Harris or Trump, U.S. politics will only get wilder

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By Tad Tietze

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If the “public” polls are correct, the United States presidential election this Tuesday could be the closest since the Bush-Gore dead heat of 2000. Or, given the margins of error involved we could see a Harris or Trump sweep of the seven “battleground” states. Or, the polls could be carrying errors as big as those in 2016 and 2020 and there might be a minor Trump landslide. Or, they could be wrong in some other way, producing a surprise big Harris victory. To make things more confusing, many insiders believe the quality of public polls has seriously declined, such that only much more expensive and granular “private” polls — like those commissioned by the campaigns and their allies — can be relied on. And, besides, what if there’s a late turnout surge among this or that demographic group, or an unpredictable effect of changes in early and mail-in vote mobilisation?

Simply put, predicting the outcome is a fool’s errand, even if the internal moods of both campaigns in the last few weeks have tended to treat a Trump victory as more likely.[1]

What can be foreseen, however, is that both major parties’ campaigns’ claims of being able to break the nation’s recurring cycle of rising political turmoil if they win cannot come to pass, no matter the size of any victory.

In this essay, in order to get to grips with the turmoil and its underlying causes, I’ll first outline the scale of mayhem during the present election cycle, as well as the unusual nature of Harris’s foreshortened campaign. I’ll then set these dynamics in the context of how Trump’s rise, fall, and comeback can be explained on the background of a longer run degeneration of the American party system — one that affects not only a Republican Party susceptible to being taken over by an outsider celebrity billionaire but a Democratic Party that has avoided facing a reckoning about its own, deeply entrenched problems.

A BONFIRE OF VOLATILITY

The current cycle has been a bonfire of volatility since CNN’s June 28 Biden-Trump debate, starting with Biden’s cognitively challenged performance, the media and big donors turning on him, Trump surviving a first assassination attempt, Biden withdrawing from the race, and his until-then unpopular vice-president rapidly manoeuvring to be nominated without the need for a primary-style contest.

Harris’s sudden rise reinvigorated a miserable Democratic party and put it consistently ahead in the polls for the first time in almost a year, leaving Trump and his campaign unsteady on their feet. Then there was a second assassination attempt on Trump while Harris was running a bizarrely empty “vibes” campaign in which she at first avoided almost all serious scrutiny under the pretext that everyone needed to “move on” (except, of course, when it came to attacking Trump).

While the dominant liberal media breathlessly reported these developments, once Biden pulled out of the race it mostly switched to cheerleading the “Kamalamentum” and remained incurious about the real circumstances of Biden’s decline or the wisdom of allowing him to continue serving as Commander-in-Chief. It is only in the dying days of the race that some outlets have raised worries about Harris as a candidate, and that a few (including the L.A. Times and Washington Post) have decided to stop making endorsements, fearing that obvious partisanship was undermining their credibility.

HARRIS’S PECULIAR CAMPAIGN

The vast majority of media coverage, whether filtered through a blue or red lens, has also failed to properly reflect on the peculiar nature of Harris’s campaign.

Harris got to the top of the ticket purely through back-room manoeuvres, while studiosly avoiding direct engagement with the media. Then she launched a highly stage-managed series of rallies in front of reinvigorated Democrat activists and supporters in which she implausibly ran — almost policy-free — as a fresh entrant into politics, a “joyful warrior”, and “a new generation of leadership” despite having run for the party’s nomination in 2019 and been sitting vice-president since 2021.

Similarly, her pledge to “turn the page” on a decade of divisive politics — intended to invoke how Trump had lived rent-free in many of his opponents’ minds — clashed with the fact that Democrats had controlled the White House for all but four of those years and that Harris was a senior collaborator in Biden’s apparent failure to “restore the soul of the nation” after defeating Trump in 2020.

When her potentially controversial or electorally risky past positions were raised, her campaign repeatedly backgrounded reporters that she’d changed her mind while official, on-the-record statements were mostly avoided.[2] When she eventually submitted to interviews she would give nebulous, contradictory answers about her values remaining the same, while also avoiding specifics (often by changing the subject to Trump) or devolving into her trademark “word salad”. It was the same with her relationship to the unpopular administration of which she was still a part — a mix of uncritical agreement with everything they’d done alongside cryptic assurances that she would, of course, do things quite differently.

Channelling Obama’s claim that he could “serve as the blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views”, Harris’s campaign scored initial success with the strategy.[3] This worked with her supporters, but detractors also projected what they believed were her true, nefarious beliefs even when nothing was on the public record. The Trump campaign’s initial attempts to brand her as a radical failed to land precisely because — despite years at the centre of public life — she remained little known to more than a minority of politically engaged voters. However, as the election neared it became clear that undecided voters were frustrated by a lack of information about Harris’s plans and were drifting back to the unsavoury but better-known quantity of Trump.

There was deeper, structural reason for the emptiness of her campaign: a risk-averse desire to hold together her side’s sudden but tenuous exit from the depths of dejection by avoiding offence to any of its many constituencies. Needing everyone on board meant remaining as elusive as possible for as long as possible, even while symbolically implying she was returning the party to the centre, such as by reappropriating nationalist imagery and slogans, playing up her ownership of a handgun, and using her past as a prosecutor to indicate she’d be tough on crime and border protection while providing little detail on how she’d solve those issues from the White House. Perhaps most egregiously the attempt to appeal to all sides resulted in her campaign editing video of her speeches to create a pro-Palestinian ad aimed at Michigan Muslims that was broadcast contemporaneously with an aggressively pro-Israel ad aimed at Pennsylvania Jews.[4]

Indeed, the only policy area on which Harris spoke clearly and confidently was abortion rights, in which she promised to sign Roe v Wade into law (although even here she wouldn’t specify how she would get around Congress, how this could work legally in the wake of Dobbs, or which historical version of Roe’s protections she’d endorse).

Interestingly, despite foregrounding several different, increasingly darker criticisms of Trump during the campaign — that he was “not a serious person” and only acted on self-interest, then that he was “unbalanced” and “unhinged”, and finally that he was a “fascist” — Harris also pilfered and even amplified features of the Trump playbook even as she attacked him over them. For example, while she pilloried him for proposing tariffs, labelling them a giant new sales tax, she then agreed with Biden’s decision to retain many of the Trump tariffs, yet still avoided explaining why those tariffs were ok. She also stole one of Trump’s few new policies — removing income tax on the tips of the hospitality workers — while acting like it was her idea.

And although Harris’s campaign continued the evergreen theme of Trump as pathological liar, its advertising and messaging was heavily dominated by verifiably false claims about his statements and policy positions. For example, while Trump had clearly and harshly repudiated the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the Democrats relentlessly ascribed its most reactionary proposals to him, even if he had never held them and had publicly rejected them. Ditto on cuts to Social Security and Medicare, which Trump had always railed against — much to the chagrin of traditional GOP politicians and elites. She also flipped Trump’s actual positions on abortion restrictions and IVF availability, over which he had fought the hard pro-life sections of his party. And finally, perhaps most ironically given her consistent ridicule of Trump’s border wall, she effectively committed to extending it and even used images of it in her ads.

These echoes came less from any substantive Harris embrace of Trumpism and more from the impossible contradiction she was trying to ride: presenting herself as a fresh alternative to Washington’s division and malaise while having been a consummate political insider for decades. About as far as you could get from an anti-politician, Harris was trying to float above the fray of recent political convulsions by being an empty vessel, who could hold her bruised and divided side together just long enough to squeak to victory by giving the appearance of being the opposite of what she was. Trump, long accused of being willing to say and do whatever it took to win power, no matter how contradictory and mendacious, now had an opponent willing to use the same approach, turned up to 11. The closeness of the final pre-election polls suggest, however, that her strategy had a constrained half-life.

TRUMP’S COMEBACK

These last four extraordinary months of chaos and weirdness had already occurred on the background of Trump improbably clawing his way back from the political doghouse from mid-late 2023. This was despite losing the 2020 election and further alienating himself from voters with his “stolen election” antics, despite suffering from relentless deployment of the January 6 riot against him, despite being further marginalised by his Supreme Court nominees overturning Roe v Wade, and despite being blamed for the GOP’s poor results in the mid-terms.

That he could do this was in part down to the Biden administration’s accumulating problems: widely disliked Covid mandate overreach; a disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal; runaway inflation causing a cost-of-living crisis; a chaotic approach to the southern border and immigration; and an increasingly dangerous world the U.S. appeared to have ever less control over. The latter was especially manifest in Ukraine’s inability to repel its Russian invaders despite massive Western assistance and Israel’s refusal to be reined in over Gaza by its U.S. backers. This picture of American weakness, both domestically and on the global stage, was exacerbated by Biden’s own observable physical and mental decline, which was denied by the White House (it was all just “cheap fakes”) and, scandalously, covered up by most of the U.S. media.

Paradoxically, Trump also made his comeback in part thanks to the multiple legal cases arrayed against him, mostly driven by transparently partisan actors, by convincing many voters that these were “lawfare” aimed at extinguishing all opposition to a hated ruling clique and its “deep state” allies.

In the context of the growing public disapproval of the Biden administration, Trump could — perhaps ironically because his administration had achieved less in policy terms than his promises to “make America great again” suggested — portray his record as having delivered more economic prosperity, greater global stability, and tighter control of the southern border.

Yet Harris’s ability to recover much of the ground lost by Biden underscored how much electoral support for Trump — a historically polarising political figure — included a large element of negative partisanship. Indeed, the predominant zeitgeist reflected in opinion polls has been of unhappiness with both parties’ candidates and growing disenchantment with the state of American democracy.[5]

POLITICS IN DECLINE

Such survey results are merely the latest echo of longer-run tendencies towards political breakdown, themselves downstream effects of the hollowing out and disintegration of the social institutions that shaped and stabilised the two-party system that dominated 20^th Century politics, tendencies that no politician or party has found a way to halt, let alone reverse.

These trends have weakened of each party’s hold over its traditional voters, resulting in greater electoral volatility and a voting public more detached from and hostile to politicians, parties, and the political system as a whole. Whereas parties could once rely on their connections to mass social organisations (like trade unions and civic associations) to cohere broad electorates, as these decayed the parties found themselves instead trying to appeal to a morass of smaller constituencies whose interests were often at odds.

Since the turmoil of the late 60s and early 70s, but especially after the end of a Cold War that had also shaped left-right distinctions, the U.S. parties have made a series of pragmatic adaptations to their growing disconnection from the public. Whether it was Bill Clinton forcing the Democrats to the right, or Bush II’s team using the international situation after 9/11 to give a weak GOP a new agenda, or Obama building his campaign largely independent of decrepit party structures, these adaptations all started from the reality that both parties’ authority was built on ever more fragile foundations.

It was in this context that Trump could subject the GOP to a hostile takeover, by running against many of its established ideologies, traditions, achievements, donors, and political elites. Crucially, he did so as an anti-politician, railing against the whole political class as failed, weak, and stupid.[6]

Then, despite a near-unanimous belief among insiders that he couldn’t possibly beat Hillary Clinton, Trump leveraged popular distrust of the Washington establishment that she epitomised alongside an unusually-centrist-for-the-GOP (except on immigration) platform to snatch an Electoral College victory that rocked the world.

THE LIMITS OF TRUMPISM

As with all of the anti-politicians and “populists” who’ve found electoral success in an era of rising public disenchantment with liberal democratic politics, while they may excite political engagement (for and against), they cannot magically conjure up new social bases through which to enact more than relatively restricted policy changes while in office. So it was with Trump, whose transformative promise was limited in practice to presiding over a booming economy, delivering a broad set of tax cuts, avoiding starting new wars, seeing off ISIS as the main global terrorist threat, and making some incomplete strides with the southern border, all before Covid-19 hit.[7]

More remarkable was the febrile opposition to his presidency, which rapidly coalesced into a “Resistance” that improbably united mutually hostile Democratic factions, a significant section of the GOP old guard, much of the federal bureaucracy, the upper echelons of the intelligence services, most of the mainstream media, the vast majority of what counts for a radical left in the U.S., and significant numbers of politically engaged middle-class white-collar professionals. In effect, the nation’s political class was partly reorganised from its old left-right oppositions towards an anti-Trump v pro-Trump axis.

Members of The Resistance overwhelmingly believed Trump’s election had been in some way illegitimate, and that extra-electoral means should be employed to hobble his agenda and, if possible, end his presidency early. Waves of anti-Trump activism kept the Democrats and media from having to properly reckon with their inability to foresee or prevent Trump’s 2016 victory, or with the deep schisms on the left that had been exposed with Bernie Sanders’ unexpectedly successful challenge to Clinton. The Resistance drove the party to the left, less around Sanders’s preferred anti-corporate, pro-working-class agenda and more towards the racial (and other) identity politics and open borders policies that dominated anti-Trump activism. This dynamic was reflected in the eagerness of a wide range of Democratic contenders for the party’s nomination — among them Harris — to align themselves with positions far to the left of most Democrat voters.

Yet when Covid suddenly became the dominant issue in society in early 2020, it was Joe Biden who won the primary as Democratic voters and elites retreated to the safety of a moderate establishment candidate in the atmosphere of uncertainty, even if the price Biden paid for support from black congressional Democrats was picking a black woman as running mate. Stuck for viable choices, he chose Harris despite her deeply unimpressive performance in the race for the nomination.

Then, Trump’s border closures and support for the first national lockdown didn’t just feed the growing Covid panic. They also crushed a booming economy that was his best chance at re-election. The left quickly saw partisan advantage in attacking Trump’s ham-fisted approach and attempts to open up the economy, instead demanding longer lockdowns and harsher mandates. Then, after George Floyd’s death under a Minneapolis cop’s knee, the media, activists, and Democrat politicians positioned themselves as champions of a short-lived but massive Black Lives Matter protest movement.

Trump’s ability to get close to catching up to Biden in enough swing states by election day is testament to how the wild events of early-to-mid 2020 also provoked a backlash, allowing him to run by attacking ongoing Covid restrictions and a breakdown in law and order. Meanwhile Biden ran a “basement campaign”, largely avoiding the public spotlight (and closer examination of his mental acuity) under the pretext of Covid precautions.

While Biden won the popular vote by a larger margin than Clinton had in 2016, the historically high turnout also meant that Trump significantly expanded his electorate. More perplexingly for those who had written off Trump’s appeal as founded mainly on white racial grievances, his voter coalition was significantly more diverse than four years earlier, with a swing to the Democrats by white voters securing the presidency for Biden.

Covid produced a short-lived revival in the authority of established politicians everywhere, particularly if they were willing to decisively impose harsh emergency measures to appear to control the threat posed by the virus. Yet those same measures — almost always implemented arbitrarily, inconsistently, and with minimal transparency — soon started to eat away at this boost to their standing. Having been the champions of lockdowns and mandates, the Democrats now had to reap the inflationary and other financial consequence of staggering monetary (and, to a lesser extent, fiscal) outlays that had been made to save an economy ruthlessly suppressed in the name of public health.

Biden’s commitment to overturning as much of Trump’s agenda as possible led him to dramatically soften border controls within days of taking office. Meanwhile his belief that the U.S. remained “the indispensable nation” — with “nothing beyond our capacity if we do it together”[8] — led him to make repeated boasts about American influence over the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza that ended in embarrassing displays of impotence.

Despite the decline in his administration’s public standing and the evident decline in his cognition, the Democrat machine and its media allies not only covered for Biden but aggressively ran interference for him when he decided to run for re-election.

ANTI-TRUMPISM & ITS DISCONTENTS

It’s hard to explain this error of judgement except on the same basis as I have Harris’s odd campaign: a debilitating fear that the party couldn’t withstand an internal struggle over its direction, especially when faced with the threat of a Trump return. The 2015-6 primary season exposed deep divisions within the party’s active supporter base, between the party elites and activists, and between the activist layers and the wider public.

While Sanders was no anti-politician, his “populist” message connected with a similar dissatisfaction inside the party to that which Trump’s candidacy had revealed in the GOP. The difference was that Trump beating Clinton forced the various wings of the Democrats into an uneasy alliance that could only be sustained in constant opposition to Trump, rather than seriously comprehending their loss to such an unorthodox and unpopular candidate. It’s clear that for millions of Democrats and Democrat identifiers, including leaders like Biden and Harris, anti-Trumpism animates them as much as — if not more than — cohering the party around an agenda that might appeal to a majority of voters.

Anti-Trumpism has not only led to Harris’s recent contortions, but to a longer-term shift in the Democrats’ role to becoming the custodians of a liberal democratic political order facing existential danger from its dark “populist” other.

Their defence of the political setup has often meant using illiberal and undemocratic means to undermine enemies: including overt and covert coordination with media and tech companies, partisan prosecutors, federal bureaucrats, and intelligence agencies. It has also resulted in new alignments at the top that would’ve boggled the minds of Democrats just 10 years previously, especially in Harris’s proud collection of endorsements from traditional right-wing, pro-corporate, neoconservative Republicans, most infamously Liz and Dick Cheney.

The lack of drive to develop a positive Democrat agenda is not because of a lack of will, but because the conflicts within the party cannot easily be overcome in an era where there is no stable social base to unite disparate interest groups. Hence the leakage to Trump of white working-class, blue-collar trade unionist, Latino, black, and some younger voters — all of whom had been touted as part of the “emerging Democratic majority” thesis just over a decade ago.[9] Without social institutional weight to bind them to blue politics, various demographics have started to fragment and realign in messy and unpredictable ways.[10]

Trump’s advantage in such a fluid situation has largely been as a negative force: against a failed political class in both parties and its allies in the “swamp”. It is for this reason he has never needed to articulate a detailed policy agenda; indeed, he has dramatically pared back the GOP manifesto into a more centrist document in his own image. It’s also why attempts to ascribe ideological coherence onto him make no sense, although there is no shortage of detractors and hangers-on trying to do just that.

Meanwhile his greatest asset in terms of positive achievements — his first term record — is also a source of weakness. The reality is that he failed to make a deep and durable enough impact to convince many of today’s voters that such a chaotic and abrasive president should be given another chance.

Nvertheless, it is in Trump’s success as an anti-politician that we can see the sources of Harris’s late-stage adaptation of many of his stylistic and tactical choices to the needs of her campaign. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” as they say, because where else is left to go?

NO RESOLUTION

Weighed down by these contradictions, neither side has a path to entrenching some kind of stability on its own side, let alone across the system as a whole.

If Harris wins, there will be massive pressure to continue avoiding a reckoning with her side’s problems. Entering office as an unusually weak politician relying more heavily than usual on the team around her, and with an aversion to taking risks, she’ll likely also find herself further hamstrung by a Republican-dominated Congress. The danger is that she, like Biden, then tries to assert authority by making some bold move, perhaps on the international stage where the executive branch holds most power. Here political self-interest from a frightened politician could paradoxically end in capricious foreign policy or military disasters.

Meanwhile the GOP side without Trump at its head will continue to be racked by conflicts between, for example, those who see the need for some kind of rapprochement between MAGA and the party establishment, and those who think the MAGA revolution needs to be completed.

Should Trump win, the Democrats are unlikely to stave off a working out of their long-suppressed internal conflicts. However, this will initially likely be refracted through the distorting lens of some kind a blame game centred on Biden’s failure to drop out earlier or the failures of Harris’s campaign strategy[11], again delaying dealing with the advanced stages of declining social relevance, a trajectory that leaders like Clinton and Obama had temporarily addressed when things still looked rosier.

Meanwhile, although such a win (even if decisive) might give Trump space to more aggressively pursue his agenda for office and further transformation of the GOP, the conditions he inherits are far less propitious than the ones he took from Obama. It’s far from clear that the current US economic recovery is sustainable, given the astonishing type of economic suppression that preceded it. And while Trump may be better at politically managing his nation’s relative decline in the world than Biden, mainly by retrenching to a more national-interest stance, U.S. power in the world is now even less respected, such that even his unconventional deal-making style may not be enough to produce the impression that he is arresting the downward spiral.

Any weakness on these fronts could then well revive the next round of anti-Trump mobilisation within a political class that may be down but is far from out. Modern-day “populism” remains generally fragile and unpopular despite the relative weakness of its establishment opponents, also lacking a stable social base and resting more on its negative than positive appeal.

That’s why, whoever wins on Tuesday, the safest conclusion is that in the next four years political turbulence will only get more intense.

This essay is deeply indebted to the excellent coverage of the campaign by Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, and Dan Turrentine, on the 2WAY platform’s Morning Meeting.

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NOTES

[1] As repeatedly reported by the well-connected, assertively non-partisan veteran journalist Mark Halperin — he who co-wrote the definitive accounts of Obama’s two successful campaigns — on the 2WAY channel (https://www.youtube.com/@2WayTVApp)

[2] Axios reporter Alex Thompson has catalogued a long list of past positions Harris and her campaign have declined to comment whether or not she still holds: https://www.axios.com/2024/11/03/kamala-harris-no-comment-strategy

[3] Championed by some pro-Harris journalists, like Politico’s Matthew Kaminski. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/08/31/kamala-harris-policy-void-00176659

[4] As reported by CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/01/politics/video/kfile-different-messages-harris-campaign-israel-gaza-ebof-digvid

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/27/us/politics/american-democracy-poll.html

[6] For more detail, see my analysis from early 2016. https://left-flank.org/2016/01/25/the-trump-paradox-a-rough-guide-for-the-left/

[7] We can add to this list the Abraham Accords and the Covid vaccine program as significant but hardly earth-shattering foreign policy and domestic achievements in 2020.

[8] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/10/20/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-unites-states-response-to-hamass-terrorist-attacks-against-israel-and-russias-ongoing-brutal-war-against-ukraine/

[9] The authors of the thesis, John Judis and Ruy Texeira, have both since criticised its misuse by identity politics obsessed Democrats and changed their minds about its applicability.

[10] This messy realignment also makes opinion polling fraught because it undermines assumptions based on previous elections, as was seen in 2016 and 2020 or (in reverse) with the disappointing GOP mid-term performance following the Dobbs abortion decision.

[11] A sharp point made by Mark Halperin. https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/democrats-have-enormous-dilemma-kamala-harris-loses