Early voting has started for the election of the 47th president of the United States. The counting starts at the close of the polls on November 5. Elections in the largest economy with the most powerful military have always commanded the attention of the rest of the world.
The interest is even more intense this year, with the wars going on in Ukraine and the Middle East, rising tension in the South China Sea, Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, and the uncertainty of the electoral outcome.
Viewed by the Americans themselves as the most consequential in its post-war history, the election confronts a deeply-divided electorate with starkly contrasting choices. Obvious differences between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in gender, generational, ethnic and cultural, and personality traits have themselves become election issues.
Their social and professional backgrounds also differ. Harris has occupied subordinate positions in large bureaucracies at state and federal levels. Trump has exercised CEO powers in business most of his life, never served in government until his election as president in 2016, and prides himself on his personal ability to drive deals with his counterparts to get things done.
These differences have doubtless helped shape the way they have dealt with subordinates and peers. Beyond management style, the candidates present diverging policy perspectives on how the US should conduct relations with the rest of the world on critical concerns related to the global economy, geopolitics, human rights and climate change.
With less than three weeks until the voting, the contest remains at a dead-heat deadlock. The gap between the contenders in the constant barrage of polling surveys fall within the 3% margin of error.
The unipolar moment of unrivalled Great Power dominance has passed. Americans are not electing the supreme global leader and external parties do not much influence their decision.
From a big picture perspective, countries that see the US as blocking their national interests, may view with indifference who emerges as the winner. As a BBC expert source explains, Chinese leaders view the election as offering them a choice between “two bowls of poison.”
Not that this perspective has discouraged efforts to influence the elections. Think-tanks, network platforms and US security agencies have documented attempts since the 2016 elections from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and their allies to reach voters through AI-powered disinformation campaigns.
The intent is not necessarily to favor one candidate than to sow doubts on the election results, deepen dysfunctional domestic discord, and disrupt government policy-making and implementation.
As broad as the global interest in the elections may be, the electoral outcome may depend on the decisions of small, local American communities. Ironically, in this paragon of democratic governance, the choice of the majority of voters will not necessarily prevail.
By deliberate design to balance the power of the federal and state governments, Americans do not elect their president directly. They vote instead for their state representatives, chosen by their political party, to the College of Electors who will deliver the decision of the states. The number of state electors varies and, apart from Maine and Nebraska, all the votes go to the winner, regardless of the margin of victory.
The candidate who collects at least 270 of the 538 electoral votes wins the presidency. George W. Bush against Al Gore in 2000 and Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton in 2016 lost the popular vote but won by capturing more state electoral votes. 2024 election strategies have thus focused on a handful of “battleground states,” whose results can swing the outcome.
Both parties seek to mobilize their base to vote, but also to locate and persuade the uninformed, uncommitted or, perhaps, uninterested in smaller demographic segments to cast a ballot for their candidate. Census and survey data have identified these electoral pockets among naturalized, ethnic, immigrant communities and, as Nikkei Asia has documented, among Asian-Americans.
Both parties have links to these constituencies; Harris and the wife of Trump running mate JD Vance are of Indian descent. This kind of retail, sachet marketing is difficult to implement. Asian Americans constitute a diverse group of language and religious communities from different cultural and political traditions and often limited in their command of English. Campaign ground staff frequently lack the campaign materials for these groups and the linguistic skills to engage them in political discussions. But the effort appears necessary and the political parties are looking for volunteer translators and interpreters.
Doug Emhoff, campaigning for wife Harris, made an appearance at the Hmong festival in Wasau, Wisconsin, the city with the most Hmong people per capita in the US, where they had found refuge from the Vietnam War. Biden won Wisconsin in 2020 by a margin of 20,000 votes, a state with 60,000 eligible Hmong voters. Biden won by an even thinner margin of less than 12,000 votes in Georgia, where Forsyth County, with a 20% population of Asian Americans, gave him 16,000 votes. Of the roughly 300,000 Asian-American voters in battleground Arizona, nearly 100,000 Filipinos form the biggest block.
Americans appear uncertain about what changes will come in the next administration. Not only because of the uncertainty of who will win, but also because many are not sure which candidate really represents change.
We know that some things will not change, whoever wins. Ongoing conflicts around the world will not magically end in November. The process of global warming will proceed. At home, the populist pressures, the culture war, and the clash between internationalists and isolationists will continue, limiting even more the ability of the US to intervene abroad.
Whoever wins, for instance, American allies will likely face the pressure to contribute more to their national security and to accommodate higher trade barriers.
Nor will other nations abandon what they perceive as their national interests. Whatever their preferences, they must focus on how to protect these interests, whether Harris or Trump is elected. – Rappler.com
Edilberto C. de Jesus is a senior research fellow at the Ateneo School of Government.