Fear Of The 'Other' Dominates US Election Season

Winning a presidential debate does not mean that the victor will wrap up the US elections in November. Vice President Kamala Harris won the debate against Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump hands down. She was confident, lethal in her attacks and managed to get under her opponents skin—making him angry and disjointed in his response, especially when she spoke of the small crowd sizes in his rallies. An instant poll taken of debate watchers by CNN showed that 63 percent felt that Harris nailed it, while 37 percent felt Trump did. 

The fact that Trump and his supporters pointed fingers at the ABC hosts for favouring Harris, indicates that despite the bluster the Republican’s realise that Donald Trump lost out. 

"The Vice President had some help, too. She was aided and abetted by two ABC News moderators who seemingly felt the need to fact-check virtually everything the former President said. The former President was clearly frustrated and became more strident and divisive as the nearly two-hour debate continued,’’  Doug Schoen wrote in an editorial on Fox News. "Although Harris clearly won the debate in my estimation, it isn’t at all clear that this debate, just 56 days before the election, will fundamentally impact the outcome on November 5,’’ he wrote.  

It is true, however, that if Biden were to be on the ticket, he would have been trounced by Trump. It is Biden’s horrific performance in the first presidential debate that forced the Democrats to ease the sitting President from the ticket. Kamala Harris brought in fresh energy to the race and enthused Democrats who had given up on Biden. According to the BBC on July 21, hours after Biden stepped down and endorsed his VP, Kamala Harris was able to raise as much as $1.6 million through a zoom call from a collective of Black women political organisers that attracted as many as 44,000 participants. This came as a pleasant surprise to the Harris team, which had aimed at collecting one million dollars  in 100 days. Since then the money flow from both big donors and ordinary folks has continued unabated.  

America today is a divided nation. As in many countries including India, exaggerated  fear of the "other’’ dominates election discourse. White Christians in the US  are afraid that their dominance is being challenged by the "other’’:  In the case of Kamala Harris, a woman of black and Asian heritage, challenging both patriarchy and racial prejudice. Ever since America elected Barak Obama as the country’s first black President, white supremacist fringe groups have come out of the woodworks and asserted various conspiracy theories, including lies about Obama being a Muslim and born outside the country. These were amplified during Trump’s term in office, resulting finally in the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill. These fears exist among sections of Americans in the rural heartland and have cast a shadow over politics. Donald Trump’s popularity and his dominance in the Republican party is a direct outcome of this polarised politics. Despite the seeming surge in Kamala Harris’s popularity, the fight will be a close one with swing voters in the states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona and Michigan deciding the outcome.

Kamala Harris has the support of women mainly due to her stand on abortion and reproductive rights. This group includes many Republicans as traditional party members regard today's Republican party as being nothing like what it was in the past and has Trump‘s stamp all over it. Republicans stars like former Vice President Dick Cheney; his daughter Rep Liz Cheney; former Rep Adam Kinzinger; Stephanie Grisham, who worked for Trump as a White House press secretary and as chief of staff to Melanie Trump; and Anthony Scaramucci, who worked as press secretary to Trump for a brief period, have all endorsed Harris. John Bolton, one of Trump’s trusted aides and his National Security Adviser, has also fallen out with his former boss. He has now become a scathing critic and often questions the President’s intelligence. Bolton has not endorsed Harris and is unlikely to do so. 

Harris had scored big among women with her stand on abortion and reproductive rights. Women across party lines were shocked when in 2022 the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade ruling that had upheld the constitutional right to abortion since 1973. Many Republican-ruled states rolled back abortion rights and made it difficult for women to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Harris had spoken out strongly on a woman’s right to take the decision on her body by herself and not  at the whim of the government. Realising that he was losing women’s votes, Trump has since said that it had to be left  to the states to decide on the issue. 

For women who had looked to Hillary Clinton to shatter the glass ceiling and become the first woman President of the US, her defeat in 2016 was a bitter pill to swallow. For many of them, Kamala Harris has the opportunity to turn the page. If she wins, Harris will become the first President of black and South Asian descent. But standing against this is her lacklustre record as Biden’s VP. Over three years of the Biden administration, Harris was hardly visible. What is more, Biden entrusted her with the tough task of looking into the root cause of migration from Mexico and Central America, as Democrats realised that illegal migration was becoming a major domestic issue. Biden’s policy proposals were harsh, limiting asylum claims on the border, expediting removal of illegal migrants and separating migrant children from parents. Harris was attacked by Republicans for not doing enough to stop immigration at the borders, while progressive Democrats and liberals criticised the harsh measures adopted by the federal government.  Kamala Harris came into her own once she got the nomination.

Trump’s plus point is the economy. People believe that they were better off during Trump’s term as President. His America First policy is supported by many in rural America. His simple explanation that Democrats are responsible for factories shifting from the country to China and other places abroad, leading to rural unemployment, has found a lot of takers. Biden’s order to existing coal plants to reduce 90 percent of their greenhouse gas pollution by 2039, and regulations that future high-capacity power plants that use natural gas have to reduce their emissions 90 percent by 2032, are highly unpopular and is seen by many as a death knell for American coal plants. Trump’s border and immigration policy also find support among large sections of Americans, especially those living in border states.

Foreign Policy 

Israel and Ukraine both came up in the debate, but in the short time allotted to each candidate little of substance emerged. Trump boasted as he has done several times earlier that if he were in the White House, Russia would not have invaded Ukraine. He claimed that if he won the elections he could make peace even before he formally took oath of office in January. He did not care to elaborate on how he will do this. On Israel, he said that Harris hated Israel and had not attended Netanyahu’s address at the joint session of Congress. His admiration for dictators again came through as he praised Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and said he had excellent relations with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. He also mentioned China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Kamala Harris on her part spoke of Israel’s right to defend itself and mentioned a two-state solution and the creation of an independent Palestinian state.  

By the end of the debate, ordinary viewers did not get to hear much on policy. Harris did not give out more than what she had already announced about her economic agenda: that she would help first time home buyers with $25,000 in support for their down payments, tax subsidies to those who build small homes for first time buyers, and that she would try to reduce health costs and raise minimum wages. Trump came out with his usual bombastic accusations  that immigrants were "eating pets’’ and Democrats supported the "execution of babies". 

The debate no means indicates the final outcome. It is fair to say that much can change in the next 55-days and it will be a close race.