Small things like these could win it for Harris … or Trump

In little over a week’s time, if the result of the presidential election is clear, opinion pages will be awash with declarative columns explaining why Americans had opted for a Trump restoration or sent the country’s first female president to the Oval Office. With the clarity of hindsight, the reasons will be blindingly obvious. A grand narrative of this epic election will take shape. Hot takes will harden into a preliminary draft of history.

There is a collection of overarching storylines from which to choose. If Trump wins, expect to hear that Clintonian mantra from the 1992 campaign: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Another hardy perennial will also get a run: America was not ready to vote for a female commander-in-chief.

A grand narrative of this epic US presidential election will take shape once the votes are counted.Credit: Monique Westermann

Immigration will be part of the post-mortem: the inexplicable failure of the Biden administration to do more to tackle the crisis at the southern border with Mexico. Doubtless there will be conjecture about whether Kamala Harris was the right torchbearer after Joe Biden stepped aside. A black woman was always going to struggle to win those must-win, muscly Rust Belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And she was also a northern Californian, a liberal enclave firmly associated with woke culture and the Democratic Party’s leftward drift.

If Trump is defeated, the view will take hold that he lost the 2024 election on January 6, 2021. Americans weren’t prepared to re-elect a former president who mounted such a flagrant attack on democracy. Thereafter, his criminal conviction, intemperate rants, threats of retribution against political opponents and a weird 39-minute dance routine at a town-hall event were just too much for wavering voters. These concerns were crystallised by Sunday’s mega-MAGA rally at Madison Square Garden, with its overt racism and fascistic overtones.

A president-elect Kamala Harris will also have benefited from the decision of the conservative-dominated Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade. A massive turnout among women, angry at the curbing of reproductive rights and determined to reassert control over their bodies, will have shattered one of the most durable glass ceilings in global politics.

All these storylines are valid. Doubtless I will end up composing a post-election column covering similar ground. But in these final days, it is the subplots I find intriguing, the small things that could shift a few thousand votes here and there and thus determine the outcome. The Donald could be in the detail. Or perhaps Harris will be the beneficiary of small things.

Consider Pennsylvania, the richest battleground prize of all because it harbours the largest number of electoral college votes (19). There, the Trump campaign has mounted an effective registration drive, aimed at negating the Democrats’ long-standing advantage. In 2020, there were 685,818 more Democrats registered than Republicans in a state that Biden carried narrowly by 80,555 votes. Now, the Republicans have whittled down the Democrats’ registration advantage to just 312,725.

To compound her Rust Belt problem, Harris has not secured the backing of the two important labour unions. The International Association of Fire Fighters backed Biden in 2020 and virtually every other Democrat for the past 40 years – it did not back Hillary Clinton in 2016. This year, however, it is not endorsing either candidate. Nor is the Teamsters union backing the Democrats, adding to her blue-collar blues.

The Rust Belt is also the home to small but significant pockets of Arab-American voters, for whom the aftermath of the terrorist attack of October 7 is more important than January 6. Ominously for Harris, four years ago Muslim-American and Arab-American voters provided Biden’s margin of victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Then there’s the often-overlooked Jill Stein factor. The Green Party presidential candidate almost certainly cost Hillary Clinton the presidency in 2016 by siphoning off Democrat votes in pivotal states.

Nor should we overlook Nebraska and its so-called “blue dot” – the electoral vote decided by the people of the 2nd Congressional District – in one of only two states that aren’t winner-takes-all. If Harris swept the three swing Rust Belt states along with the ones she is expected to carry, she would have 269 electoral votes. The “blue dot” would enable her to reach the magic number of 270.

Now, in the aftermath of that ugly hatefest at Madison Square Garden, we are rightly fixated by Puerto Rican voters offended by a racist joke by comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, who called this Caribbean US territory “literally a floating island of garbage”. After all the attention on the seven swing states, suddenly a non-state is looming large, not least because Pennsylvania is home to one of the largest concentrations of Puerto Ricans. Nationally, they constitute the second-largest Hispanic voting group.

Once again, we are reminded that everything matters in this squeaker of an election, large or small. Last week it was Trump’s weird fascination with the dimensions of a golf legend’s phallus. Now, it’s a racist joke from a comedian who, 72 hours ago, few Americans had ever even heard of. This is a history-changing contest, both momentous and minute.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.