USA
A People Divided Heads to the Polls to Decide the Nation’s Fate
Monday 4 November 2024, by Dan La Botz
As I am writing on November 3, two days before the presidential election in the United States, the country is divided as at no time since the Civil War of 1861-65. And more than ever the contrast between the two major parties is stark, the Democrats remaining a traditional political party of American capitalism and bourgeois democracy, while the Republican Party under candidate Donald Trump has evolved into a far-right party based on whites who resent Blacks and Latinos, men who resent women, and Evangelical Christians waiting for Armageddon, a party riddled with fascists and bands of armed men.
After months of what seemed perpetual summer, accompanied by forest fires and hurricanes, tokens of the climate catastrophe, and a hot Halloween everywhere, fall has finally arrived. Forty-seven of the 50 U.S. states permit early voting, and fifty-five million Americans of 161.4 million registered voters, have already cast early ballots. I voted yesterday in Brooklyn in the neighborhood recreation center where dozens of poll workers, mostly Black women, helped me and others.
The vote is too close to call. There are some shifts among the electorate, though we’re still divided geographically as usual. The Pacific Coast (California, Oregon, and Washington State) is blue, the Democrats’ color, as is most of the Northeast (New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, and Rhode Island) but the Midwest and much of the South is Republican Red. As in the last presidential election, the outcome turns on seven swing-states scattered across the country: Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina.
The electorate is divided by gender, education, and by race, each candidate making gains among particular groups. Harris, who defends women’s right to abortion, has an 11-point lead among women, while Trump, who denigrates women in every speech, has a 10-point lead among men. As usual, Republicans have the support of about 60% of whites, while Democrats only about 40%. The great majority of Black voters still support the Democrats, but Republicans have made gains among Blacks, especially men, and may now have about 15% of the Black vote. Democrats will also get the majority of Latino votes, but here too Trump has made gains and could win 35%. Asian and Pacific Islands people, who in swing states represent 3 to 9% of the electorate, generally vote for Democrats, but Republicans have made some inroads among them too.
Senior citizens are just about divided evenly. Republicans usually win this group by a few points, though Harris could make some grains. Republicans generally win over 60 percent of the rural vote, but Democrats win about that same percentage of suburban voters.
A new gap among voters since Trump appeared on the political scene in 2015 is education. Among white voters without a college education, Trump could win about 60 percent, while Harris may win less than 40. These are voters, as some analysts say, those left behind by the post-industrial, high-tech society, and they hold only a fifth of the wealth of those who are college educated. Trump has succeeded in winning them over, especially the men among them.
Young people mostly don’t vote. Only half of all young people are registered and in the last national election of 2022 only about 25 percent voted. Young women are most likely to vote for Harris because of their concern about abortion rights.
As on most Saturdays, after we voted, my wife and I walked to the farmers’ market. There a group of Palestinians, pacifists, and leftist were shouting “don’t vote for genocide,” some urging a vote for Jill Stein of the Green Party. Few people stopped to listen. Still Stein could win many votes in Michigan, enough to beat Harris and throw the states electoral votes to Trump. We won’t know the results for a few days. I’ll present the results and prospects next week.
3 November 2024
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