Harris-Walz ticket may have the upper hand — but can they keep it?

The two slates from the major political parties for the American presidential election are now settled. It is Donald Trump, the former president, and Ohio Senator JD Vance for the Republicans versus incumbent Vice-President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for the Democrats. With incumbent President Joe Biden no longer in the hunt for re-election, the American electoral contest has now been launched in earnest. The world should pay attention.

Yes, there are also minor candidates such as Robert F Kennedy Jr, Cornel West and Jill Stein. However, their electoral fortunes will be unlikely to factor in the outcome unless the results of the vote in a big, closely divided state hangs on a few hundred ballots.

Beyond the presidential election, the entirety of the House of Representatives, a third of the Senate, numerous governors and thousands of state and local positions will also be voted for in the election on 5 November. In some states, there will be controversial referendums on divisive public policy issues, including iterations of state rules on women’s reproductive rights.

As readers of these columns know, American presidential elections are not settled by the popular vote. Rather they are won or lost, state by state. Winning a state by even the slenderest of margins means the full weight of that state’s electoral vote (effectively its population size) goes to that candidate.

There are 538 electoral votes to be won, thus a presidential victory means gaining at least 270 of those votes. Maine and Nebraska divide their electoral votes by congressional districts rather than as statewide wins or loses. 

This system evolved as the founders of the American republic, back in 1787, were torn between their fears of rule by the mob or rule by a despot and so they fashioned a complex compromise for the selection of a chief executive. Over time, the Electoral College has become little more than a near-abstraction of names pledged to support the winner of each state’s result in the presidential vote.

This year, until the two major party tickets had been set, and especially since the choice had apparently been heading into a grudge match between two old geezers (one of whom was now a convicted felon) whom many citizens seemed to be displeased with either way, the race was generating little enthusiasm among the general public.

Yes, politicians, political operatives and strategists, media commentators and issue activists had been deeply engaged with this lengthy process leading to the 2024 election for months – if not years – but that was not a general feeling. 

For the ordinary person, save for committed Maga cultists, enthusiasm remained in short supply. Still, it is fairly usual over the first half of any election year. Many Americans are now on summer vacations, students are on their summer breaks and ordinary people, just as always, face the quotidian struggles of making home budgets stretch from payday to payday, along with the usual challenges of raising families amid the pressures of everyday life.

Rejuvenated Democratic campaign

But there can be no denying that, at least for now, the Democratic Party’s ticket has generated a great bubble of enthusiasm and excitement, now that their champion has been named. Their indoor rallies have been pulling in tens of thousands of happy, enthusiastic people. And this has been taking place despite efforts by a visibly discomfited Donald Trump who has denied the reality of those crowds, arguing the images are AI-generated fakes. A multitude of eyewitness accounts argue otherwise.

In contrast to the earlier Trump coronation and its reliance upon has-been celebrities like Hulk Hogan, the Democratic Party’s convention that begins on 19 August in Chicago will feature speeches by incumbent President Biden, former President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Biden and Hillary Clinton are expected to speak on Monday, Obama on Tuesday and Bill Clinton on Wednesday.

Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz will accept his nomination on Wednesday night, and on the final night of the convention, the party’s presidential nominee, Kamala Harris will formally accept her presidential nomination in a speech on Thursday evening. 

Read more: The epitome of Midwestern values, Tim Walz could be the Democrats’ trump card

Harris’s nomination is a foregone conclusion since an electronic polling of convention delegates resulted in an overwhelming endorsement of her candidacy. (A small group of uncommitted delegates have been lobbying for a chance to address the convention although this request may not be granted.)

The earlier push for a switch in candidates away from Joe Biden had gathered momentum in the wake of his woeful performance at the CNN debate with Donald Trump.

Now that the switch has taken place, for their part, Trump and his campaign management team seem disoriented by the change in the Democrats’ presidential candidate. At this point, they have been attacking her background, her friends, her political life, her IQ, her ethnicity, and even, just occasionally, the policies she has espoused. 

Meanwhile, the attacks on Harris’ running mate have begun to coalesce around Tim Walz’s presumed ultra-liberal political views, his policies to ensure sanitary towels are available in school lavatories (oh c’mon, really!), his leading of multiple student study tours to China, and certain aspects of his military career. 

For the latter charge, Walz is being subjected to the same kind of ugly smear attack that had fatally undermined Senator John Kerry’s bid for the presidency two decades ago in 2004. In Walz’s case, the charge is that he retired from his service in the Minnesota National Guard rather than be deployed to Iraq. 

However, it is a matter of public record Walz resigned after 24 years of service — and well before orders for overseas duty would have been issued, in order to run for Congress without any conflicts of interest. His relatively minor indiscretion of saying he carried “weapons of war” rather than trained his unit for such activity has now become a big talking point for Republican candidate JD Vance.

Missing in all this is the fact Donald Trump never served at all due to medical exemptions derived from very likely spurious records of bone spurs, at the time of the Vietnam conflict.

Read more: Kamala Harris & the world — where does the presidential candidate stand on foreign policy?

In the midst of all this, Donald Trump has appeared on the Elon Musk-owned “X” online platform (rather than Trump’s own outlet, Truth Social) for what had been promoted as a conversation between two like-minded, publicly engaged, thoughtful men.

The programme suffered numerous technical glitches that delayed it from beginning for more than half an hour. Throughout, it featured the kind of mutual teenager, sports buddy, backslapping that might even have made disgraced former Fox News host Tucker Carlson cringe a bit. 

Whether the transmission actually helped sway any undecided voters, however, is unlikely, although it may have provided some encouragement to those already inside the Maga tent. Musk appears to be providing significant funding for the Trump campaign and its aligned PACs. Such bodies are not supposed to be directly connected to candidates, but they may engage in efforts on behalf of issues, policies, and general mayhem.

On Wednesday, 14 August, Donald Trump gave what was billed as a roll-out of his economic policies in a speech in Asheville, North Carolina. This came two days before Kamala Harris’ own planned economic policy-heavy speech at the end of the week in Raleigh, North Carolina. That state is possibly, just possibly, up for grabs between the candidates, although the Republican candidate is still seen as leading among likely voters.

Battle of the economic policies

More generally, Harris seems to have pulled into a statistical dead heat or even slightly ahead nationally — depending on which poll is being cited. And she is beginning to catch up in a number of the crucial swing states.

Trump’s North Carolina speech, while it did contain economic policy nuggets, they were embedded in a wave of personal attacks, lies, misstatements of facts, exaggerations and more general incoherence. According to Axios, among those were promises of “massive tax cuts if he’s elected, courting voters with big giveaways without discussing how they’ll pay for it. Why it matters: Trump’s big policy legacy was his tax cuts in 2017. Now he’s promising to go much further in 2025.

“With his offerings spelled out on the backdrop of his rally in Asheville, N.C., Trump listed promises for voters who think the economy isn’t working. For service workers: No taxes on your tips. [Harris is promoting a similar pledge now.] Price tag is $250 billion a year. For seniors: No taxes on your Social Security. Price tag is roughly $150 billion a year. For people who want lower bills: Trump promises to cut the price of electricity in half. The U.S. is the world’s leading oil producer. For everyone else: The Trump tax cuts will be extended in 2025. Left unsaid in Trump’s promises: How to pay for them, and how to protect Social Security while cutting taxes.” 

Election promises are, of course, easy to make even as they are infinitely more difficult to deliver — especially when the costs become clearer.

Once Kamala Harris sets out her own economic policies for public viewing, one can bet on Republican critiques of many of those points, as well as critical analyses by commentators that hone in on specific issues and contradictions in the proposals.

Moreover, the GOP will continue with major critiques of the immigration record of the Biden administration of which Harris has obviously been a part, as well as the economic conditions of the nation. Economic concerns remain as one of the top two issues for many voters — even as job growth continues, wages are rising faster than inflation, unemployment remains low and inflation is now under 3% (although that means prices are not falling from their previous increases).

One other thing to watch for will be how the Democrats handle pro-Palestinian demonstrators who are promising to mobilise in demonstrations at the party’s convention in Chicago. A previous Democratic convention in the same city, in 1968, provided vivid, sometimes bloody scenes of struggles between the police and protesters opposing America’s role in Vietnam — in what was later called a “police riot”.

Those events almost certainly contributed to then-vice-president Hubert Humphrey’s defeat that year. Democratic Party leaders are clearly hoping to avoid anything like that this time around and to demonstrate party unity as opposed to deep fissures. DM