Washington, DC, Iowa and Minneapolis
As one drives along the 169-mile-long St Croix river, a tributary of the Mississippi that connects Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s home city Minneapolis to the politically fractious swing state of Wisconsin, the motifs announcing support for Kamala Harris are gradually outnumbered by billboards of Donald Trump, illustrating the hard combat the Democrats face in the November 5 election, despite their slender, yet persistent lead in opinion polls.
Economy and border security remain pressing concerns for voters, animated as many of them are with Trump’s nationalist rhetoric relayed in his big rallies and raucous television bytes. According to Trump, the people’s economic hardships, especially the skyrocketing food prices, are a fallout of, among other factors, unwarranted spending on immigrants’ settlements. He has attempted to seize people’s economic frustrations and optimise human tragedies brought about by Hurricane Milton to lend a coat of credibility to his portrayal of the American society beset by “fleeing jobs” and “criminals pouring in” from outside the borders.
“They [Democrats] stole the FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants...,” Trump told a public meeting in Michigan on October 10. Congress allocated $650 million in the 2024 fiscal year to fund a programme that helps state and local governments house migrants, but there is no data to support Trump’s charges that FEMA disaster assistance money was diverted to house immigrants.
There is no dearth of voters who approve of Trump’s everyday vilification of illegal immigrants. “Where is all the money going?” asked Steve, a 30-something from Iowa. He questioned the Biden administration’s spending on immigrants, alleging that “criminals from Venezuela are infiltrating the US”. He said he was dissatisfied with Biden’s handling of the economy, and would vote for either Trump or a third party candidate, but “not Democrats”.
In terms of numbers, Biden’s record on the economy is not dismal. For the last two years, the unemployment rate has been under 4 per cent, a record in the past five decades. But public perception has been scathing in the face of soaring food prices.
Harris, the first woman of colour to win the presidential nomination of a major party, has pioneered a vision pivoted on what she describes as an “opportunity economy”. She has promised to pursue many of Biden’s stated objectives and public policies, such as providing tax credits to middle-class and lower-income families and lowering drug costs.
Harris is limning her image as a leader who battled economic odds to rise to prominence. In the presidential debate with Trump on September 10, she said: “I grew up a middle-class kid. I was raised by a hardworking mother, who like so many people across our nation, had big dreams and aspirations for her children…. I believe when the middle class is strong, America is strong.” She has promised a tax break for more than 100 million Americans.
Audrey, a storekeeper at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, is an enthusiastic Harris supporter. “Trump has never gone to a departmental store to buy essentials. He can’t relate to our livelihood issues. He is a business guy,” she said. Visibly apprehensive that “another Trump presidency could perfect his ‘otherisation’ of the African-Americans”, the community to which she belongs, Audrey said she would make sure that Democrats in her neighbourhood would vote on November 5.
A firefighter from Washington, DC, who wanted to remain anonymous, echoed Audrey’s revulsion at Trump’s anti-immigrant messages. “It hurts people, and it’s dangerous. But the best way to extinguish people’s negative rhetoric is to ignore, and not let these negative emotions circulate in the election season,” he said. During the presidential debate on September 10, Trump said of Haitian immigrants: “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats.”
However, the impassioned exhortations building a case for Harris may be limited to the ‘Never Trump’ constituency rather than representing the sentiment of undecided voters. She faces several impediments that make the race arduous for her.
One of them is the vexing debate on how people perceive leadership. Trump has perfected an idea of leadership that initially seized on people’s economic frustrations and attracted them with quick-fix solutions, but later focused on waging a full-scale harassment campaign against immigrants and political opponents, while portraying political opponents to be in collusion with the “outsider”. This allowed him a conducive pitch to roll out, pursue and strengthen his commitment to placing the social and political interests of the majority on top, the white Americans to be precise. In a frenzied environment where politicisation of national security issues outweighs other issues including the question of survival of democracy, culminating in an animating personality cult, the idea of a woman in charge may not click with lower-income groups without a college degree, who are the zealous flag-bearers for Trump.
Jake Vincent from New York admits that there is an undercurrent of misogyny, which, along with the blighted economy and fear-mongering on border security, is the reason why Trumpism continues to resonate at a time when Trump’s felony conviction should have rendered him unfit to run in the court of public opinion. He describes the US as a “business enterprise” and argues that “Trump, despite his many flaws of character, is an efficient businessman. He is the best bet for the US at a time when many people are losing faith in its success story.” Vincent had been an operational trainee course instructor in the US Navy in California. He jeers at the thought of a Harris presidency. “She showed no character as vice president; she will be a rubber stamp to the military-industrial complex which runs this country,” he said.
Worryingly for Harris, Vincent’s views are upheld by an increasing number of male black voters under 50. Trump registered an uptick in approval, at 21 per cent, among young black men, according to a recent study by Howard University. Even Muslim immigrants like Zain, a taxi-driver from Pakistan this reporter spoke to at New York’s 5th Avenue, said Trump evoked more confidence because “he speaks of America first, and he can do something for the lower income groups”.
Trump talks of creating an environment to “steal” manufacturing jobs that have moved overseas. To this end, he has pledged to lower the corporate tax rate from 21 per cent to 15 per cent for “those who make their product in the USA”.
Despite Harris underlining the urgency to safeguard democracy from Trump’s authoritarian ways, there is apprehension that the anger against inflation might affect her campaign. A recent research from Empower, a financial planning enterprise, outlined: “Some 78 per cent [Americans] are using more of their budget on essential items, and 27 per cent have hit a pricing limit, and aren’t willing to pay anything more for many grocery staples, or will cut the items from their shopping lists.”
Trump is exploiting that faultline by circulating a notion that Harris plans to tilt the US to the left. “Kamala went full communist… she wants to destroy our country,” he said at a public meeting in Wilkes-Barre township in Pennsylvania in August. He has since repeated the charges, often deriding her opponent as “comrade Kamala”.
Harris’s campaign managers have clarified that she has moved away from several of her left-leaning stances from her 2020 presidential run, such as her interest in a single-payer health insurance system and a ban on fracking.
Israel’s intensifying conflict with Gaza could also be a problem for Harris as it alienates Arab Americans. The Biden presidency’s steadfast support for Israel despite the mounting civilian casualty in Gaza has disillusioned the Muslim populace. On September 19, the Uncommitted National Movement announced that it will not endorse Kamala Harris for president, as she did not oblige the movement’s request that she discuss a ceasefire in Gaza. Kaitlan Collins, a renowned broadcast journalist, told this reporter that “though Harris expresses concerns about Gaza, people know her policies are the same as Biden’s. They don’t want to hear the argument that she is better than Trump.” Collins is afraid that Harris might lose Michigan if Arab-origin voters decide to sit at home.
That would complicate her path to the presidency. Pennsylvania is another decisive swing state. In 2020, Biden won it by a mere 80,000 votes, despite his extensive childhood connection to the state. If Trump reclaims Pennsylvania, Harris will have to depend on North Carolina and Georgia, which are right-leaning.
Trump has prioritised Pennsylvania and Georgia. And he is spending $17 million in North Carolina. According to a Wall Street Journal opinion poll released on October 11, Harris and Trump are neck and neck in the seven battleground states. The poll showed Harris with marginal 2 per cent leads in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan, while Trump was up by six points in Nevada and one in Pennsylvania. The two are tied in North Carolina and Wisconsin.
However, Trump’s anti-abortion stand has allowed Harris to aim at building a coalition of women voters. In 2022, three supreme court justices whom Trump nominated during his presidency were part of a majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, the ruling that had protected abortion rights nationally for nearly half a century. The new decision allows individual states to restrict or permit abortions as they see fit. Harris has pledged that she would support the Congress to pass a federal law protecting abortion rights.
David Schultz, a distinguished professor at Hamline University in Minnesota, said economy, immigration and abortion are the three big issues that people in the US would use to decide their vote. He emphasised that “not everyone ranks them in that order”. But if they did, it would not be easy to write an epitaph on Trumpism.