By Martin Woodley
From October 2023 Donald Trump opened up a clear lead over President Biden in the poll averages up until the ‘hush money trial’ in April – May 2024. Trump again opens a major lead over Biden in June which continues to widen as concern about Biden’s health and mental acuity take hold, especially after the first televised debate. Trump’s polling makes a second surge following the failed assassination attempt on 13 July.
Fig. 1 shows the average of opinion polling between the beginning of April to the present. Prior to 21 July the polls show Trump widening a lead over Biden; after 21 July they show Trump vs Harris. It clearly shows that while Biden was falling further behind Trump, the Biden campaign entered a crisis in early July following his disastrous performance in the first televised presidential debate of the campaign on 27 June. Biden’s withdrawal and Harris’ subsequent adoption as the Democratic Party candidate immediately resulted in a recovery in Democrat fortunes, with Harris overtaking Trump in the polls moving into the first Trump vs Harris debate on 10 September. Rolling Stone described the effort aimed at “burnishing Harris’ public image”, spearheaded by Emily’s List, the largest and most influential PAC supporting Democratic women.
“A year ago, it would have been hard for anyone to predict such a stunning reversal in popular opinion. At the start of July, Harris’ favorability rating was more than 17 points underwater, according to tracking by FiveThirtyEight. That’s near where Biden’s approval rating still hovers — near-historic lows for a sitting president, and lower than Trump’s at the same point in his presidency. But by September, Harris’ favorability was roughly even — meaning a lot of people changed their minds about her in a very short amount of time. At least some of the credit for that goes to an effort launched last summer.”
The immediate reasons for the sudden reversal of fortunes lay in the obvious relief that Biden had left the race; a recovery among black and latinx voters; and an audacious non-attendance at Netanyahu’s address to Congress, where Harris instead attended the national convention of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority, one of the nation’s oldest university organisations for African American female students.
However, Harris’ previous high profile in the Democrat campaign against the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, eventually led to some notable gains.
“Voter registration data shows promising signs for Harris. Analyst Tom Bonier, one of the first to detect a Dobbs-motivated voter-registration trend in 2022, has said what he is seeing since Harris became the nominee eclipses even that post-Dobbs boom.
Across 13 states that had updated their registration data by early September, Bonier observed an 83.7 percent increase in registration among young women the week after Harris’ elevation, compared with the same period four years earlier. Among younger Hispanic women, that increase was 149 percent. And among young Black women it was a stunning 175 percent.”
The debate itself – and Harris’ performance in it – has completely neutralised the effect of Biden’s disastrous performance, which led to major campaign donors withholding funds. In fact, since it was clear that Kamala Harris was going to become the Democratic Party candidate, Harris has consistently outperformed Trump on the fundraising trail.
Polls just prior to the debate showed Trump closing the gap with Harris, and with a small 1% point lead over Harris just days prior, which led to the Democrats turning their fire on Green Party candidate Jill Stein. The closeness of the race is further shown by the projections, not just for presidential electoral college votes, but also for the congressional outcomes in the November election. These are shown in Fig.2, where (a) shows the projection for the electoral college; (b) shows the projection for seats in the House of Representatives; and (c) shows the projection for seats in the Senate. In all three cases, the finely balanced nature of these elections is self-evident. Indeed, the race is tied in the battleground states where the lead is again well within the margin of error.
Moreover, aside from the election being decided largely in the battleground states, it is widely understood that in general, the metropolitan districts vote Democrat, while rural and small town districts vote Republican. The race is contested largely in the suburban districts. Here, Trump commands a lead on the economy, due to the Biden administration’s disastrous performance. However, Harris commands a massive lead among women on the issue of restrictive state abortion laws, while Trump commands a massive lead among white men on the issue of immigration across the southern border.
However, a number of interesting facts arise on inspection of the historic popularity of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates alongside the policy stances of the two Parties.
Favourability of the candidates
Fig. 3
Fig.3 shows Trump’s favourability from 2017 to the present. It can be seen that his net favourability has been negative throughout the entire period. Next, consider Biden, shown in Fig. 4, who was the Democratic Party candidate up until he was forced to stand down on 21 July. This is important because not only does Harris take responsibility for the administration’s policies, but the CNN interview of Harris/Walz with Dana Bush confirmed that she stands by, and intends to continue the Biden policy framework. This shows that while his net favourability was initially positive at the beginning of his presidency, it turned negative later in 2021, and continued negative up until the present.
Fig. 4
Next, consider the net favourability for Kamala Harris which is shown in Fig. 5. It can be seen that like for Biden it begins positive, but again turns negative later in 2021 and stays negative up until the present. There is a late surge following Biden’s withdrawal from the candidacy in late June, but remains overall negative..
Fig. 5
Now consider the Vice-Presidential candidates, JD Vance for the Republicans and Tim Walz for the Democrats. These are shown in Figs 6 and 7 for the period from the beginning of August until the present. It can be seen that J D Vance has a negative net favourability, while Tim Walz has a small positive net favourability.
Fig. 6
It can be seen that both Presidential candidates, the incumbent President, and one of the Vice-Presidential candidates have overall net negative favourability – the Presidential candidates and the incumbent for extended periods of time. Only the Democratic Party Vice-Presidential candidate has a small net positive favourability. Moreover, the Presidential candidates, the incumbent, and J D Vance are very well known political personalities, whereas Tim Walz is a relative unknown in their company. This suggests that their shared unpopularity reflects in some way the shared unpopularity of their Parties.
Fig. 7
Politics of the Democratic and Republican Parties
Both the Democratic and Republican Parties represent the same class interests – that of the US imperialist ruling class. Their policy differences reflect only the sensibilities of their respective voting constituencies. As mentioned previously, metropolitan districts generally vote Democrat while rural and small town districts generally vote Republican. The suburbs are generally where the inter-party struggle is conducted. Otherwise, the interests of the imperialist ruling class will be reflected – through the prism of the respective voting constituency sensibilities – in the policy platforms of both parties. This is as true of foreign policy as it is of domestic policy. Only where the fundamental dividing lines of US politics come to fore and are reflected in opposing interests of the respective voting constituencies will seriously diverging policy positions be taken.
Therefore, there is no disagreement within the various sections of the ruling class on the need to confront and contain China in order to secure continuing US hegemony. Therefore, the trade war with China was initiated by Obama, drastically escalated by Trump, and escalated further by Biden. Whoever becomes President in November, the militarisation of the South and East China Seas will continue, as will the attempt to de-globalise the world economy and re-shore production to the US.
Furthermore, Trump threatened the Europeans over the Nord Stream pipelines, and Biden repeated the threats, and it is to the advantage of the US position that Nord Stream 2 was sabotaged. There is a difference over the approach to the war in Ukraine, but this is really a difference over the extent to which the US should be involved in Europe given the imperative to concentrate on China. This difference however, will be constrained by the shared necessity to limit as far as possible the effects of a defeat of the West by Russia.
There is no disagreement over the US’s unconditional support for Israel, and the necessity to continue to supply it with arms and financial and diplomatic support, come what may. For the Democrats, this is even worth risking the loss of the election due to the much higher support for the Palestinian struggle among the Democrat base than among the Republican base. Indeed, there is evidence that electorally, supporting a Gaza ceasefire and an arms embargo to Israel would benefit the Democrats in swing states. Yet, despite the ‘uncommitted’ delegates – totalling 30 and representing 700,000 Democratic Primary electors – were not permitted to address the Democratic National Convention.
There is no disagreement over the approach to the left governments in Latin America or to the process of eurasian integration – that is to say, whoever wins the Presidential election will seek to destabilise left Latin American governments and eurasian integration as much as possible.
What is true in foreign policy is also true in domestic policy. Despite the mainstream puffing up the economic performance of the US, conditions of life for ordinary working people in the US have deteriorated under both Democrat and Republican administrations. Fig.8 shows the number of people working multiple jobs where the primary job is full time. It can be seen that these numbers increased during both the Trump and Biden administrations.
Fig. 8
Fig. 9 shows the personal savings rate. A steady decline occurred from 1975 until the financial crisis in 2008-9. After a modest rise during the Obama administration, it stabilised at a low level under Trump, and after anomalous Covid lockdown affected spikes declined precipitously during the later Biden administration. Therefore, both of these combined indicate that disposable income has steadily declined over a long period of time through both Republican and Democrat administrations.
Fig. 9
Fig. 10 shows the cumulative change in real hourly wages between 1979 to 2023 in the US for different wage groups. The lowest paid workers have seen their real wages increase just 17% over the period – an average of 0.4% annually. If we take out the pandemic-era’s period of strong wage growth for low-wage workers, this figure drops to 0.1% between 1979 and 2019. By contrast, real wages boomed at an annualised rate of 2.9% over the pandemic, outpacing wage growth in the previous 40 years combined. Notably, middle-wage earners fared little better in wage growth than low-wage earners.
A similar trend of slow wage growth can be seen across all other income groups apart from the highest income earners. Therefore, while median wages have risen under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the biggest increases are ever more concentrated among the very highest earners.
Fig. 10
So, considering that economic and foreign policies largely overlap between the Democrats and Republicans, why has politics become so polarised in the US, especially since the early 1990’s? The explanation for this could lie in the fact that some of the fundamental issues are coming to the surface. These have been explored previously. For instance, see here and here. This brought to a close the period of Republican political dominance constructed by the adoption of the Southern Strategy by the Nixon administration and successive Republican party managers.
The primary trends currently taking place are the differential demographic increases in the non-white in comparison to the white population, and the propensity of the non-white population to vote more for the Democrats than for the Republicans. This has necessitated an attack of immense proportions on the voting rights of primarily non-white communities in an attempt to hold back the tide. This is argued for through an appeal against a supposed massive voting fraud perpetrated by the Democrats, bolstered by massive unconstrained immigration over the Southern border. This is the central theme of Trump’s election campaign.
This intersects with the primary division in US politics – the racial division of the working class, which was established right at the earliest times of the original English colonies of Virginia and Maryland, where the kernel of the future working class consisted of indentured servants from England and African slaves. It is this division of the working class along racial lines, and the enlistment of white workers to aid the oppression of black workers over very considerable periods of time which has maintained a peculiar weakness of US workers in comparison to the working class in other comparable countries. Therefore, there has never been an enduring social democratic tradition, any truly mass socialist or communist parties, and therefore no real threat to the rule of the capitalist class. With the growth of the metropolitan centres and the increasing weight of the non-white population, this is increasingly coming under threat, as was demonstrated in the summer of 2020.
That is why the so called ‘culture wars’, which comprise the core of the political polarisation, have become so prominent. Of course, questions of gender and sexuality pertain as aspects of ‘metropolitan values’. Because the Democrats have their strongholds in the relatively multicultural metropolitan centres, and the Republicans have their strongholds in the relatively monocultural rural periphery and small towns, the semi-periphery of the suburbs are the arena of the fiercest struggle. Here Harris’ campaign against the Dobbs decision and Trump’s crusade against immigration may well be the decisive battles.
Image: Still images of Trump and Harris at the ABC News Presidential Debate, captured from the BBC’s news report (https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cewlvvlyl8ro); Fair use.