With only 49 days remaining until the US presidential election, the political atmosphere remains febrile. Sunday’s assassination attempt against Donald Trump – the second in two months against the Republican candidate – adds further to the tension.
In truth, the election itself is much closer than the nominal voting date of November 5th. In-person and mail-in voting begins within the next week in some parts of the country, including the swing states of Wisconsin and North Carolina. Most states will have followed suit by mid-October. In 2020, more than 100 million votes were cast before election day. That figure was boosted by concerns over Covid, but pandemic-era reforms enabling early voting have remained in place in most states, and it seems likely that many will take advantage of them again.
Trump has ruled out a second debate with Kamala Harris, who was widely judged to have bested him in last week’s encounter in Philadelphia. Post-debate polling suggests a slight shift in the Democrat’s favour, but the race remains on a knife edge. While Harris succeeded in her objective of exposing Trump’s erratic and unstable personality, she did little to address concerns over the economy and immigration – the two most pressing issues for voters, and the ones on which she continues to trail her opponent.
Those who wish to prevent a second Trump term are divided into two camps over the current state of the race. The first believes that Harris is succeeding where Joe Biden failed by turning the election into a referendum on Trump’s fitness for office. They expect this to bear fruit with a growing Harris lead in the polls as the campaign moves into its final stages. For the second camp, though, Harris has so far failed to offer a convincing messaage of real change to voters who remain deeply dissatisfied with the state of the country. This, they believe, could fatally undermine her chances with key demographics in swing states.
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What is certain is that there will be no holding back from Trump. His running mate JD Vance has doubled down on racist untruths about Haitian immigrants resident in the city of Springfield in Ohio, the state he represents in the US senate. The Trumpian strategy of never backing down from a claim, however outrageous or misleading , is familiar from the last two presidential campaigns. But it is now accompanied by a perception, including among some Trump-supporting Republicans, that the campaign is becoming increasingly unmoored from reality, with the candidate more susceptible than ever to the influence of a lunatic fringe of far-right conspiracy theorists. For opponents, this apparent unravelling offers an electoral opportunity. But it adds even further to the debasement of American political discourse and the sense of a nation at war with itself.