It’s the most volatile election in living memory and anything can and will happen

In five decades of living alternately on the two sides of the Pacific, I have never seen anything like it. The political atmosphere in America is far more pessimistic, partisan and polarising than anything seen in Australia.

The left’s venomous hatred of Donald Trump, with its comparisons with Adolf Hitler, is matched by the right’s loathing of the Democrats and hostility towards liberals. On political shows, talking heads of old have become shouting heads.

Meanwhile, in the centre, inhabited by about a third of Americans, there is despair at the extremism of both left and right.

Indeed, this year’s presidential election campaign seems more volatile than anything seen in the US since 1968 – with the race riots, war protests, political assassinations and burning of the cities.

Witness the extraordinary twists and turns during the past few weeks: the sudden debacle of the presidential debate; the near-assassination of a former president; the sudden scratching of the incumbent President from the race; the sudden elevation of a Vice-President her own party had deemed a serious burden; and then, lo and behold, the same VP suddenly pulling even in the presidential contest.

What makes matters even more turbulent is the global disorder: from eastern Europe to northeast Asia to the Middle East, the world faces several threats that could easily spin out of control and suck Uncle Sam into more 21st-century quagmires.

All this reminds one of the final episode of Fawlty Towers, the brilliant English comedy of the 1970s. The local health and safety inspector confronts a hapless Basil Fawlty with a long and horrendous list of everything that is wrong with his hotel, including a filthy kitchen, inadequate temperature control, cracked and missing wall and floor tiles, lack of hand basins and – gasp! – two dead pigeons in the water tank. To which actor John Cleese replies: “Otherwise, OK?”

Well, for many Americans and indeed many people around the world, things are far from OK.

One can be forgiven for thinking the 2024 US presidential race – a contest between a left-wing firebrand from the union’s most left-wing state and a rude, crude, lewd buffoon charged with four indictments – is like what Henry Kissinger thought of the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s: it’s too bad both sides can’t lose.

It’s a truism in contemporary US politics that to win the White House a candidate needs to win over independents and undecideds in about seven key swing states: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona. The question is whether Trump or Kamala Harris, notwithstanding their many flaws, can appeal to these swing voters.

The 78-year-old Trump taps into legitimate grievances about lax border controls, identity politics, energy prices and the direction of US foreign policy under neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists. As distinguished British historian Niall Ferguson warns, any great power that spends more on servicing its debt than on defence will not stay great for long. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, recognise this banal truth.

To reorder US strategic priorities away from Europe to Asia is hardly isolationist. It is a prudent recognition of the limits to power in a multipolar world that does not accommodate the US dominating the globe as it did during unipolarity. It is also consistent with Barack Obama’s much-touted pivot to Asia more than a decade ago that was aimed to counter the China threat.

Yet Trump’s polarising style of politics, much less his character and temperament, disgusts many independents and even right-leaning suburban voters.

Bret Stephens, the award-winning columnist from The New York Times and a recent guest of the public policy research organisation I head, reflects the views of many Americans on the right intellectual spectrum when he laments that Trump has “done the most to reshape the Republican Party into something unrecognisable to someone like me, who grew up in Ronald Reagan’s shadow”.

In Stephens’s judgment, Trump’s main crime is to smash “the old conservative consensus, which believed in classically liberal ideals like free trade, strong international alliances and the benefits of immigration, as well as some classically conservative ones, like the necessity of moral character in political leadership and civility in public life”.

Remember Trump and Vance pledge a 10 per cent across-the-board tariff that is reminiscent of the trade protectionism that helped turn a great recession into the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Add to this their support for a mass deportation of immigrant workers, who have been a source of American growth, and it’s no wonder so many age-old conservative institutions – from publications such as National Review and The Wall Street Journal editorial page to think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute – are profoundly uneasy about Trump mark II.

Then there is 59-year-old Harris: the prospect of America having its first female president, who’s also black, has energised millions – not just ethnic minorities but also the young and those who have never voted.

But Harris is also a San Francisco Democrat – a metropolitan sophisticate whose politics are fundamentally at odds with the thoughts and attitudes of Middle America – and she has chosen as her running mate a fellow left-winger from Minnesota, which has not voted Republican since 1972.

The Democrat ticket promises more of the same regulation and subsidies of Joe Biden, plus huge tax increases – even as Harris tacks or changes her lines on various issues such as fracking. For those who believe America’s greatest strength, from which the world benefits, is the can-do individualism that fuels its economy, Harris and Tim Walz present a worrying prospect. What is also disturbing about Harris is her refusal to subject herself to any media scrutiny. In the three weeks she has been the Democratic candidate, Harris has not faced one press conference or interview with a senior journalist. Can you imagine a new Australian prime minister or opposition leader shying away from any interviews or press conferences weeks out from an election?

According to Gerard Baker, a regular contributor to The Times and The Wall Street Journal, the American mainstream media may well do “what they nearly got away with doing for Biden the last few years and cover for someone evidently incapable of holding office”.

All this makes for an unhappy country and helps explains why the race is a dead heat: all the available opinion polling evidence suggests Harris is now breaking even with Trump in battleground states.

But how reliable are the polls? In 2016 and even 2020, polls massively underestimated Trump’s strengths. A few weeks out from both elections, Hillary Clinton and Biden held commanding double-digit point leads. Yet both elections were exceedingly close. Then again, the polls before the November 2022 congressional midterms predicted a big Republican victory in the House of Representatives. They, too, were wrong.

In the most volatile election in living memory, even the most seasoned observers of American politics have no idea what will happen on November 5. Does anybody?

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies.