seeing him as a showman who points to real problems in an entertainingly exaggerated way. He is the pure essence of ressentiment, and millions of Americans who feel this emotion cheer him on for daring to break the rules of elite politics and to shock the elites whom they blame for their troubles and anxieties. The more that people like me (an Ivy League humanities professor) recoil in horror from him, the more they like him.
And against Trump, there is Kamala Harris. She is a talented and charismatic politician, offering a predictable, sensible, moderate liberal program, following from the record of the Biden administration. But she does not have the blazing appeal of a Kennedy or an Obama, and her need to defend the status quo makes it hard to reach voters who feel the status quo betrays them, or to excite younger Americans. At this point, there is little more she can do to affect the outcome except to bombard swing state voters with television ads, and to keep working on her ground game to get out the vote. Will it be enough?