Kamala Harris has two possible paths to win the election against Donald Trump
analysis
LBy Leigh Sales
Topic:US Elections
Kamala Harris has two paths to victory in the US election.
During the next few days, you'll read and hear plenty of predictions about the US presidential election result.
Much of it will be worthless, particularly in this age of misinformation and social media-fed confirmation bias.
Left-leaning pundits will find reasons to forecast a likely victory for Democrat Kamala Harris, while conservative commentators will home in on reasons why Republican candidate Donald Trump will triumph.
When technology permits people to mostly hear what they want to hear, and social media acts as a contagion for one-sided hot takes, are there any analytical tools which are still reliable?
Revealing my own bias, I'd suggest that cold hard numbers and the evidence of history — whilst not infallible — offer a more reliable steer than gut instinct or the latest trending topic.
I say "revealing my own bias" because somebody like me — a career journalist with a public broadcaster — keeps reaching for facts and historical data when they're increasingly less and less useful for predicting political outcomes.
I still stubbornly keep faith in the religion of logic, reason and integrity even though there's plenty of evidence that they are out of vogue. The continuing success of Donald Trump, and his highly competitive position, is proof that irrationality, misinformation and vulgarity are potent weapons.
If you'll indulge my bias, I believe the key thing to note when considering the likely outcome of the 2024 election is an irrefutable fact of history. Of the 46 occupants of the Oval Office, only one of them has been black: Barack Obama, elected in 2008 and 2012. But even a black man has more chance of making it than a woman. There has never been a female president (and only one vice president: the incumbent, Kamala Harris). In fact, until Harris accidentally assumed top spot on the Democrat presidential ticket this year thanks to Joe Biden's implosion, only one woman had ever even been nominated by her party for the job (Hillary Clinton in 2016).
History's lesson is that the election of a black woman to the White House goes against the odds and would be a huge break in an almost unbroken conga line of white men.
It's possible, of course. The Western world has made huge inroads into gender and racial equality, albeit with some distance to go. But to paraphrase the former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard (speaking of her own political demise in 2013) if Kamala Harris loses, race and gender won't explain everything, but they won't be irrelevant either.
Race has a critical role
Beyond the clear historic pattern, there are many interesting titbits of electoral data to dig into.
Geography and the way American states have shifted political allegiances over decades is instructive. Scrutinising the electoral college and picking the locations where candidates need to secure voter turnout is useful. Voting patterns and polls broken down by gender are extremely interesting (and gender could prove important in 2024).
It's also handy to look at dominant domestic and foreign policy issues during past election campaigns, especially economic factors, to see how they correlate with outcomes. Data from any one of those areas can be extrapolated to the 2024 election to make credible predictions. It is still guesswork because events and changing social attitudes can make history redundant, but as the saying goes, past behaviour is often the best predictor of future behaviour.
My subjective take is that the most useful data to look at this year relates to race. Racial demographics offer a very powerful indicator of political allegiance and play a critical role in US election outcomes, as the last four presidential races demonstrate.
The largest individual bloc of registered voters in the United States by race is white people. They're powerful not just because of their numbers but also because of their reliability: they're the demographic most likely to show up at the ballot box on election day (voting is not compulsory in the US so having supporters you can rely on for turnout is critical).
Just before the last US presidential election in 2020, white Americans made up 69 per cent of registered voters. The next largest blocs by race were Blacks and Hispanics, at 11 per cent apiece. Asian-Americans and others make up 8 per cent.
The proportion of white voters is even higher in several key electoral battlegrounds (for example, in Pennsylvania — a state that could be decisive — 81 per cent of registered voters are white; in another swing state, Michigan, the figure is 79 per cent).
Those white voters also lean heavily conservative. The Pew Research Center found that 81 per cent of white voters identify as Republican. Of course, that doesn't stop those people sometimes voting for the Democrat if they can't stomach their own party's choice. Case in point — action star and former California Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared he's voting for Harris because he considers himself "an American before a Republican" and that Trump would deliver "four more years of bullshit with no results".
If the numbers show that a sea of dominant white voters is inclined to vote for a white male Republican candidate, how does any Democrat — let alone a black female one — ever make it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
The Schwarzenegger effect
There are two possible paths (and a reminder: this analysis is focused on racial demographics, not on geography, electoral college or gender).
Harris can build an overwhelming multi-racial coalition of all the non-white voters to balance the might of the white bloc.
Or, if she can't do that, she has to peel away some of Trump's white base.
Let's call that the Schwarzenegger effect — persuading white Republican voters to switch allegiance. These people are largely suburban, regional, rural and working-class Americans who feel let down by the political class because their lives have become harder with rising living costs, higher unemployment and declining standard of living.
Some of these people may be in play because they are disgusted by Donald Trump — the only reason they could ever stomach voting Democrat (The Terminator being Exhibit A).
The risk for Harris is that white voters who dislike Trump personally may be persuaded by the argument embraced by Trump's chief rival for the Republican candidacy, Nikki Haley.
"I don't have to like him or agree with him 100 per cent of the time to know that life for Americans would be better under the policies where we have strong immigration, where we have law and order, where we have an economy where we can look at opportunities, where we've got national security that is strong," Haley said earlier this year.
If white voters buy that, then the only path left for Harris is to ensure that the other major racial blocs — Blacks, Hispanics and Asians — show up for her en masse.
She can win without securing a white majority (as long as her white vote doesn't collapse) but only if she carries a very significant majority of minorities.
The last four US presidential elections — the Biden and Obama victories as well as the Clinton loss — illustrate clearly how this plays out.
In 2008, Barack Obama ran against John McCain, a white man. Most white voters — 55 per cent — opted for the Republican. But in every other major racial sub-group, Obama dominated. Obama also delivered a high participation rate. Black voters in particular, across all age brackets, turned out in record numbers.
Then in 2012, Obama successfully ran for re-election against another white male Republican, Mitt Romney. Some white voters peeled away from Obama but he made up for that with a dramatic increase in his support from Hispanic and Asian voters.
Four years later in 2016, the Democrats lost. Their candidate Hillary Clinton kept support with minority voters at reasonable levels but landed far short of Obama. She also fell down with white voters. She attracted only 37 per cent of the white vote, six points down on Obama's 2008 victory (something that analysts blamed on her remark that Trump supporters were "deplorables" — shades of which we've heard repeated in Biden's "garbage" comments this week).
Clinton's missing white voters didn't all go to Trump though, who actually attracted fewer white voters than Mitt Romney (there were several third-party candidates in the race who performed well). Clinton lost partly because she was weak with white voters and partly because she didn't compensate with a strong enough multi-racial bloc.
Fast forward to 2020 and the victorious Democrat Joe Biden recovered the white vote to well above the Democrats' 2016 and 2012 levels. He performed well enough with the other racial blocs to get over the line.
If we take a look at how the polls have Harris tracking, especially compared to the Biden and Obama victories, how does she compare?
Far from well enough for Democrats to feel confident or relaxed.
The latest New York Times/Siena poll at the time of writing paints a particularly alarming picture for Harris with Black men. Compared to Biden in 2020, she has dropped 15 per cent support in that demographic. They appear to have gone to Donald Trump who has picked up 15 per cent.
Harris will easily attract more Black voters than Trump overall, but "more" may not be enough unless she has an unexpected stampede of white voters heading her way, too.
Among Hispanic voters, the situation is similar. The New York Times/Siena poll found Harris underperforming the last three Democrat candidates for the White House in that demographic. Trump did well with Latino men in 2020 and he appears to have tightened his grip on the Hispanic vote in a way that his predecessors Mitt Romney and John McCain could not.
Polls can be unreliable but it's clear that the Democrats' own internal research must match them because of what we're seeing the Harris camp do in practice. Obama has publicly admonished black men to stop making excuses and to get behind the Democrat candidate. Harris has done a round of Black media and unveiled a suite of policies aimed specifically at black male voters, including addressing health inequities, offering mentorship and apprenticeship programs and promising financial assistance.
There are many theories as to why Harris is losing men from racial minorities (among them, that cost of living hits those groups disproportionately hard; that culturally those men are drawn to strongmen figures; that Black voters have long trended Democrat but feel taken for granted because of slow progress in equality; and that there is both sexism and racism at play).
Inside America's fastest-growing state
The scale of the task for Harris is made clear by digging down into one of the battleground states next week, Arizona.
Until recently, the Republican party dominated Arizona, the home state of Senator John McCain, as well as another former presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, considered the father of modern conservatism. For the past 70 years, Arizona has voted Republican in every presidential election except two (Bill Clinton carried the state in 1996 and it delivered a narrow win to Joe Biden in 2020, setting off a furious row between Donald Trump and Fox News when the network called the result).
The demographics in Arizona are changing. It's America's fast-growing state. Almost a third of the population is Hispanic. Trump was vicious about McCain when the senator was still alive and as a beloved figure in his home state, that hasn't been forgotten. Those things have put Arizona in play.
But it's an uphill battle. Only 29 per cent of the state's registered voters are Democrats. The latest opinion polls have Harris just trailing Trump (she's at 45 per cent and he's at 49 per cent). Like the rest of the country, most Americans living in Arizona think the country is trending in the wrong direction. The big issues for the border state are immigration, cost of living and housing affordability — all issues on which the Democrat is vulnerable, given it's her party that has held the White House for the past four years.
Although history and data point to a tough fight for Harris, once an election is over, hindsight can sometimes make us wonder why we didn't have more of a sense that the public was gearing up for a moment of historic change.
Obviously, if Harris becomes America's first female president, it will be a massive moment for the US. But if Trump wins, it will also signify real change: in that scenario, that the political rule book as we understand it, and what the public wants from its political leaders, is something entirely different to the past.
By：ABC(责任编辑：admin)
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