America’s moment of reckoning has arrived. On Tuesday, the nation will hold a presidential election like none before, poised between the historic candidacy of a Black woman and a former president branded a fascist by his own former officials.
The Democrat Kamala Harris and the Republican Donald Trump spent the weekend barnstorming swing states, aware that opinion polls show them running neck and neck in the race for the White House. Analysts are predicting the closest election since 2000, when George W Bush prevailed by 537 votes, and warning of the threat of civil unrest and political violence.
“This time, I venture to say, is a real Armageddon election,” John Zogby, an author and pollster, told reporters at the Foreign Press Centers in Washington. “Honestly, I’m not entirely sure that elements of either side of the electorate are willing to accept the results if their candidate does not win.”
The contest is also being watched intently around the world, with victory for Harris likely to represent a continuation of US foreign policy norms but a win for Trump threatening to upend them. The outcome could have profound implications for the wars in Gaza and Ukraine as well as the climate crisis.
Harris has been joined by independents and former Republicans in warning that US democracy itself is on the line. They have sought to remind the electorate that it was only four years ago that Trump instigated a coup against his own government, on 6 January 2021, in a desperate bid to cling to power.
Mark Milley, a former chair of the joint chiefs of staff, has described Trump as “a fascist to the core”. John Kelly, who was Trump’s chief of staff at the White House, has told how the president spoke admiringly of Adolf Hitler’s generals.
Trump has, if anything, reinforced the point in recent weeks by making ominous comments about “the enemy from within”, threatening to deploy the military domestically and staging a bigotry-filled rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden that echoed a Nazi one held there in 1939.
Yet still tens of millions of voters are set to back him, accepting his argument that they were better off four years ago than now. Trump has declared: “On issue after issue, Kamala broke it, but I will fix it.” Harris, for her part, has countered: “It’s either Donald Trump in there stewing over his enemy’s list, or me, working for you, checking off my to-do list.”
The election is the most expensive ever, with Democratic campaigns and outside groups having spent about $4.5bn on ads as of last week, compared with about $3.5bn for Republicans. It is focused on seven swing states that will decide the all-important electoral college: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The contest also represents a vast experiment in the world’s powerful democracy. Harris, 60, would become the first woman, first Black woman and first person of south Asian descent to serve as president in the nation’s 248-year history if she wins.
She is up against a 78-year-old white man who has been accused of sexual assault by more than two dozen women, and whose campaign has embraced old-fashioned machismo and “bro culture” in search of votes.
Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “The approach of leaning into a toxic masculinity-themed campaign at a time when women’s rights are literally under assault in America is indicative of the absolute regressive and draconian worldview that Donald Trump brings to politics. They have doubled and tripled down on it, appealing to the worst instincts and lowest common denominator in the country.”
Last week, Trump said he would be a protector of women “whether the women like it or not”, prompting fierce backlash. Such flashpoints have exposed a historic gender gap in the electorate. In the latest USA Today/Suffolk University national poll, women backed Harris 53% to 36%, while men supported Trump 53% to 37%.
Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “The population that is really pissed off is women. I mean really, really, really. The anger that women feel towards this guy is immense and it’ll show up in this election.”
She added: “The story of this election is the massive gender gap and it’s for three reasons. One is that there’s a woman candidate. Two is that the abortion issue has brought this right to the fore; previously, there wasn’t an issue for women to rally around.
“Three is Trump’s own unremitting misogyny, talking about women like: ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’ll protect you.’ Go fuck you, mister. We want to live in a place where women don’t need protection as opposed to protection from Donald Trump. Come on. Everything he has done infuriates women.”
Harris has chosen not to emphasise her gender or race, unlike Hillary Clinton’s stated ambition to break the glass ceiling in 2016. But she has made reproductive rights and personal freedoms a rallying cry and backs a national law codifying access to safe abortion.
Harris was forced to stitch together a campaign in just three months after Joe Biden, 81, chose not to seek re-election. The vice-president has walked a fine line between claiming credit for her part in Biden’s legislative successes while distancing herself from his low approval rating.
Paul Begala, a political consultant and former adviser to President Bill Clinton, says he is “astonished” by Harris’s performance and thinks she has barely put a foot wrong. Democratic strategists were divided, he continued, over whether she should close by stressing Trump’s threat to democracy or a message of economic populism.
“She has squared that circle by saying: ‘He comes to office with an enemies list; I come with a to do list,’” he said. “It’s so elegant. It’s not just a slogan, it’s a framework. It’s a tree that you can hang a lot of ornaments on. It’s genius and I say that with deep admiration. I think of myself as being pretty good at this. I could not come up with that.”
Harris, a former senator, California attorney general and San Francisco prosecutor, has unveiled economic plans that include tax cuts for most Americans, bans on price gouging, more affordable housing and a new child tax credit as well as efforts to boost domestic manufacturing. She is seeking to revive a coalition of young voters, people of colour and suburban women.
But critics argue that, after a flying start, she has lost her way and failed to sell a compelling message. Frank Luntz, a political consultant and pollster, said of her first 45 days on the campaign trail: “We’ve never seen anything like it. It was a genuine freight train. The best in modern American history, even better than Obama. She took the country by storm.”
More recently, her campaign has been “abysmal”, Luntz said, adding: “You have to give voters a second act. You have to give them a second reason to listen and, in her case, she’s not telling them what they want to know or need to know.”
Trump has attacked Harris relentlessly on inflation and immigration, using dehumanising language to call undocumented immigrants “animals” who are “poisoning the blood of our country” and pushing bogus stories about Haitians eating pet cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. He has promised the biggest mass deportation operation in history.
Luntz believes that Harris has failed to find a convincing defence to the claim that she and Biden were too slow to shore up the border. “She has not figured out how to deal with it because she will not differentiate herself from Joe Biden and that’s a fundamental mistake in her campaign and she may pay the ultimate price for it,” he said.
But Harris’s defenders contend that, as a woman of colour, she is being held to a different standard by a nation grown numb and indifferent to Trump’s excesses. The CNN senior political commentator Van Jones observed: “He gets to be lawless. She has to be flawless.”
Fuelled by grievance and a desire for retribution, Trump is making his third consecutive run for the White House after losing his 2020 re-election bid (he continues to falsely claim that it was stolen). He would be the oldest person ever elected to the White House.
Trump would also be the first convicted criminal to win the presidency. In May, he was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records relating to a hush-money payment to the adult film performer Stormy Daniels. He has cast the four criminal cases against him as politically motivated and vowed to investigate or prosecute rivals and election workers if he wins.
Trump’s campaign has been characteristically unorthodox. His daughter-in-law Lara Trump is leading Republican efforts to get out the vote in what is her first campaign. The billionaire Elon Musk and the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk are also playing an outsized role despite having no prior experience. Tens of millions of dollars have been diverted from that ground game to paying Trump’s legal fees.
Begala, the Democratic strategist, said the Trump campaign has been professionally run and produced some effective ads, but the candidate keeps trampling on their message with insults against women and bizarre riffs. “I guess if I was running that campaign, I would pay Trump hush money. Just shut him up, cut off his mic like they did at the debates. It is just astonishing,” he said.
The former president survived two assassination attempts, one at a Pennsylvania campaign rally in July and another in September near one of his Florida golf courses. He emerged from the first incident with a bloodstained face, fist raised, and a call for his supporters to “Fight, fight, fight!” – a chant now adopted at his rallies.
Trump, who chose Senator JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate, has vowed to fundamentally change Washington’s relationship with Nato and resolve the Ukraine war with possible peace talks that might require Kyiv to cede territory. He has said Hamas must be “crushed” and vowed to be tougher on Iran.
Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and CIA director, said: “It is in many ways a choice between whether or not we will provide world leadership or whether we will hide in isolationism and basically withdraw from the rest of the world into an ‘America first’ approach. That will have serious consequences in terms of America’s place in the world or certainly will have an impact in terms of our relationship with the international community.”
Just as in 2020, the election will be a stress test for democracy in a bitterly polarised nation. Trump has refused to commit to accepting the 2024 results or to rule out possible political violence, while he and Republicans lay the groundwork to contest a potential loss. He tells his rallies to expect a big victory on Tuesday, saying he could only envision losing “if it was a corrupt election”.
Some of his supporters are adamant that they would not accept defeat. Kathy Holesapple, 56, an entrepreneur, pilot and aircraft mechanic, said at a rally in Henderson, Nevada, last week: “We won’t. None of us will. We know he didn’t lose in 2020 either.”
Begala, author of You’re Fired: The Perfect Guide to Beating Donald Trump, said: “I don’t think there’s the slightest doubt that Trump will falsely declare himself the victor. He lost that Emmy award back when he was a TV host and he said that was rigged. I’m also sadly convinced that there’s going to be violence, that Trump motivates those few unhinged people.
“Good God, otherwise patriotic Americans were beating police officers [on January 6]. They tased [Capitol police] officer Michael Fanone until his heart stopped and most of those people had no priors. I’m certain that he’s going to stoke violence. I say that honestly with a heavy heart.”
Nearly one in four Republicans who hold a favourable view of Trump (23%), and 19% of all Republicans, say if Trump loses the election, he should declare the results invalid and do whatever it takes to assume office, the Public Religion Research Institute thinktank found. Nearly three in 10 Republicans (29%) believe that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.
But progressive activists remain optimistic that America will “turn the page”, as Harris puts it, and make history on Tuesday not by installing a would-be dictator but smashing a long overdue barrier that eluded Hillary Clinton eight years ago.
Leah Greenberg, a co-founder and co-executive director of the Indivisible Project, a grassroots movement, said many of its members who took part in the Women’s March in January 2017 were there because they had already booked flights to Washington, assuming they would attend the inauguration of the first female president.
“They intended to go to celebrate,” she said. “They ended up going to commune with this mass movement of people who were horrified and were organising and then they [went] back home in their communities. They took on leadership roles. They spent the next eight years organising and transforming their own political landscape and now they’re getting to campaign for what they originally were so excited about, which is a woman president.”
Greenberg added: “It’s frustrating, certainly, that we are still fighting Trump but it is also this moment where we have the chance to beat him with the very forces that he is so contemptuous of.”
