Everyone wants this campaign, and the presidential race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, to be over. Photo / AFP
CAMPAIGN DIARY
I’ve had several dozen conversations with voters in America this week. As you’d expect from a country this large and polarised, Americans have no shortage of opinions on the state of their country.
If there’s one opinion that’s almost (almost) universally held, it is a desire for this brutal, fractious election to be over. And if there’s a second opinion that’s just as common, it’s that many Americans know this strife won’t end on November 5, polling day.
Should Donald Trump lose, Democrats and Republicans alike know he is unlikely to take it lying down and will rely on his surrogates to litigate the electoral process in as many states as possible (many of the Republicans I’ve spoken to, who admittedly were skewed towards the more extreme end, being crowded together outside a Trump rally, think this kind of litigation is a good thing).
Should Trump win, a different form of chaos will ensue. Most of the Trump voters I have encountered have acknowledged his chaotic, somewhat shambolic managerial style, but believe it’s worth it for the results Trump achieved in office (since you asked, yes, they don’t think he handled the pandemic particularly poorly). The Democrats also acknowledge this shambolic style but are less convinced of the results.
There’s a palpable sense of dread, particularly in the Democrat-leaning parts of the country, at the amount of water to go under the bridge between a candidate declaring victory sometime in the early hours of November 6 and a new President being inaugurated on January 20. Most people still think the person who is victorious on election night will be the same person whose hand is on the Bible in January, but they know the road will be rocky.
The Trump campaign isn’t helping to alleviate this sense of dread. The campaign has already alleged dodgy practices in several counties. In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, as the Herald reported last week, Trump’s team succeeded in a judicial appeal to extend the period to register for a mail-in ballot after complaints were made about the county’s preparedness. The victory showed that not all of the Trump campaign’s claims are vexatious.
The American electoral system is uniquely vulnerable to allegations of tampering. It has several vulnerabilities. First, it involves many thousands of often-elected local officials rather than non-partisan public servants. This hasn’t tended to be a problem in the past, however, with politicians taking off their partisan garb to do their democratic duty. But it has become a problem now, with some Republicans coming under pressure to back election denialism.
A whole movement has sprung up around this belief, and it’s popular. I spent hours at a Trump rally this weekend and couldn’t find anyone who would tell me that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election.
The strategy is a winning one for Trump, who told supporters on Sunday he needed a landslide “too big to rig”, in other words, Republican turnout needs to be so high the Democrats have no chance of “stealing” the election from him.
The campaign has some money behind it. A Nevada cryptocurrency multimillionaire named Robert Beadles funded a campaign to question the certification of a county commissioner in Nevada. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has been telling his podcast audience to focus on the fairness of their local counts and local officials. This means a repeat of the chaos that unfolded in Congress on January 6, 2021, seems less likely than chaos unfolding in the thousands of counties covering the United States as count after count is contested.
The Harris campaign seems ready for a fight. Over the weekend, the campaign ceased to speak of her as an underdog, reframing her as the favourite to win – an odd strategy if one is trying to boost voter turnout. A Washington Post poll average didn’t quite back this up. It showed Harris’ lead in the seven swing states peaked with a lead of 2.5 points in national polls in the second week of October, but fell to 2.1 points.
One of the great contrasts between US and New Zealand politics is how little people in America care about how much promises cost. This is quite the contrast to New Zealand, whose past three elections have included week-long arguments over the existence or non-existance of fiscal holes.
The US lives in a semi-perpetual fiscal hole. Since 1970, the Federal Government has run deficits every year but four – from 1998 to 2001. The federal deficit was 6.3% of GPD last year, compared with 2.4% for an equivalent New Zealand measure.
If New Zealand were running a deficit that large, a large part of the election would be spent debating the best way of closing it, through tax hikes and service cuts. In the US, neither candidate seems to care all that much and the only proposals on the table would appear to make it larger.
On Sunday, Trump repeated an expensive three-pronged pitch to the coalition of working-class voters he hopes to consolidate for the Republicans: no tax on tips, no tax on overtime and no tax on social security.
The cost of these promises and others has been forecast by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget to add US$7.75 trillion ($12.95t) to the federal debt pile by 2035 – the equivalent of 31 times New Zealand’s entire GDP at today’s prices.
At the meeting held by Vice-President Kamala Harris’ running mate Tim Walz last week, I heard the Democrats’ fiscal pitch: down payment assistance of US$25,000 for 400,000 first-generation home buyers. They also back exempting tips from federal income tax.
The Biden-Harris administration proposed providing up to US$25,000 ($41,000) in deposit assistance to first-home buyers, which, if New Zealand’s experience is anything to go by, will likely fuel house-price growth even further. The Harris campaign also proposes to extend a tax deduction for small businesses to US$50,000 ($80,000).
The cost of all this comes to a relatively modest US$4t ($7.3t) increase in the federal debt pile by 2035.
There’s a good reason for Americans’ lack of interest in fiscals. The country’s position as a reservoir to the piping of the global economy means that for now, they can borrow more or less what they want without much trouble from creditors – a luxury no other country big, medium, or small enjoys (just ask former British Prime Minister Liz Truss).
The other reason is that the US fiscal process means there’s a good chance most of this stuff won’t make it beyond the doorstep of Congress, which will need to pass it into an appropriations bill before it can take effect. What typically happens is that the two houses horse-trade bits and pieces of White House policy for measures in their own states or requests for cuts. The President can really promise whatever they like fiscally, knowing they can blame someone else if it doesn’t come to fruition.
The net effect is a sort of political fantasy land, where instead of discussing what the country needs and how best to pay for it, candidates tour the country for a year in a kind of fiscal lolly scramble.
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 US was assisted by the US Embassy in Wellington.
Expectations tempered around return to surplus in 2027/28.