Kamala Harris has just one route to power. Donald Trump has two

Kamala-phoria is real among the Democratic Party’s base. But to get a realistic grasp of the US presidential contest, there are three widely held illusions that need to be addressed.

First is that the advent of Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee has transformed the race to the White House. The Democrat base was despondent over Joe Biden. Harris has excited the base. Democrat supporters have embraced her by volunteering in the hundreds of thousands and donating in the hundreds of millions.

Illustration by Dionne Gain

This is a powerful priming for the Democrat campaign. But while it’s necessary for an effective campaign, it’s not sufficient. The campaign itself has yet to materialise. More importantly, the excitement has not yet extended beyond the party base. Harris cannot win with the support of the base alone. She needs the centre, too.

The polls have tightened, no question. But only by an amount equivalent to the margin of error. Donald Trump remains ahead with the slimmest of leads.

On the poll average maintained by the non-partisan Cook Political Report, Trump was ahead of Joe Biden by 2.7 percentage points on the national measure. Today, Trump leads Harris by 1.3 percentage points.

In the all-important swing states, Trump has an advantage, but it’s not insurmountably large. The most realistic assessment on the evidence to date is that the election is essentially an evenly matched contest and, with three months to election day, it could go either way.

But what about all the hoopla you’ve heard about Harris’ vaulting ascendancy? The eminent Democrat strategist David Axelrod says that the Democrats are under the influence of “irrational exuberance”.

The most striking feature of the polls in the US today is that even the most dramatic events make only the most marginal impact.

The Democrat pollster Mark Mellman points to earlier US presidential elections where the opinion polls gyrated by 12, 14, even 16 percentage points in the space of a couple of months.

But today? Biden’s “disastrous” debate moved the polls away from him by less than 1 percentage point. The following three weeks of hysterical Democrat self-flagellation by only another 1.5. And the bombshell of Biden’s withdrawal from the candidacy? That merely won those 1.5 points back again for Harris.

Even the assassination attempt on Trump failed to move the needle. Why? Mellman explains it as a result of partisanship, polarisation and parity. “The three P’s lock voters in, allowing for precious little movement.”

The second illusion is that Trump is floundering. There has been a raft of reports that he has gone “off script”, departed from the campaign plan and brushed aside his advisers. Instead of trying to attack Harris on her policies, he’s “gone rogue” by insulting her personally and running critiques of her person – her laugh, her brains, her claim to “blackness”.

Trump’s insults are evidence, according to the dominant media narrative, that he’s losing. He’s variously been described as unhappy, rattled, off-balance, panicked.

You’d need to have acute amnesia to think that this is Trump “off script”. It’s typical. Trump’s entire political career is little more than a continuous onslaught of insults and racist slurs.

His first political impact was in leading the “birther” campaign against Barack Obama and playing up his middle name – Hussein – to paint him as alien and illegitimate. He began his first presidential campaign descending the golden escalator and denouncing “Mexican rapists”. And so on.

This is not Trump gone rogue. This is Trump the rogue, absolutely in character and on target. It’s inherent in his very character as a right-wing populist. Now he’s applying the right-wing populist treatment – singling out the “other” for scapegoating – to Harris.

Rich Bond, a veteran strategist and former chair of the Republican National Convention, told The New York Times that the Trump campaign has “a two-part list. One is to take Harris down. The second is don’t let Mr Trump be a jerk. That’s the entire list, and the second part may be impossible.” Yes, it’s impossible. Trump doesn’t care.

But surely these sorts of nasty, racist, sexist attacks only alienate the very voters he needs to win over? Women and black voters, especially. If he cared, he’d have chosen a different vice-presidential candidate, maybe a woman or a black person. Instead, he chose J.D. Vance, a Trump mini-me.

This leads to the third illusion – that Trump’s first and only priority is to win the election. Certainly, he’s competing to win. But of paramount importance to Trump is holding the fierce loyalty of his followers. He won’t soften – “play nice” – with Kamala if it risks losing the intense devotion of his hard core MAGA base. In any case, nice Donald would be transparently fake.

If Trump is to win, he will need the MAGA mob to vote for him. But if he loses, he will need the mob to riot for him. After losing the 2020 election he incited his acolytes to storm the Capitol to block the certification of the election.

They failed. Trump never has retracted, never has recanted and repeatedly promises “vengeance”. To this day, he refuses to commit to accepting an election loss. Just a couple of weeks ago he told an audience to vote for him, and he’d “fix it so good you’ll never need to vote again”. He is signalling plainly that he has no regard for the constitution.

Harris has one route to power – to win the election. Trump has two. To win the election or to claim power illegally, by force. The US media is operating under the wilful delusion that this is a “normal” election. But there is no return to “normal” as long as there is Trump.

Trump is a political wrecking ball. He will try to wreck Harris through the electoral system and, if that doesn’t work, he’ll wreck the electoral system. To expect otherwise is an illusion.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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