One candidate is the former twice-impeached US president, Donald Trump, who is a convicted felon and who pursued a coup attempt in January 2021.
The other is the current Vice President, Kamala Harris, the former prosecutor who would become America’s first woman, first Asian-American, and second black president if elected.
The issues are important, even critical. At home, there are women’s rights, including reproductive rights; climate change; health care; the economy; education, and immigration. Abroad, there are policy challenges from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the “open-ended war” Israeli wars in Gaza and Lebanon to co-existence with China. Perhaps above all, there is Trump’s fundamental threat to US democracy and the American system.
How to get to grips with what may be the most important US elections since the end of the US Civil War in 1865?
It’s a toss up election
First, the bottom line. Cut through all the polls since Harris replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee on July 21. Sift all the reports from the ground, the interviews with the “person on the street”, and the take-aways from focus groups.
You’ll find that on November 5, the presidential election will be too close to call.
To understand why, let’s dissect the archaic way that the US chooses its leader: not through the popular vote, but through a convoluted electoral college.
What’s this thing called the electoral college?
America’s national election is actually 51 different votes, the individual ballots in the 50 states and in Washington DC.
In each of those contests, voters are picking a slate of delegates for their preferred candidate. The outcome is winner-take-all, based on the size of the state. In California, 54 delegates are at stake; Alaska or North Dakota has only 3.
In total, there are 568 delegates in the electoral college. So the first candidate to 270 wins.
Simple, right? Far from it. The number of delegates does not change whether a candidate wins a state 70-30 or 51-49. So in two of the last six elections — Al Gore v George W Bush in 2000, and Hillary Clinton v Trump in 2016 — the losing candidate won the popular vote but fell in the electoral college.
The seven states that will decide the election
Barring an unexpected upset, we can allocate 43 states and Washington DC to either Harris or Trump.
Big wins for Harris in California and New York (28 electoral votes) will be balanced by Trump victories in Texas (40) and Florida (30). Other Democratic triumphs in larger states like Illinois (19) and New Jersey (14) will be offset by Trumpist advantages across the majority of smaller states.
So the contest comes down to seven states that are too close to call.
In the “Rust Belt” in the northern US, Pennsylvania (19), Michigan (15), and Wisconsin (10) have decided the last two elections. Trump swept them by a total of 80,000 votes in 2016; Biden took all three by a larger but still slim margin in 2020.
If Harris succeeds in all three this year, she will have a guaranteed 270-268 victory in the clectoral college. (That is because of a quirk in the system: a single delegate in Nebraska, which along with Maine splits its electoral votes. Another story for another time, perhaps.)
But if Trump wins in one of the three states, with Pennsylvania and its 19 delegates the most important, then the Harris campaign will have to prevail in two and possibly three of the other four “swing” states.
Those are in the “Sun Belt” across the southern US: North Carolina (16), Georgia (16), Arizona (11), and Nevada (6). Biden won all except North Carolina in 2020, but Arizona and Georgia had been Republican territory since 1996 and 1992, respectively.
In each of those seven states, Harris and Trump are within 2% of each other in the polls.
Who’s going to win? Issues versus spectacle and fear
I’ll write more in forthcoming weeks about what may determine the outcome on November 5, but here’s the opening line: a contest decided by issues favours Harris and her Vice Presidential running mate Tim Walz.
In part, that is because of their advantage on women’s rights, given the threat to millions by the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade and almost half of US states effectively banning abortion.
The Democrats also can highlight their achievements with health care, and the security of a US system which Trump tried to overturn after his loss in the 2020 election.
But in larger part, it is because Trump doesn’t do issues. He pays scant attention to the substance, preferring insults and lies.
Frustrated staff and donors have tried since late July to get him to focus on the economy and immigration. Instead, he and his VP pick JD Vance have pushed soundbites like “childless cat ladies” and “immigrants will eat your cats and dogs”. Had there been more than one Trump-Harris debate, that approach might have turned into a meltdown.
The saving grace for Trump is that issues are not always the priority in the vote.
American politics have always been about spectacle, and in the 21st-century era of social media, Trump can claim to be the Greatest Showman. Each outrageous tweet or rally soundbite can seize the news cycle, not to be derided or dismantled, but to be gawked at and amplified.
Look back on 2016 and you will struggle to see a single issue in the Trump-Clinton showdown. Instead, the campaign was defined by Trump, the purported billionaire, claiming to represent the working person with Make America Great Again.
The drama of his sexual harassment of women was overtaken by “Hillary’s e-mails”. He even got away with literally stalking Clinton across a debate stage.
In 2020, the covid pandemic may have been divisive by ensuring that issues returned to centre stage. But in 2024, that real fear may have been supplanted by a “culture of fear” whipped up by Trump and Vance through misinformation.
The economic headlines in the US are positive in 2024. Inflation has fallen from 9% two years ago to less than 3%. GDP is growing by about 3%, a higher rate than in almost all developed countries. Petrol prices, traditionally a marker of well-being, have dropped steadily this year.
But what matters is not reality but whether Americans don’t ‘feel’ they are better off. And that is where Trump’s rhetoric of “carnage” and decline can take hold.
Similarly, undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border has dropped by 77% since December 2023. A bipartisan deal on border security, crafted by the Biden-Harris Administration with Republicans, was sabotaged by Trump in early 2024.
But if Americans buy into the falsehood of Trump and Vance that “millions” of “terrorist” immigrants are crossing the border, they may feel only fear rather than reality.
So who is going to win? If I knew that, I would be at the bookies rather than writing this column.
Scott Lucas is Professor of International Politics at the Clinton Institute, University College Dublin; Professor Emeritus of International Politics at the University of Birmingham; and editor-in-chief of EA WorldView