After what has felt like an endless campaign, today is Election Day in the United States (US). Presuming that counting proceeds smoothly, there’s a good chance that by tomorrow we will know the winner of one of the most consequential elections in modern history. That makes it a good moment to look back on what has happened during the campaign and consider the stakes for the future.
The state of the race
Let’s start with the current state of the race. As always, the outcome of the election depends on the swing states. Most US states reliably vote the same way every election. By contrast, the swing states are those in which a victory for either candidate is possible and so which will ultimately decide the overall winner. These seven states – Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania – have been polled more than ever before, and we also now have early voting data available from all of them.
So far, all of this information is inconclusive. The race appears to be a dead heat, with neither candidate enjoying a significant advantage. However, this appearance is based largely on the polls, which have been giving strange and contradictory results. The 2024 election comes at a make-or-break moment for the American polling industry, which badly misread both the 2016 and 2020 elections by underestimating support for Donald Trump.
Determined not to make the same mistake again, pollsters have radically changed their methods, and the exact changes have varied from pollster to pollster. Many seem to be suppressing results which suggest a clear victory for either candidate because they fear reputational damage from another drastically wrong call. This could be one reason why the polls appear so abnormally stable and tied.[1]
Early voting data is also a poor guide to the outcome of the election. Widespread early voting is a relatively recent phenomenon in U.S. elections, and this year it has been embraced by the Republican Party on a scale unseen in the past. This means that we lack a basis for comparison to previous elections.[2]
Not that this has stopped anxious (and sometimes jubilant) members of each party poring over the data looking for signs of an advantage. For instance, Republicans have been buoyed by turnout among seniors, and Democrats have been pleased to see women disproportionately represented among those who have voted early.[3] Yet there is no evidence that this means that younger people or men are less likely to vote on Election Day itself, when their votes will count just as much as those who turned out early.
The campaigns
Everything, then, hinges on what happens today – who turns out to vote, and who they actually vote for. Here is what the two campaigns will be hoping is going to happen.
Kamala Harris has run her campaign with one overriding goal: to appeal to moderate, white swing voters in general and women in particular. She had three reasons for doing this. Firstly, as a woman of colour – not to mention a former senator from California – she realized that her biggest potential liability was being seen by the electorate as too liberal. Secondly, ever since 2016 Democrats have been able to make enormous inroads into America’s formerly Republican-leaning suburban communities as their residents have been repelled by Trump. Harris’ focus on the idea of Trump as a threat to democracy in the final weeks of her campaign is designed to win over more of this group. Thirdly, the overturning of Roe v. Wade – which guaranteed the right to abortion – has galvanized American women against the Republican Party, and Harris has made abortion rights a central part of her message.[4]
Victory for Harris hence looks something like this. Firstly, she needs to make sure that her party’s most reliable supporters turn out to vote in significant numbers in large cities like Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Atlanta. Secondly, she needs to peel as many suburban moderates and women away from Trump as possible.
Right now, defeat looks most likely to come from a failure of the party’s base to be enthused by her candidacy. If Harris loses, she’ll be criticized for not paying enough attention to voters of colour and working-class whites. Campaigning with former Republicans like Liz Cheney might have appeal in the suburbs, but there’s a chance it turns people off downtown.[5]
The Trump campaign is trying to pull off a similar balancing act. In previous elections, Trump has managed to mobilize white rural and working-class voters in large numbers while also maintaining some support in the suburbs. This time around, Trump himself has focused on using divisive and incendiary rhetoric to mobilize his base. While his campaign advertising has focused much more often on messages about inflation and immigration which are designed to appeal more to suburban moderates, it has also featured a heavy attack on transgender rights.[6]
Trump has also made an explicit appeal to men a central part of his campaign and has made some moves towards trying to broaden the Republican Party’s appeal with men of colour. The impact of the latter, however, has been blunted by the open racism of his campaign in its final weeks.[7]
If they were fielding any other candidate, then this would be the Republican Party’s election to lose. The US has just seen sky-high inflation, a crisis at its southern border, and an unpopular incumbent president having to step down halfway through his own re-election campaign. Virtually every other post-pandemic leader or government which oversaw similar levels of inflation has been ejected from office. The Republicans ought to be leading comfortably in the polls, not locked in an apparent tie. Instead, the party is paying a “Trump Tax” for their candidate’s divisiveness and extremism.[8] If victory comes, it will be because their discontent with the state of the country in the last four years persuaded just enough voters to give the former president another chance anyway.
The stakes
In a sense, what is on the ballot today is not just who will be president for the next four years – it is whether the country will finally reject Trumpism or accept it as a normal feature of the country’s political landscape. If Trump loses, his political record will be a grim one for Republicans. The former president faced an unpopular opponent in 2016 and won by a tiny margin, and then went on to lead his party to dramatically underperform in the 2020 presidential election and the 2018 and 2022 midterms. Another loss now would present an opportunity for moderate Republicans with respect for the constitution to reclaim their party, and for the US to draw a line under the Trump era.
Victory, by contrast, would unleash Trump like never before. Indeed, Trump and his campaign seem to be relishing in divisiveness more openly than ever, meaning that it will be hard to claim that Americans did not know what they were getting themselves in for if they elect him. Trump’s campaign this year has been more overtly racist. He has complained that immigrants have bad “genes” and that they “poison the blood” of the American people.[9] At an event billed as his campaign’s “closing argument”, Trump hosted a comedian well known for making racist remarks – who then proceeded to do just that, sparking a furious backlash from some of the voters of colour who Trump had previously claimed to be trying to win over.[10]
Trump has also continued his violent rhetoric and attacks on the democratic process. These have included welcoming violence against journalists, speculating about his political opponents being jailed and shot, and making baseless accusations of election fraud. And that is just in the past week.[11]
Something else has hung over the closing days of the campaign – the possibility of violence or divisive legal contests, particularly if Trump loses. The Trump campaign has been ratcheting up its criticism of the electoral process in recent days, and it will almost certainly attempt to use lawsuits and pressure on local election officials to influence the counting process. The result could be chaos – or outbreaks of violence against election officials and offices, such as that which Trump has been criminally charged with orchestrating on January 6th, 2021.
All of this means that the stakes are high. It matters a great deal to the rest of the world whether the United States is a country in which this style of politics is accepted by voters and practiced by the nation’s president. What happens today will determine the course of the next four years, and far beyond.
Andrew Gawthorpe is an expert on US foreign policy and politics at Leiden University and the creator of America Explained, a podcast and newsletter. He was formerly a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, a teaching fellow at the UK Defence Academy, and a civil servant in the Cabinet Office.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not reflect the views of The Foreign Policy Centre
Photograph courtesy of Phil Roeder via Wikicommons.
[1] Robert Tait, Dead-Heat Poll Results Are Astonishing – And Improbable, These Experts Say, The Guardian, November 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/02/what-polls-mean-so-far-trump-harris-election-voters.
[2] Ivan Pereira, Tens Of Millions Of Early Votes Have Been Cast. What Could It Mean For Election Day?, ABC News, November 2024, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tens-millions-early-votes-cast-election-day/story?id=115272249.
[3] Joey Garrison, Women Outpacing Men In Early Voting, Boosting Harris Campaign’s Optimism, USA Today, November 2024, https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/11/01/women-outpacing-men-early-voting-optimism-harris/75990004007/; Ryan King, Trump Camp Touts GOP Early-Voting Gains Over 2020 As Election Comes Down To Wire, The New York Post, November 2024, https://nypost.com/2024/11/03/us-news/trump-camp-touts-gop-early-voting-gains-over-2020-as-election-comes-down-to-wire/.
[4] Megan Messerly and Meridith McGraw, Harris Is Courting Moderate Republicans. Liz Cheney Is Helping, Politico, November 2024, https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/21/harris-liz-cheney-moderate-republicans-00184765; Justine McDaniel, Abortion Rights Gave Democrats Big Wins Post-Roe. Harris Wants A Repeat, The Washington Post, November 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/03/kamala-harris-abortion-campaign-voters/.
[5] Nicholas Nehamas and Erica L. Green, As Harris Courts Republicans, The Left Grows Wary And Alienated, The New York Times, November 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/us/politics/kamala-harris-progressives-democrats.html.
[6] Susan Davis, GOP Ads On Transgender Rights Are Dominating Airwaves In The Election’s Closing Days, NPR, November 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/10/19/g-s1-28932/donald-trump-transgender-ads-kamala-harris.
[7] Zac Anderson, Crude Talk And The NFL: Trump Doubles Down On His Lead With Male Voters, USA Today, October 2024, https://www.npr.org/2024/10/19/g-s1-28932/donald-trump-transgender-ads-kamala-harris; Harry Enten, Trump Was Doing Historically Well With Hispanic Voters Before Madison Square Garden Backlash, CNN, October 2024, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/28/politics/hispanic-voters-trump-election-rally/index.html.
[8] Andrew Gawthorpe, Republicans Pay A Trump Taks – Again, America Explained, October 2024, https://amerex.substack.com/p/republicans-pay-a-trump-tax-again.
[9] Kate Sullivan, Trump Suggests Undocumented Immigrants Who Commit Murder Have ‘Bad Genes’, CNN, October 2024, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/07/politics/trump-undocumented-immigrants-bad-genes/index.html; Maggie Astor, Trump Doubles Down On Migrants ‘Poisoning’ The Country, The New York Times, March 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/us/politics/trump-fox-interview-migrants.html.
[10] Jill Colvin and Michelle L. Price, Trump’s Madison Square Garden Event Features Crude And Racist Remarks, The Associated Press, October 2024, https://apnews.com/article/trump-madison-square-garden-new-york-election-fcfe75be7f8281fde7bffa3adb3bba5d.
[11] Hannah Knowles and Meryl Kornfield, Trump Says He Doesn’t Mind Someone Shooting At Journalists At Rally, The Washington Post, November 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/11/03/trump-rally-media-shooting/; Michael Gold and Adam Nagourney, Trump Assails Liz Cheney And Imagines Guns ‘Shooting At Her’, The New York Times, November 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/01/us/politics/trump-liz-cheney-tucker-carlson.html; Alexandra Marquez, Jake Traylor and Jillian Frankel, Trump Talks About Shooting At Press, Ramps Up Election Fraud Claims At Pa. Rally, NBC News, November 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-wouldnt-mind-if-someone-shot-media-pa-rally-rcna178573.