Read part one here.
Kamala Harris has to win three times
Could the tragedy of another Donald Trump victory actually happen? Despite the apocalyptic warnings of those who should know, the American people are divided right down the middle. According to the bookmakers, at the time of the democratic national convention Kamala Harris was favourite to win, though never by a massive margin. At the moment the odds are six to five against her. In the seven all important swing states neither candidate is more than 2% ahead in the opinion polls, so within the 4% margin of error.
Bear in mind that for a satisfactory outcome Harris has to win three times. Firstly, that she will win the popular vote, as Al Gore and Hillary Clinton did, is highly likely but unfortunately will not help her. But then she has to win the electoral college, which means taking a majority of electoral college votes in the swing states. Thirdly, even if she does that, her presidency is going to have to survive the inevitable insurrection which Trump has already said is coming. He tells us that he will accept the outcome “if the election is fair” but we know from his previous form that he will declare it unfair unless it comes out in his favour.
A few other things give Trump reasons to hope. One is the phenomenon of shy Republicans, those people who feel ashamed to tell opinion pollsters how they plan to vote, but come out for Trump on the day. So the opinion polls underestimate the Trump margin. Attempts to correct for this often merely muddy the waters.
Another is that there may be many voters who hear the catastrophic predictions of Trump-inspired civil war following on from a Harris victory, and seriously believe the only way to prevent it is to stop her from winning. That, alas, is twisted logic, but that is nothing new to portions of the electorate. The sad reality is that the US is a divided nation, there is pain ahead whatever the outcome, and it is folly to forego the last chance to prevent this bully from having his way.
Powerbrokers at home
Then there is the obvious influence of social media, all the more so now that Twitter/X has become a mouthpiece for Elon Musk. Musk himself has let it be known that he fears what will happen to him under a Harris presidency: he told Tucker Carlson, only half-jokingly, “if he loses I’m fucked”. And if he wins, Musk’s power will be massively enhanced – he has been promised that the country will be his oyster. His unquestioning loyalty to Trump is driven by self-interest not evidence. He is currently unashamedly bribing voters in the swing states under the pretext of a raffle – this is being challenged but by the time the courts can find against him the harm will have been done. It is striking that the Trump campaign accuses the Democrats of electoral fraud, but assumes that its own fraud will be allowed to pass unpunished. And given the composition and previous behaviour of the Supreme Court, that assumption may be justified.
Musk is far from being the only multi-billionaire helping Trump. To name just one, Jeff Bezos, again looking to protect his empire, has blocked his newspaper, the Washington Post, from coming out in favour of Harris, to the consternation of practically all its journalists. It’s hardly surprising that the editor-at-large has resigned and 200,000 subscriptions have been cancelled. Will Bezos’ Amazon suffer equal harm?
Powerbrokers abroad
Then there is Trump’s biggest ally of all, Vladimir Putin. We now know through the Mueller report that Trump’s 2016 victory owed a great deal to Russian electoral interference, and in this context his often stated admiration for Putin, not to mention the disappearance of classified documents and their partial reappearance at Trump’s Florida residence Mar-a-Lago, make total sense. There is clear evidence that Putin interfered in the elections in Moldova and Georgia (the Tblisi one – but maybe also the Atlanta one); given how much he has to gain from a Trump victory it will be astonishing if he is not doing so as we speak in the USA.
Autocrat though he may become, Trump will be Putin’s poodle. The prospect for Ukraine in the short term, and for NATO countries in the medium term, is too terrible to contemplate. Worse still, Trump is not a young – or indeed healthy – man, and if and when he hands over power, JD Vance will advance that particular harmful cause with even greater zeal, and this time with true conviction.
So the world’s three richest men have found common cause, and money talks.
It does not end there. Other powerbrokers abroad include Benjamin Netanyahu, who in the event of a Trump victory, would be spared even the half-hearted protests over his appalling atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon which have come from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. In Trump he would have a devoted supporter, and it is one of the ironies of this sad tale that it could well be the Arab American and Muslim voters of Michigan, disenchanted with Biden and Harris’s failure to restrain Netanyahu, who help achieve that result.
Furthermore, the whole Middle East crisis is playing into Trump’s hands – Netanyahu knows that by turning up the heat at the crucial moment he can make the Biden administration look helpless and incompetent. Even American voters who remain unmoved by foreign affairs will blame Biden and Harris if escalating tensions lead to an oil price rise just before the election. And we know that voters vote with their pockets – how else can you account for Trump being credited with being ‘good for the economy’?
Election interference
Election interference can take many forms: illicit social media influence campaigns, propaganda, bribery, intimidation, sabotage of polling stations to name but a few. We know that the Trump camp has organised armies of ‘election observers’ who may well do a great deal more than just observe. It will be astonishing if there is not a last-minute surprise. This could take the form of some rumour, put out too late to be effectively refuted by the Harris camp. Paradoxically Harris is much more vulnerable to scandal. She is dependent on a squeaky-clean image. In contrast Trump is almost invulnerable. His many flaws are almost priced in by those who plan to vote for him. As Val Jones said “he gets to be lawless, she has to be flawless,”. One of his great electoral advantages is that he is, figuratively speaking, soiled goods. The fact that he is so in a literal sense, according to some reports, seems to make surprisingly little impact on his base.
In fact, for Trump all news is good news. The best thing that could happen, from our point of view, would be for the media focus to shift away from him, for Harris and her allies to be allowed to focus more on her policies and her undoubted strengths as a candidate. And yet, that is not how today’s 24-hour news cycle works. And when a candidate stands so far apart from all his predecessors, it is perhaps inevitable. Confession – I too have fallen into the trap of talking more about Trump than Harris.
What, no activists?
Given the awfulness of the prospect facing us all, and the helplessness of the vast majority of the world’s citizens, it could hardly be surprising that non-Americans want to do their best, and approximately 200 volunteers chose to travel over to help the Harris campaign, nor that those individuals should happen to be members of the British Labour Party. What is surprising is that there are people who see a story there. People who pretend to be unaware that this has been going on for years and that much of the overseas support is for the Republican Party and always has been. People who seem unaware of the campaigning activities of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson or Liz Truss on behalf of Trump. And that is without even mentioning the clandestine financial and logistic support which is coming from Russia.
Trump is taking the matter to the Federal Elections Commission. This says a lot about his insight into his own double standards. What is also telling is the Republican Party’s description of Keir Starmer’s Labour Party as far-left and a bad influence on the US Democrats. This within weeks of Starmer sitting down to dinner with Trump and, given that he did not do the same with Harris, giving the impression of an endorsement. Many of us would say, just one of the numerous errors of judgement he has made since coming to Office. He, of course, might see it differently and prioritise starting off on the right foot with a very thin-skinned man who might very soon be in a position to give him serious grief if he plays his cards badly.
Let us hope and pray that that remains entirely hypothetical.
This article is adapted from one on the website of Oxford for Europe, of which the author is currently chair, www.oxfordforeurope.org.
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