Got questions about the American election? I’ve got the answers below!
Why should I care?
The election will decide the President of the United States for the next four years. The President leads, vetoes or signs new laws, and appoints judges. They are very important to the direction of the country.
But I don’t live in the US. I live in New Zealand.
They’re our third-biggest trading partner, the biggest and loudest media hub in the Anglosphere, and a heavyweight of foreign policy. They impact our businesses, shape our culture, and present new challenges and solutions on matters from China to climate change.
They always say it’s “the most important election of our lives”. Why should I believe you this time?
For all our lives, for all its faults, the most powerful country in the world has been a full democracy. Trump failed to get what he wanted last time around, and he’s back for revenge with a plan and a purpose. If he wins, we’re all walking into uncharted territory.
Okay, so I’m convinced. I should pay attention. Who’s running?
Donald Trump is the candidate of the right-wing Republicans. The Vice-President, Kamala Harris, represents the centre-left Democrats.
They call their main parties Democratic and Republican?
It’s a bit Tweedledum and Tweedledee, isn’t it?
Anybody else in there? Any Mad Hatters or March Hares?
Not really! Third-party candidates never win the presidency (footnote 1). Third placer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped out and endorsed Trump. Everybody else will nab, at most, 1% of the vote; they can’t win.
In that case, what are Trump and Harris offering?
Each campaign has defined itself around two issues. Trump’s greatest asset is the economy. He contrasts prosperity when he was in office versus high inflation and chaos under Biden-Harris. His second main issue is immigration. He caricatures illegal immigrants as criminal “vermin” who “poison the blood of our country”. His leading solutions are tariffs - raising taxes on imports - to revive the economy, and mass deportations to lower immigrant numbers. These are very stupid, and you’d find no agreement in our right-wing government with Trump’s approach. Other typical Republican policies are anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-climate action and pro-gun.
Harris stands for the usual Democratic policies - a blend of cutting taxes and subsidising businesses with spending more on priorities from healthcare and education to climate change. However, she has chosen to emphasise pushback against Trump’s America in two ways. Firstly, Trump appointed Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, permitting states to impose draconian penalties to prevent abortions. Harris will restore Roe v. Wade. Secondly, voting her in prevents Trump from concentrating authoritarian power in his hands to wield against his enemies.
The two biggest foreign policy issues are Ukraine and Gaza. Trump is keen to throw Ukraine under the bus, severely worsening the odds of holding off Putin. Harris will continue Biden’s strong military support to Ukraine. There is less daylight between them on Gaza. Biden continues to reinforce Israel and negotiate a ceasefire, while Trump has promised to forget any thought of a ceasefire and give Netanyahu carte blanche. Harris means a chance at peace sooner; with Trump, continued bloodshed is a sure thing.
Now, it'd be impossible not to know who Trump is. But who is Vice-President Kamala Harris?
Harris is two decades younger than Trump, but she has considerably more experience in government. Although Biden never gave her much to do, her record dates back to her years in California. She started her public career as a prosecutor. In my eyes, she’s a generic liberal. If elected, she will break America’s 46-president streak of only voting in men; often overlooked is that she will also be the first Asian-American president.
And what about the next Vice-President?
Whichever presidential candidate wins, their “running mate” wins with them to become VP. This position only matters because, if the president cannot continue to serve, the VP succeeds them. Trump’s guy, JD Vance, is a Trump half his age. The public sees him as very conservative and unlikeable, and he’s extremely inexperienced, but he is smart and had a sharp debate. Harris’s pick, Tim Walz, is a progressive governor with a rural everyman background, but he looked unready for the big lights in the debate.
Great, now I know who's who. When is the election, anyway?
Technically, it’s already begun! More than fifty million Americans have cast early votes. However, Election Day is on Tuesday the 5th of November. Different states close voting at different hours of the evening. For NZST, we can expect results from midday Wednesday.
So, we’ll know soon?
Not so soon as you might think! In 2020, Election Day looked like a Trump victory. However, after three and a half days of counting more votes, the major news networks called it for Biden (footnote 2). This election is expected to be even closer, so this election could drag on too. (And I’m not even getting into the post-election hangover - put a pin in that.)
How can this election be so close, anyway?
The tense COVID years and high inflation have brought down governments around the world. Add Biden’s infirmity, highlighted in a disaster debate, and Trump’s post-shooting goodwill, and Biden was on track to lose.
…but then his party replaced him with Vice-President Kamala Harris to achieve a Jacindamania effect. So, on the one hand, voters still want to punish Harris for the past four years. On the other hand, voters have good reason to be wary of Trump.
A stoppable object…
And a moveable force.
Still! Can that many people really support Trump?
Hillary Clinton won 48% of the vote in 2016; Biden only improved on that by 3% in 2020. The USA is an extremely polarised country (footnote 3). The large majority of voters will never bring themselves to vote for the other side. (Compare that to NZ Labour falling from 50% to 27% of the vote between elections!) The US election will be decided by who can woo the few swing voters, plus who can get more non-voters to show up this time (footnote 4). That’s why it’s close.
But Kamala’s been leading in the polls since August!
Aha, now here’s the rub. You don’t win the election by getting the most votes - Hillary got the most votes and she lost. You win by winning the Electoral College.
The what now?
In the Electoral College, every state has Electoral Votes proportional to how many people live in that state. If you win the most votes in a state, then you win every Electoral Vote from that state. If you win the most Electoral Votes, then you win the election. The magic number is 270. So, Hillary won more votes than Trump, but he won more Electoral Votes, so he became President. Biden won more votes than Trump and more Electoral Votes, so Biden became President.
So Kamala’s lead doesn’t mean anything?
Harris will probably win the popular vote, but yes, who will win the election is predicted to be a coinflip (footnote 5). That’s different from the last two elections, where Trump’s opponents were heavily favoured to win both times. This is why you’ll hear about “swing states”: while we already know most of the states that Harris or Trump will win, the “swing states” are the handful where the vote could go either way and thus decide the election.
Okay, I think you’ve made your point. It’s close.
Thank you for acknowledging my insightfulness.
At least we can put this all behind us soon enough, right?
Weeellll…
Oh no.
I mean...the last time, Trump spread a lot of narratives about voter fraud, initiated a rash of bad faith lawsuits, and rallied the January 6th mob. He did all of that before he faced the threat of prosecution if he couldn’t get his presidential immunity back. Nobody can predict any political violence or other destabilisation for sure. But he'll certainly cry foul and do his best to win the election through non-votey means.
He can’t do that, can he?
Your guess is as good as mine! This stuff hasn't really been tested. Trump spent years building an infrastructure of loyalist officials across the country who could refuse to ratify Harris victories, send Trump electors from states Harris won, and judge that mostly Democratic batches of ballots are invalid. This failed last time, but Rocky didn't win the first fight, either, did he?
Haven’t seen that one.
Me neither. And of the above assumes that Trump doesn’t win. Which is a 50/50.
=/
Have I answered all your questions?
Every one I knew I had and some that I didn’t. Say, you wanna go watch that Joe Rogan episode where he talks to Trump for three hours again?
Hell no.
Footnotes:
Third parties struggle for two reasons. One, unlike New Zealand’s proportional system, the presidency is winner-takes-all. It's a lot harder to get around 50% of votes than it is to get 5%. Two, most voters do not vote for candidates who cannot win: even if you dislike the major-party candidate you align more with, not voting for them means the major-party candidate you align less with is closer to victory. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as minor parties fail to gather the momentum to convince anybody they can win, though their ineffectiveness at running for far more achievable offices isn't helping their case.
You might wonder at how the media can call an election before every single vote has been counted. If Trump is one million votes ahead of Harris, and there are two million votes remaining to be counted, can’t Harris still win? The answer is the same principle that polling, and a lot of other statistical science besides, operates by. If you take a large enough sample group from the wider population, then the % of each that support Trump and Harris will be roughly similar to the entire country. That’s what polling is. As votes continue to be counted, then, you can see that it’s statistically extremely likely that the trend seen so far will continue. But how can you rely on this when American elections are so close - not to mention the complexities of the Electoral College? Because you don’t just know how the entire country has voted! You also know what the trends are within all of the states, and within all of the districts, and within all of the counties, and so on and so forth - and not just in this election, but in all the previous! So, take a scenario where all of the big city and suburban votes in Pennsylvania have been counted and not many of the rural votes have been. Trump is just barely ahead of Harris. The media can conclude that it is statistically implausible that there will be more Harris votes than Trump votes remaining to be counted. Therefore, they can with confidence call the election. Political science is not an exact science and the media have impure incentives about when to make the call - most infamously, the media declared that Al Gore had won the 2000 election before retracting and then declaring Bush the winner - but there is a rational and trustworthy methodology with a winning track record as to why and how elections are called early.
This is often misrepresented as everybody in America being super angry and politicised all of the time. That’s just a vocal minority. Most people are polarised, but their passion and engagement doesn’t run nearly as deep. The same principle applies here in New Zealand.
The US electorate displays several major demographic divides. Men, non-college educated people, and white people are much likelier to vote for Trump. Women, college-educated people, and Hispanic and especially black people are much likelier to vote for Harris. Accordingly, much of the election is about leaning into your side of the culture war to get your groups out to vote. Trump's nonstop machismo and grievances pander to his crowd, while Harris targets a woman’s freedom from government control of her body.
Every election will have rogue polls - Biden infamously had a +17 poll in Wisconsin, a state he ended up winning by .63%. However, I would make note of Ann Selzer’s poll she regularly runs in Iowa, which has historically been the uncontested gold standard of reliability. For Trump to have a shot in this election, he would typically have to be over 5 points ahead in Iowa, whereas Selzer’s recent bombshell is a Harris +3. Harris almost certainly won’t win Iowa, but if you dock four points to account for the margin of error it’s still very good news for her. This may be a colossal miss, but I’m reading it as the strongest argument for Harris having a better shot than even odds.
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