DOUGLAS KENNEDY ON THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION - LA TRIBUNE DIMANCHE - CHRONIQUE 1

8 September 2024

THE MATH

A few weeks back, on a peerless August evening in coastal Maine, I was sipping a summery Gin and Tonic with an old friend – a one-time Harvard professor turned management guru. His house – which he shared with his brilliant psychologist wife (herself an accomplished author) – faces an inlet of the Atlantic, surrounded by dense woods; a landscape that could best be described as New England Pastoral, with my friends Fred and Catherine representing for me the best in American life: intelligent, informed, progressive, cultivated individuals who (like most of us of similar educational backgrounds) have found the rise of the authoritarian in our national politics to be beyond vertiginous.

Naturally the conversation turned to the forthcoming election. When I voiced grave

concern about whether Kamala Harris can beat back Donald Trump’s unnerving far right

populism, Fred (himself a southerner by origin) told me:

“Fear not, Douglas. His positions on abortion and reproductive rights have lost him the

support of so many Republican women. He is scaring off the fiscal conservatives who once backed him – because they see he’s crazy. And as the campaign moves forward he’s going to get crazier. Trust me the swell against Trump – and all the danger he represents – is going to grow and grow. I suspect that Harris will win handily”.

Naturally I told him: ‘May your words prove true’. But though there has been an

undeniable wave of enthusiasm toward Vice President Harris as the Democratic Party

nominee once President Biden made the smart call and dropped out of the race, the math still worries me. It doesn’t matter that, as of this week, Harris has opened a four percent lead nationally over Trump. The fact that the former President and his crypto-fascist running mate (the Yale Law School educated JD Vance) are making extreme gaffe after extreme gaffe (including Vance saying that women without children should be barred from teaching in schools) also hasn’t seemingly diminished his support. But even if Harris does established a reasonable seven to eight point lead over the gangster there is still apotential pitfall in her quest to be the first woman President of the United States: can she garner enough swing states in the Electoral College to win the election?

In most countries a President is elected by popular vote. The candidate with the biggest

number wins. In parliamentary democracies the party leader who gains the biggest

number of seats gets to form a government and become Prime Minister. But though all

Americans elections for the Senate and the Congress are also decided by the number of

votes cast, the election of the President is a far more trickier matter. Because – as Al Gore

and Hilary Clinton discovered in 2000 and 2016 respectively – you can win the popular votes by a margin of several million, yet still lose the election because of the way that the

Electoral College works.

Indeed the Electoral College is one of the greater quirks in American democracy – and can be traced back to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 when a then-nascent United

States (just nine years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence from Great

Britain in 1776) was attempting to outline the core operating principals of American

democracy. At the time there was a debate about whether should be elected by direct

popular vote or chosen by the Legislature. The Electoral College emerged as a bad

compromise – where, every four years, a group of electors from every state would gather

to confirm the winner of the largest number of votes in that state and, in turn, the

number of electoral votes assigned to that state. The thinking was that, having an

Electoral College might avoid a mob rule form of electing a President. But as many a canny historian notes today it was also devised as a way of appeasing the so-called ‘slave states’ of the American South at the end of the eighteenth century . As the distinguished Constitutional Law Professor, William U. Codrington, noted in an essay of the racist origins of the Electoral College:

“The populations in the North and the South were approximately equal [in 1787], but

roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its

considerable, nonvoting slave population, that regions would have less clout under a

popular vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the

president… one that could leverage the ‘three-fifths compromise’ [the horrifying notion in

the American South that slaves were only three-fifths a person]… With about 93 percent

of the country’s slavs toiling in just five states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary

of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42

percent”.

Though many Americans (myself included) loathe the Electoral College – because it

operates disproportionally to the popular vote) – the fact is: this is the system we are

stuck with. The states with the most congressional representatives (which, in turn, is

determined by population density) gets the biggest number of electoral votes. Thus

California – with a population of 39 million – has 54 electoral votes, whereas Maine (which

I now call home when in the United States – has a mere three votes, as befits a state with

only 1.385 million residents.

Altogether there are 538 electoral college votes spread across the fifty states that make

up America. The candidate who gets 270 votes wins The White House.

Which, given the disproportionate nature of the Electoral College, means (as aforementioned) that the will of the people is often sidestepped. Consider the situation

today. According to all current state-by-state opinion polls, the divided nature of modern

America – the way we have become two disparate countries, with radically different

versions of our collective future (social democracy with ongoing separation of church and

state versus a coalition of conservative plutocrats, evangelical theocrats, and the tragic

underclass of angry white America) means that the Electoral College divide (red states

versus Democratic blue states) is almost split evenly. Like Biden in 2020, Harris controls both coasts and a few central states, with Trump far ahead in the Midwest, the South and the High West . What this means is that the entire destiny of the 2024 election hinges on just a handful of what are known as Swing States, as they have been known to turn red or blue. Given that Harris has 226 certain electoral votes, with Trump all-but guaranteed 219 electoral votes (according to yesterday’s The New York Times), the race to garner the magic 270 votes will rest on whether Georgia (16  votes), Pennsylvania  (19  votes), Michigan (15 votes), Wisconsin (10 votes), Arizona (11 votes), Nevada (6 votes) and North Carolina (16 votes) tack to the Democrats or the Republican.

As of writing this column, the margins in all of these states are communion wafer thin. For example, in Georgia (which narrowly went to Biden in 2020), Harris is ahead by just 1% (as she is in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania). In Arizona, also a Biden win four years ago, is now tied. And in North Carolina – a state that went to Trump in 2020 by 0.3% – the race is a virtual dead heat.

Which is why the election result is still uncertain – and why, given a few small shifts, Trump could sneak victories in Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina. The same can be said for Harris – with the other swing states a toss-up. As such, this election is far from decided – and for American progressives like me, it remains profoundly unsettling, Especially as we could re-elect a convicted felon who essentially authorized a coup d’etat after losing in 2020. No wonder I find myself frequently thinking: we are truly living in a digitalized version of the nineteen-thirties, where the frontier between ongoing democracy and a bleak totalitarian future is a dangerously fragile one.