Former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, speaks during a town hall with Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Photo / Michelle Gustafson, The New York Times
Former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, speaks during a town hall with Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Photo / Michelle Gustafson, The New York Times
Former New Zealand Prime Minister Sir John Key has declared for Trump because he will be “better for the economy”.
Matthew Hooton has over 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties and the Mayor of Auckland.
OPINION
Just occasionally, be grateful for proportional representation.
Despite popular belief, nationwide pollsbefore recent US elections have been fairly accurate. Polls the week before the 2016 election had Hillary Clinton ahead by 3%. She won the popular vote by 2%. Four years later, the final polls picked Joe Biden by around 8%. While reportedly the least accurate polls for 40 years, they still weren’t too far out. Biden won by 5%.
That’s quite an advertisement since most polls, including the most accurate, surveyed only around 1000 people in an electorate with 150 million voters.
It was the Electoral College, where candidates secure all a state’s electors even if they win its popular vote by a single vote, that handed Donald Trump the presidency in 2016 and why 2020 felt so close.
Trump has never won the US popular vote. He’s picked to narrowly lose a third time on Wednesday, New Zealand time.
One rule of thumb is Kamala Harris must win the popular vote by 4% to secure the electoral college. Current polls suggest she’s ahead by just 1%. In the seven states that will decide it, all polls are too close to call. Assuming fake and genuine challenges, a clear result seems unlikely on Wednesday.
Arguably, voters being so evenly split can be blamed on the high accuracy of candidates’ polling and other market research, and their ability to target messages to undecided voters. After all, if two products have unlimited market research budgets and access to their industry’s best messaging strategists, you’d expect them to split the market about evenly.
As elections become ever more market research-led, questions arise about whether liberal democracy can maintain public credibility. In the meantime, the consequences for New Zealand aren’t remotely evenly balanced.
Forget free-trade agreements or anything other than managing deteriorating access to what remains the world’s biggest economy.
Even with the US notorious for agricultural protectionism, Harris would be the most left-wing trade-policy President since World War II – except Trump himself, whose approach is almost indistinguishable from ultra-left anarchists rioting outside World Trade Organisation (WTO) conferences.
On his first day as President, Trump scuttled the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership, the US’s major bipartisan trade policy objective this century. He then spent four years undermining the WTO.
Biden hasn’t improved matters and nor would Harris. Trump now promises a full-scale trade war, not targeting China alone but against the whole world.
The rules-based system established after World War II, which has helped keep the peace, would finally collapse, catastrophically for New Zealand’s economic interests.
Nor would Trump be good for the US domestic economy, despite Sir John Key’s extraordinary endorsement. Trump’s first-term tax cuts, which stimulated growth but increased US federal debt by US$8 trillion from US$20t to US$28t, can’t be repeated. Debt is now US$36t, with a ceiling to be re-imposed next year.
US Vice-President and Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks to members of the press at a local hotel in Houston, Texas. Photo / AFP
Key endorsing Trump is probably best explained by his own casual attitude to borrowing, running eight cash deficits in eight years as Prime Minister, taking our net debt from $9 billion to $60b.
Even if Key is right that New Zealander Chris Liddell, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, prudently cut US red tape, such relatively sane voices – including Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner – are no longer around. Trump’s circle now includes only his most extreme true believers.
Nor, contrary to Key’s endorsement, can it be good economic policy for a previously respected democracy’s President to deny the legitimacy of the electoral process, encourage the violent overthrow of their own electoral defeat, undermine the rule of law, promise extra-legal reprisals against political opponents, threaten the survival of its very constitutional arrangements and be a recently convicted criminal awaiting incarceratory sentencing.
In 2016, even with some reputable figures appointed to his Administration and the New Zealand Embassy in Washington doing well to establish relations with his circle, it soon became obvious Trump was entirely transactional and – having little to offer him – our best strategy was a low profile, maintaining relations at the next tier of the US defence, intelligence, foreign policy and economic establishments.
That may not be possible with Trump unchecked. Led by Foreign Minister Winston Peters, both the Ardern-Hipkins and Luxon Governments have strongly tilted foreign policy back towards Australia, the US, Nato, Japan and South Korea.
Motivated by the quasi-alliance linking China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, Dame Jacinda Ardern became the first New Zealand Prime Minister to attend Nato’s annual leaders’ summit, followed by Chris Hipkins and Christopher Luxon as the second and third.
Luxon backs Peters, telling The Economist foreign policy is being reset even beyond where Hipkins left it, diversifying diplomatically and economically away from China and aligning even more closely with Australia, the US, the UK and Canada.
In contrast, Trump is unsympathetic to Nato, threatening to remove the US’s security guarantee from Europe. Without Kushner, who negotiated the Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, a second Trump presidency would be less nuanced on the Middle East. Either because of kompromat or genuine affection, Trump leans towards Russia’s Vladimir Putin and famously became friends with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. He is critical of Taiwan.
Trump’s approach would further destabilise not just Europe and the Middle East but also East Asia, from the Sea of Japan to the South China Sea.
Trump’s supporters argue his comments about Nato and other allies are a ruse to force them – successfully in many cases – to increase defence spending to at least 2% of GDP. Act’s David Seymour, soon to be Deputy Prime Minister, promised as much pre-election.
It doesn’t matter which theory is correct. Either to maintain our implicit security guarantee from the US or to get on without it, New Zealand will need to increase annual defence spending from about $5b to $10b.
If Luxon’s Economist comments were meant seriously – which Canberra, Washington and London will assume – Finance Minister Nicola Willis’ next Budget will need to point to a $10b defence spend by 2028/29.
Alternatively, we could accept we can’t afford it, and opt for non-alignment. If worried only about physical invasion, that could make sense. But our 1500km moat doesn’t protect us from economic, cyber, drone, missile or other air attacks, or from supply-line disruption.
A Harris win means the status quo, and Luxon, Peters, Seymour, Willis and Defence and Intelligence Minister Judith Collins can relax, at least on national security.
Otherwise, that senior team will need to spend the summer before the inauguration urgently deciding whether and how to find the extra $5b annual defence spending that, one way or the other, a Trump win would demand.
