The other day a friend from Michigan, one of those key swing states that decides who will be the next president of the United States of America, messaged me to celebrate his early vote for Kamala Harris, “the one sane candidate” in the race, as he put it. Then he added: “But you know what? In a way, Trump has won already, before the result.”
What followed was a tour d’horizon of where Middle America lives in this dramatic countdown to an election, the likes of which we’ve never seen before. He pointed to the economy, he pointed to immigration, he cited the way the Trump campaign has been blasting away via TV ads on the question of transgender issues, lambasting “woke thinking” and the tortuous position of Kamala Harris on that front. “Virtually everything we’ve talked about in this campaign has been Trump’s agenda,” he concluded. “That is why I say: on one important level, he’s already victorious.” Quietly taken aback, I found myself with a sobering thought. That my friend’s joy at voting signalled the best of democracy, but that his diagnosis of Trump’s ‘triumph’ represented the worst.
When you look at the facts, you have to pinch yourself to believe what Trump has pulled off here. The US economy, by any objective standard, is booming. Inflation has come down dramatically, unemployment is low, wages have been rising steadily, and the markets have gone way up, excellent news for the tens of millions who have retirement plans invested.
Yet Trump has sold the idea, for months on end, that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have “destroyed our country … they have created the worst economy in our history … Harris doesn’t have a clue when it comes to managing economics.” No matter that the experts, led by a group of Nobel prize-winning economists, suggest Trump’s economic plans will drive inflation back upwards and balloon the national debt, not to mention trigger a new kind of trade war with China.
Polls have consistently shown that Trump has a clear edge on this score with the simple question (stolen from Ronald Reagan, it should be noted): “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” As importantly, a sizeable majority of US citizens cite the economy when saying the country is heading in the wrong direction – a perennial nightmare for a White House incumbent like Harris. Then comes the issue of immigration, a clarion call of Trump’s from the very beginning of his political genesis. “Our country has become a garbage dump for the world’s murderers, rapists, and drug addicts,” he says at every stop, never letting the facts get in the way of his narrative – for example, lying openly about Haitian immigrants eating the pets of people in one small town in Ohio.
Yet once again no matter. The polls show a majority concluding that immigration sits right up there among the voting public’s concerns, alongside the economy. Again, you have to pinch yourself to see the way Trump has used an issue, laced with falsehood, to drive opinion to him. “Trump lies and uses racist stereotypes on this issue all the time,” says David Leonhardt, the in-house immigration expert at The New York Times. “But we have to see as well that he has exposed the vulnerability of the political elites on this one.” Witness the way the Biden administration promised reform, but has seen record numbers coming across the Rio Grande illegally in the past few years.
All of which has left Biden’s anointed successor, Kamala Harris, with a tough call as the country made its decision. How best to respond to such an agenda? The mountain of lies, the blatant racism, let alone the accusation that she is everything from the “anti-christ,” to an “extreme Marxist,” to a “shit vice-president.” My friend from Michigan says it’s like living “in the gutter, day after day,” and then you ask yourself “four more years of this?”
Going into the final stretch, the Harris campaign clearly settled on making Trump the issue. The moment when the vice-president called him “a fascist” signalled an end run of criticism that moved well beyond the man’s mental state, or narcissism, or all those multiple criminal indictments that range from financial fraud to sexual harassment to inciting insurrection. She was pointing the finger at a dictator-in-making, who she alleges would use the military against his own people and seek revenge on all who dared to oppose him.
What was so telling, however, was the way Trump has been presented, even by Harris and her surrogates. “It’s almost as if Trump were an incumbent, isn’t it?” wrote Matt Bai, a commentator with The Washington Post. “She’s trying very hard to make this a referendum on him and his fitness for office.” I heard another Post commentator Shadi Hamid add: “I think the voters want to be inspired beyond the lesser-of-two-evils argument, and she so struggles to do that.”
Fact is, says that friend in Michigan, that may be the best argument Harris has? He worried, on ending that message, that tens of millions of his fellow US citizens had already factored in the many questions, worries, fears about Donald Trump that have risen over the last few years – and still voted for him anyway.
