The Herald’s deputy political editor Thomas Coughlan is in the US for the presidential election. Read his previous campaign diary entries here.
After years of campaigning (Donald Trump announced his candidacy at the end of 2022, his primary challenger Nicky Haley announced hers in February 2023), it’s finally election day in America.
Commentators here believe this will be a high turnout election, meaning many tens of millions of Americans will cast a vote today, joining the 82 million who have already done so.
I’m at Howard University in Washington DC, Vice-President Kamala Harris’ alma mater where she should appear sometime tonight or early morning local time (I say should because Hillary Clinton cancelled her election night appearance in 2016, opting to appear the next day).
It’s a balmy 24C, which sounds wonderful if you don’t have to lug the contents of a small television studio through security tighter than any airport in the world.
Getting accreditation for Harris’ election night bash has been difficult. There aren’t too many people here, but there’s so little space that those who are here are jostling in Anchorman-fashion, for a good view of the stage, which is still being assembled.
I’ve found myself a park bench rather tastefully dusted in autumn leaves. About 200 feet away is Harris’ lectern surrounded by bulletproof glass that looks an inch or two thick. For obvious reasons, I’m reluctant to venture closer and measure it.
The only food here is from vending machines (apparently the student cafe will open shortly). My jeans are developing a hard shell of the salty flavouring the Americans put on their crisps that’s so addictive you wonder how it’s still legal. I’m sandwiched between some Australians and two French people who are growing desperate for a cigarette, but know they’re not allowed to smoke. Given we’ve got about 10 hours or more to go, I’m slightly worried they won’t make it.
No one knows what’s going on.
The New York Times ran a piece this morning detailing several scenarios in which a Harris win should have been obvious from the start followed by several more scenarios in which a Trump win should have been obvious from the start.
Oddly enough, the bigger question people are asking is whether this will all end peacefully. The Times also ran a story in which New York-based businesses asked what they could do to assist a peaceful transfer of power following the election. You have to pinch yourself to remember this is a real question in America. Perhaps that should have been obvious too, given what happened after the last presidential election.
I’m lucky to be here at all. This morning, in Philadelphia, I hopped on the wrong train to Washington DC and have had to pay a NZ$200 penalty to stay on it.
No mind, it’s the first stuff-up of this trip which has included trains, planes, and Greyhound buses. The last time I caught a train I got lucky and found myself seated next to one of John Legend’s back-up singers who for nine hours explained to me the scandalous world of back-up artists (they can get paid US$10,000-US$50,000 a gig), but cheeky promoters deduct massive expenses from these fees‚ leaving back-up singers with nothing; overseas promotors often ply the performers with booze, leaving them burnt-out, indebted alcoholics, John Legend, Beyoncé, and Madonna are great to work for – most of Beyoncé’s back-up team, “The Mamas” have been with her forever – a certain other famous performer is not, but he made me swear never to tell). It was a welcome break from politics.
A guide to tonight: this election is unusual in that as well as the usual big election question (who won?) there’s another, potentially even bigger question (who will declare they’ve won?).
If the polls are wrong, and let’s face it, given the past few elections that’s a distinct possibility, there’s a good chance they’re all wrong in the same direction. That could mean a pretty clear victory in Electoral College terms and perhaps even the popular vote too, for either Harris or former President Donald Trump. Of course, the biggest challenge to this scenario is the fact that votes in crucial Pennsylvania are likely to take forever to count, given officials are only allowed to begin counting mail-in ballots today.
FiveThirtyEight, a site for polling obsessives, informs me that since 1998, election polls in presidential House, Senate and gubernatorial races have diverged from the final vote tally by an average of 6 points, but in the 2022 midterm elections, that average was just 4.8 points, which, they say, made it the most accurate poll cycle in a quarter of a century.
If the polls were off by a similar amount this election, as they very well may be, then either candidate would score a decisive victory. An analysis by the New York Times reckons that a 4.8 point polling error for Harris could see her win 319 electoral college votes, compared to just 219 for Trump, while an error for Trump would see him win 312 votes.
Polling guru Nate Silver’s famous model even reckons there’s a small (to be serious, very small) probability of a tie in the electoral college, which would see a likely Republican-controlled House of Representatives choose the president (likely Trump).
Regardless, if we see anything approaching a convincing swing, we might see the campaigns move early to latch onto it and declare something of a victory in order to gazzump the other side’s chances of contesting the result – and of course, the Trump side is far more likely to contest anything approximating an unclear result than Harris (who has promised she will certify the election result in her vice-presidential role as Speaker of the Senate, even if the result goes against her – that shouldn’t be a big deal, but this year it is).
If the result is unclear, as many people expect it to be, expect a fairly long tedious night, where we see little, if anything of the main protagonists.
If you’re interested, the “obvious” reasons for a Harris or Trump victory are these: both candidates have an issue on which they are strong and their opponent is weak: abortion for Harris and immigration for Trump. These could theoretically cancel each other out (I’m not sure whether there’s much evidence for this, but that rather spoils the fun).
The “obvious” thing about a Harris victory is Trump and the post-Trump Republicans’ history of losing out underperforming in elections, suggests there is a strong never-Trump coalition that could block his path to the White House.
Ariel, a Harris supporter I spoke to at Harris’ rally last night, said she’d been motivated to volunteer for the Harris campaign by some of Trump’s more extreme tendencies.
“When someone shows you their true colours, believe them … we saw four years of that,” she said.
There’s quite a bit of polling to suggest that voters really aren’t all that fussed on Trump – including metrics that should be familiar to New Zealanders. Americans feel incredibly negatively about the economy and just 28% in the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll said the country was on the “right track”. If you were to port those figures to a New Zealand election, they’d suggest a change of government (they certainly did last year).
Those numbers go some way to explain why Harris isn’t beating Trump more convincingly. He’s an unpopular challenger, but she’s an unpopular incumbent. A lot of Americans don’t like him, many of his supporters that I’ve spoken to don’t much like him much either, but they’re also pretty unhappy with the state of the country right now, and many think it was better four years ago.
The “obvious” Trump path to victory is that those polling numbers suggest an insurmountable dissatisfaction with the status quo and a desire to hold one’s nose and vote for the man under whom many believed the country to be better off. Trump knows this. One of the first things he said at the rally I attended was this:
“I’d like to begin by asking a very, very simple question: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?
“I don’t think so. So I have come today with a message of hope for all Americans: with your vote on Tuesday I will end inflation. I will stop the massive invasion of criminals into our country”.
Last week, I met a voter, Lawrence, who summed up this view quite perfectly.
“When Trump was president, I made more money than I ever did – when Biden came, I’m f**ked up.
“We’ve got a Vice-President, she was Vice-President for three years and nothing got done, then we’ve got Trump who when he was president stuff got done, but what he says and how he goes about things turns a lot of people the wrong way.”
Interestingly, these feelings about Trump were not enough to make Lawrence actually vote for him. He told me he’d be voting independent.
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018. His travel to the United States was assisted by the US Embassy in Wellington.
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