Yes, it’s all about him, and it was always going to be all about him. But will he win?
With one week to go, Trump and Harris are both campaigning furiously, and the polls still show the election standing on a knife-edge. Frustratingly, we just don’t know how accurate they are. Early voting has begun in many states, and in some swing states, Republicans have been voting in much larger numbers than Democrats—but does this matter? In 2016 and 2020 the polls underestimated the Trump vote—will it happen again? Are there really any undecided voters still left? Will it hurt Trump that a comedian at his massive Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” and mocked Jews as money-grubbing, or that another speaker called Kamala Harris “the anti-Christ”? We simply don’t have answers to these questions.
Unfortunately, polling in the United States was much more reliable half a century ago than it is today. As the historian David Stebenne has noted, in the 1970’s most households had landlines and listed their names in phone directories. There was no such thing as call screening, and a high percentage of the public actually responded to pollsters’ questions. Today, most Americans only have cell phones, for which there exist no reliable directories. The explosion of telemarketing and scams, combined with the ability to screen calls, means that fewer and fewer people will even answer a call from an unknown number, let alone spend time responding to the person at the other end. Pollsters have tried to develop more sophisticated algorithms to account for these uncertainty factors, but with mixed results. If the current polls really are off by more than two or three points, then one candidate or the other will most likely win most or all seven swing states.
The betting markets, and many perennially pessimistic Democrats, think that candidate will be Trump. Indeed, Kamala Harris’s inability to pull strongly ahead of Trump, despite his crimes, scandals, character flaws and possible incipient dementia, has led some groups that have only supported her reluctantly to compose vicious anticipatory post-mortems for her campaign (“pre-mortems,” perhaps?). Progressives are excoriating her for seeking Republican support, for not offering an ambitious “left populist” program and for supporting Israel in the midst of the Gaza War. Centrists are excoriating her for not breaking strongly enough with liberal orthodoxy, and for projecting weakness. Both groups deride her as “vacuous.”
That label is unfair. In her politics, Harris is a conventional Democrat with centrist inclinations that stem from her background as a “tough on crime” prosecutor. As President, she would largely continue Joe Biden’s policies. But to many voters her profile still looks blurry. She had to tack left to win the Democratic nomination for the California Senate, and again to compete for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination (when she flamed out early). These campaigns left her with a record on cultural issues—for instance strongly supporting transgender care—that Trump has slammed very hard. She also has the problem that bedevils every sitting vice-president seeking a promotion: how to present herself as independent without looking disloyal. Finally, in keeping with her long career as a prosecutor, she is much better at attacking opponents than at presenting her own ideas. When pushed, in interviews and the recent CNN “town hall” to expound on her vision for the United States, she has fallen back on platitudes and sometimes collapsed into embarrassing word salad. It is not surprising that in the last weeks, her campaign has returned almost entirely to one basic talking point: the horror of Donald Trump.
But this turn was inevitable. Hard as it may be to admit for those who despise him, Trump is one of the three most transformative American political figures of the last hundred years, along with Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. He completed the transformation of the Republican party into an isolationist, xenophobic, populist party of the resentful white working and middle classes (and a handful of business oligarchs). He has done more than any politician in American history to reshape a political party into a personal vehicle, with a fanatically loyal base. And he has done more than any politician in American history to undermine and threaten the country’s democratic norms and the rule of law. Like it or not, this chapter in American history may well go down as the Age of Trump.
This week, by far the most chilling example of the man’s malign influence came when the oligarch Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, ordered the newspaper not to endorse any candidate for president, after its editorial board had already prepared an endorsement of Harris. Amazon’s profits depend in large part on government contracts, especially in web storage services, and Bezos obviously feared that Trump, if elected, would make good on threats financially to punish companies that had opposed him. The billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, pulled a similar stunt with his newspaper, also to curry favor with Trump (whose administration he tried to join in 2017). Viktor Orbán should be proud. His admirer Trump has clearly learned from the master.
Given this Trumpification of American politics, it is hard to see how the campaign, ultimately, could ever have been about anything other than him. For all the calls on Harris by frustrated supporters to present a bold, distinct program, there is little that she could have realistically proposed to distract attention from Trump without losing critical support in her own ranks. The white working class and middle class remain very suspicious of large-scale government initiative, which decades of Republican propaganda have effectively, if mendaciously, framed as a transfer of wealth from them to undeserving minorities. As for voters who believe that Harris’s moderate liberalism, her past pandering to progressive militants, and her supposed “weakness” make her as great a danger as Trump, it is hard to know what she could have done in her short campaign to reassure them. If they don’t see Trump as more of an existential threat now, nothing Harris can say will persuade them to do so.
So again, like it or not, by far the most important issue in the presidential election is Donald Trump, and the threat he poses to American democracy. The election will hinge, more than on any other factor, on how American voters judge him. Harris’s attacks, including her embrace of the label “fascist” for Trump, will probably not convince many undecided voters to support her. They might, still, however, increase her own turnout enough to bring her victory next Tuesday. We’ll see.