Current swing state polls give Trump a slight edge over Harris, though with margins of error, these numbers should be interpreted cautiously.
Both candidates are on the brink of historic milestones. A Trump victory would make him the second president in US history, after Grover Cleveland 132 years ago, to lose office and reclaim it. Harris, meanwhile, aims to become the first woman to hold the nation’s highest office.
Early voting has seen unprecedented numbers, with over 78 million ballots already cast—almost half of 2020’s record 160 million turnout, according to University of Florida data.
CNBC-TV18 spoke to experts Brian Bonner, Senior Journalist; Christopher Clary, Associate Professor at the University of Albany; KC Singh, Former Diplomat; and Lisa Curtis, from the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, to examine the key election trends.
Below are the excerpts of the interview.
Q: Kamala Harris has a razor-thin edge in this election against Donald Trump. But how do you think Harris has evolved from Joe Biden’s running mate in 2019-2020 to becoming the Democrat presidential candidate just a few months ago?
Singh: The problem for Kamala Harris was that she had to both distance herself from Biden because Biden is one of the most unpopular presidents at the end of the term and at the same time, not appear ungrateful because he’s after all made her the heir to his legacy. It’s a game she has played well. She’s not really openly criticised anything that Biden had done. But slowly she’s distanced herself.
Take Israel, for instance. She did it by not going to Netanyahu’s address to Congress, even though as Vice President she was supposed to preside over it. She’s done those things to convey it subtly. But even then, in some places, she will probably suffer because of it.
In Massachusetts, in Michigan, there’s a huge number of Arab and Muslim votes, which may not come to her. Normally it would come to the Democrats, but in this case, because of the Biden policy on Gaza, on Israel, not appearing to contain them, it may not come to them. But at the same time, you never know. They’re not going to vote for Trump either. That’s why this election is very difficult to predict because there are Republicans who may not vote for Trump but will not openly say so.
There may be people in the middle who are just shifting. Out of the women vote, very clearly, and that’s what the latest polls out of Iowa indicated, that the women are voting in much larger numbers than they voted for Biden or for anyone else before this, which includes white women. Now these are all new elements, and therefore the voters may or may not be able to register.
Q: Do you think the women voters in America hold the key to the White House in the last lap, in these last 24 to 40 hours?
Clary: The problem we have in the US is polling is broken. People don’t answer their phones, traditional methods don’t work. We’ve had to put together panels, trying to use online methods, other things. And we’re driving in the dark here. I think the sense is it’s quite close. No single poll, including, a recent one by Ann Selzer, a famous pollster in Iowa, that showed somewhat to people’s surprise that she found Kamala Harris ahead, no single poll tells us anything definitive. And so we have to wait, I think, until the votes are counted in this case. Just because of this era we’re entering into where we don’t have the old survey tools that used to work and still work to a large extent in places like India and Pakistan, where I sometimes do survey work.
Q: Asian-Americans, Indian-Americans more specifically, how important is this as a voting group in the United States this time around in this election and in the seven battleground states?
Clary: There’s a famous book on Indian-Americans in the US called The Other 1%. It is a growing, important minority group in the US. They are still strongly Democratic, but there has been some erosion in the asymmetry of their support for the Democratic Party according to polls. This is still a small group that is unlikely to sway the vote in any given state, but to the extent that some of these states might be very close, who knows? Any single constituency could matter in a close election, but it’s a vote that matters for American politicians, more so at the level of the House of Representatives than at the presidential level.
Q: By when do you actually expect to see a final result or some of the key news outlets in the United States to call the election, considering it’s so close and it’s going to go down to the wire, do you think it will take longer than usual for news outlets to call this election?
Bonner: If it is close, but I’m going to go out on a limb and you can play it back if I’m wrong because I’ve been wrong before, but I don’t think it’s going to be close for many reasons that your speakers have already discussed. I think it’s breaking and I think it’s breaking in Kamala Harris’s way. I think North Carolina and Michigan, a couple of the swing states are very quick at counting and I think we’ll know from there. I think Iowa was the shocker. If the Iowa poll was correct, I think that shows that the polling is off. We’ve seen huge numbers of early voters, huge numbers of women. They break for Kamala Harris and of course, the men break for Donald Trump. So if I had to predict right now, I don’t think it would be close. I think we’ll know Tuesday night. I hope so, as an American, because even though I live in Ukraine, I believe that it’ll be very nasty if it’s very close and very contested and we get into another situation like 2020 or the year 2000.
Q: Is foreign policy a major issue on the ballot in America?
Curtis: I think it is an issue, but I think domestic issues are even more important right now. Immigration, crime, the economy, inflation—these are really the issues that are driving the campaigns of both candidates.
Foreign policy came more into play when we saw the debates, both the debate between former President Trump and Vice President Harris, as well as the vice presidential candidates. At that time, I think we saw more of a focus on foreign policy. But lately, I think the issues have really been domestic. They’ve been focused on the issues I just discussed. They’ve also been focused on how each side is campaigning.
Unfortunately, there’s been a lot of attacks on each candidate, as well as some unseemly rhetoric, that’s been happening here. So that’s unfortunate. It would be better if both sides stuck to the issues at hand, but we have seen some of that happening in the last few weeks, but I do expect that, most people will be placing their votes based largely on their concerns about what’s happening inside the United States.
Q: Do you believe that the harsh stand that Donald Trump has taken on immigration, also on issues such as abortion, has led women in America across communities to unify, also the Asian Americans, the African Americans to unite, maybe in favour of Kamala Harris?
Curtis: I don’t think it’s really that simple. I think what we’ve seen is a lot of differences in how these communities are reacting, and how they’re responding. For instance, we saw that black male Americans weren’t necessarily supporting Kamala Harris. This is why former President Obama came out and lectured them, trying to get them to change their support for Kamala Harris. This was unexpected.
Also, the Latina vote has been very unpredictable in terms of where that’s going, and we have seen Trump be able to get some of those communities that you might normally see voting Democratic, supporting him for various reasons. Maybe it’s about the economy; maybe it’s about immigration. I think people don’t understand that legal immigrants to the United States often become very angry about illegal immigration. That has been in Trump’s favour, that he has come down so hard on illegal immigration—that’s even gotten him support from some minority communities in the United States. So what I’m trying to say is there has been a complete breakdown of sort of the conventional wisdom with this election. Individuals are voting, who they feel will be the best candidate for their own sort of personal interest, and that varies, as we can see by our very divided electorate.
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