No matter who wins the November 5th presidential election in the United States of America, history will be made. If Kamala Harris carries the day, she will become America's first female president and the second person of colour to occupy that storied office. If Donald Trump triumphs, he will become the second US former president to win two non-consecutive terms, the first being Grover Cleveland who lost his re-election bid in 1888 but regained the office in the 1892 election (and who also happened to be the first and only American president to have gotten married while in the White House).
But the historic significance of whatever happens on Tuesday goes beyond the personal record that will be set by one of the two candidates. It is more about what it says about the state of politics in the US, about what is likely to happen after the election is called, and what the outcome will mean for rest of the world. Post-World War II, America has held outsized significance for global economic and political order. America's presidential elections are thus closely monitored around world. But there is an extra significance this time around. The world is in a fragile place. How America votes on Tuesday is likely to moderate or deepen this fragility.
The global political and economic order will be the last thing on the minds of the majority of the 180 million Americans who will elect the next president. This is understandable. America itself is in a strange place. It is largely an insular and polarised country, but it is more insular and more polarised today than at any other period in modern times. American voters will be preoccupied with how to navigate the contours of the strange territory they have found themselves. They have pressing local issues to sort out, and the world can wait. In any case, they are electing the next president of the USA, not of the world, and they are the only ones with votes in this pivotal election.
However, the rest of the world will be impacted--for ill or for good, slightly or significantly--by how the Americans vote. This itself is a strange place to be. Others are mere spectators in a game that is likely to have real effects on their fortunes. And unlike spectators in say a football game, they can't even shape the outcome with the decibel of their support. They can only hope for their preferred side to edge out the other side. But there is another useful thing they can do: they can start to actively prepare for what victory for either Harris or Trump may portend for the global order in general and for their individual countries in particular.
This is more so because the election can go either way, and it is important not to be caught napping. As at this morning, the election, according to most aggregate polls, remains a toss-up. It is a rare sight in American elections for projections to be this tight just a few days to the presidential election. It is important to acknowledge that American election projections/polls have been off a few times either because of errors in polling methods or the bias of pollsters. But in most instances, the majority of pollsters call the election one way or the other ahead of polling day.
We won't know if the supporters of a candidate have been over-sampled or under-sampled until the actual results are declared. The way things stand, it is safe to project that the election remains close and that the outcome may be decided by which of the candidates/parties succeeds in wooing the few remaining undecided voters to their side and whose get-out-the-vote (GOTV) machine is more effective. At the end of the day, this election may be decided by either the level of turnout overall or by a few thousand voters in the seven battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
How Donald Trump has stayed this strong to the extent that he stands a good chance of winning the election still confounds many watchers of US politics. Against an established American tradition, Trump denied losing the 2020 election and said his victory was stolen. He rallied his supporters to 'Stop the Steal,' tried to bully state officials to tilt the election in his favour, and gave more than a wink to those who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. These were acts thought unimaginable in America, even in the earliest days of its democratic experiment. Trump has a string of indictments and convictions around his neck, he remains a polarising figure, he keeps saying outrageous things against his opponents and those who disagree with him, including threatening those he has termed enemies of the state, and many of the senior officials who worked with him during his first term have said he is unfit for that esteemed office.
Ordinarily, by American and Western standards, Trump's political career should be dead and buried by now. But the death of his political life has been widely exaggerated. He has remained a major political force and he may as well make a historic return to the White House, and even if he doesn't make it, he will come closer than the other five US former presidents who tried unsuccessfully to make a return to the White House (and let's hope his failure will not be followed by the kind of political violence usually associated with the Third World).
There are many reasons for Trump's improbable resilience in American politics. One, Trump has successfully narrativized the 2020 election as stolen and his trials as persecution. There are those who see him as a victim. Two, his undiplomatic language/approach is seen as a departure from the usual guile of politicians, and most Americans have become so immune to his bad form that they readily give him a pass. Three, American politics is more polarised than ever, and he retains near total control of the Republican Party and has a strong appeal for those who feel they got the short end of globalisation.
So, his gratuitous slander of immigrants and his promise to deport record number of illegal immigrants and impose high tariffs on imports (especially from China) strikes a chord with many blue-collar workers who think outsiders are stealing their jobs. Some have framed this racist pushback, because the core of Trump's MAGA crowd is white and male. But things are more nuanced, as evident from the support that Trump is now receiving from black and Latino males and from Muslims.
A major driver of Trump's strong appeal is the state of the economy post-pandemic. America's economy has recovered well, it is growing at a decent clip (2.8% in Q3-2024), and it is still the envy of the world. Inflation has tracked down from a peak of 9.1% to 2.4%, and after keeping interest rates high for a long time, the Federal Reserves cut the benchmark rate by 0.5% in September and is projected to make further cuts next week. But these macro data is not making as much dent on the standard of living of average Americans who still remember when, not long ago, they used to buy basic things at much lower prices and didn't have as much struggle paying their bills. That era, just a few years ago, happened to coincide with when Trump was president. Also, many entrepreneurs think Trump will be better for their bottomline.
So, while a significant number of Americans who will vote for Trump do not approve of his style and morality, they think he will be better for their welfare. It is a form of nostalgia, which may not stand close interrogation. But it doesn't matter. Politics is largely about perception. The key message of the Democrats, especially their flagbearer, has been about how nasty a person Trump is and about how much threat he poses to democracy. Character and institutions still remain important. But they become abstracts when compared to bread and butter issues and they do not resonate with people as much as their ability to pay their bills without stress. Politics is personal.
Other factors that have helped Trump include the obvious cognitive deterioration of President Joe Biden, which forced him off the race four months to the election, the anger of the youth (who believe that Biden didn't do enough to protect the Palestinians and thus are not excited about turning out for the Democrats) and the short time that Harris has had to define herself as well as her difficulty in erecting a distance between her and an administration in which she is effectively a co-pilot. But she may still be able to swing the presidency her way, especially if women who think that Trump constitutes a threat to their reproductive freedom pour out in record number for her and if she outperforms Trump in most of the battleground states.
There are analysts who feel that the outcome of the election will not have much effect on America's domestic and foreign policies. They base their analysis on the hope that even Trump will not be able to carry out his many threats either because the institutional guardrails of America will hold firm or because commonsense will prevail. They may end up being right. At the domestic level, there is not much difference in the policy proposals of the two candidates, as Trump has successfully remade American policy landscape in his image, (a case that The Economist made persuasively recently through a review of policy proposals in eight policy areas), and the fact that the Democratic Party has moved mostly to the right to counter the Trump effect. In any case, American politics and economy are sturdy enough to withstand the next four years. America, largely, will be fine.
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At the foreign level, however, is where we should worry and brace up for a tumultuous ride. Harris offers a safer bet for the global order. Even if there will be tweaks on her approach to Israel and Ukraine, she is likely to continue on the same path as Biden. But Trump presents a different proposition. While it will sound great to some Americans, Trump's threat to impose 20% tariffs on all imports and 60% tariffs on imports from China may not only trigger a tariff war that the world does not need but also put free trade and the fragile global economy at risk. His ultra-nationalistic posture will have serious implications for multi-lateral institutions like the United Nations and for traction on global causes like climate change.
The delicate balance of a multipolar world is also likely to be strained under a Trump presidency, and it is important to proactively think about how Trump's approach and preferences will impact US relations with Europe and China on one hand and the ongoing/potential wars between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Iran on the other. In capitals around the world, foreign policy experts should be mapping the various scenarios, thinking through their possible responses and preparing for whatever choice America makes on Tuesday. The rest of the world doesn't have a vote in America's most consequential election in generations. But it can at least ready itself for the outcome.
