Americans go to the polls to choose between a man they know far too well and a woman they’d rather not get to know

After hundreds of bumptious rallies and many months of empty cliches, after the expenditure of several billion dollars between the two major campaigns and their political allies, after the public airwaves have been filled with so much befogging untruth and slander the very atmosphere of thought has become toxic, after the majority of citizens have been driven to hysterical dread that one or the other result is sure to destroy our way of life, it is the strange custom of my countrymen to suffer both candidates to live after election day, and for one of them to serve as president of the United States for four years.

The final polls reveal little about how the result will come out. For fun, we Americans use 51 simultaneous and separate elections to determine the presidency. Our best-funded public pollsters freely admit that they simply copy each other’s state-level results in the final weeks, and refuse to publish interesting outliers, lest they be caught out and lose their corporate clients. That means the vast majority of polls show the race within the margin of error. One dynamic that pollsters didn’t collectively anticipate – say, the projected rate of turnout among unmarried women or rural whites – could throw the election wildly in one direction or the other.

What we can say is that the 2024 election is between a man whom Americans know far too well and a woman Americans would rather not get to know.

With an approval rating hovering right near 50 per cent, Donald Trump is more popular than ever before. This is all the more remarkable given the fact that a poll earlier this summer showed that one in three Democrats wish that an assassin’s bullet had exploded his skull and killed him rather than merely graze his ear. In my experience the ones talking the most about the need to preserve democracy are the pro-assassination ones.

After a month in which Kamala Harris was shot to the top of the ticket by her party elites, and in which she did no substantive interviews, she was clearly leading. She then spent a month introducing herself to the public. This was her big mistake. Thereby she fell backwards into a dead heat as Americans concluded she’d be better off not speaking.

The contrasts multiply from there. Trump has sometimes been overconfident and overfamiliar. He trusts voters to know when he’s kidding, and for his opponents to humourlessly pretend not to know when he’s kidding. (“I won’t be a dictator, except for day one.”) In the final weeks, Trump has been campaigning as if he anticipates a win. He has spread his events to Wisconsin and states that would normally be a longer reach for him, such as New Hampshire. He and his running mate, JD Vance, have been reaching deep into new media, going on comedy podcasts. Harris, by contrast, is one of the most deeply insecure candidates ever thrust into the spotlight. Without having won the nomination herself, she doesn’t quite control her own campaign apparatus, some of which is on loan from team Biden and team Obama. She is appearing in highly controlled, highly scripted environments like the Stephen Colbert show, and she is concentrating almost all her time in Pennsylvania, narrowing her map.

On the surface, the issues driving the election are the usual economic ones. Americans say they trust Trump more on the top two issues, the economy and immigration. However, if Harris wins it will be because unmarried women voted in a tsunami to reject Trump, and to preserve or expand their right to abortion.

But Republicans may have advantages on other cultural issues. One of the most-seen pro-Trump advertisements quotes Harris’s one-time suggestion she would use taxpayer-funded dollars to give gender reassignment surgery to illegal immigrants who are imprisoned for other crimes, if they identify as trans. “She’s for they/them. Donald Trump is for us,” it concludes.

There are already storylines to look out for in the results. The Trump era has sped up and initiated serious realignments in American politics. Despite the attempt to define his appeal as primarily racist, the Republican Party under the populist Trump is more attractive to non-white voters, particularly black and Hispanic men, than it was under corporate nice-guy Mitt Romney. If he wins, it may be due to the continued migration of working-class men into the Republican Party and the influx of voters from countries such as Venezuela who deplore the left.

The Harris candidacy, like Hillary Clinton’s candidacy before it, reflects the iron grip that degree-holding professionals have on the Democratic Party. Consequently, except for extractive industries and some big tech donors, corporate money now flows almost unobstructed to the Democratic Party. Her strength and weakness are the very same thing, and it is something over which she had no say. In an era of populism, the anti-populist is the representative of the entire phalanx of established institutions in American life. And so her political fate is tied up with how majorities of Americans feel about the performance of academia, big pharma, the regulatory agencies, the Pentagon and even the media itself.

That is the real motor of this campaign and this era. The post-cold war consensus in American politics had a subtly utopian vision. It posited that the freer movement of people, goods and capital across borders would bring about the most good. It would smooth over and efface our irrational loyalties to our nations and religions. Harris is on the side that there is more prosperity and moral progress to be juiced out of this model of elite-managed democracy, in which questions of immigration and economic management are slowly removed from deliberation and into the realm of human rights. Trump, along with so many populist leaders across Europe, represents a rebuke to that project. His candidacy has injected the Republican Party for the foreseeable future with the task of reasserting the primacy of self-government in a democratic age. Politicians who have come to love prestige without the responsibility of power, or a mechanism for credibility, hate it. That fate thrust on a man such as Trump so weighty a project is either a cosmic joke or divine judgment.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review and William F Buckley senior scholar at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. He is the author of My Father Left Me Ireland

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