Culture war drowns out foreign policy in US election
Robert Delaney says as Harris erases Trump’s lead in polls, the Republican obsession with her identity is not doing them any favours with voters
America has been through a year’s worth of presidential election drama in the past several weeks. The rest of the world, where Washington’s foreign policy has consequences, must also hold its collective breath. With no ability to cast a vote, non-Americans can do little else.
Let’s do a quick review before we look at where things are headed because, if we’ve learned anything amid the intrigue, it’s that the US election season is infested with black swans and red herrings, each one of which could produce an entirely new dynamic.
With his disastrous debate performance on June 27, US President Joe Biden put his Republican opponent Donald Trump on a glide path to the White House. The assassination attempt against Trump more than two weeks later, and Biden’s determination to stay in the race, had left Democrats reeling.
Biden eventually caved after pressure from his party, and handed the reins to Vice-President Kamala Harris, who unexpectedly erased Trump’s lead in the polls with her flash transformation from a hidden figure behind Biden to a deft political tactician. She seemed to know that, for anyone outside Trump’s base, his attack strategy of demeaning insults was wearing thin. She refused to fire back on the same level.
Trump could have met Harris on the high road by using the tragedy of his brush with death at the hands of a 20-year-old gun fetishist to reinvent himself as someone capable of reaching a wider audience. The message of unity that we were told Trump would deliver at the Republican National Convention eventually devolved into his usual shtick of personal insults.
And then his interview at the National Association of Black Journalists produced an entire news cycle built around his assertion that Harris only began identifying as black recently, when he could have been talking up some arguably valid points about how his administration directed funds to historically black colleges and universities or how African-American unemployment decreased under his presidency.
Add to this a steady decline in the popularity of Trump’s vice-presidential pick J.D. Vance. The Ohio senator is alienating moderate women voters – a battleground demographic – with his warnings about the threat posed by “childless cat ladies”. Since he kissed Trump’s ring to clinch the nomination, he can’t return to the arguably moderate Republican positions that he expressed before the former president hijacked the party.
The latest polling averages compiled by FiveThirtyEight show Vance with an unfavourability rating of 39.6 per cent, and a favourability rating of 31.3 per cent, numbers that have steadily weakened since Trump picked the Ohio senator.
With the top of the Republican ticket leaning into sexism and misogyny as their primary messages, these numbers show us that most Americans do not want an administration animated by these ideologies, regardless of how much they might appeal to Trump’s base.
What is frustrating for the rest of the world is that these issues don’t touch them. Despite the dire need to hear detailed proposals from the candidates about how they would handle global conflicts that do not appear to be headed for a resolution any time soon – Russian President Vladimir Putin’s determination to subdue Ukraine remains undaunted and the war in the Middle East now threatens to engulf the region – we’re getting a slugfest instead of a race.
Perhaps the only foreign policy insight we can draw so far is that a Trump-Vance White House would balk at defending Taiwan if it were to be attacked by mainland China owing to the fact that a childless woman known for her love of cats remains a politically influential figure on the island after governing it for eight years.
The intensity of the American culture war at the centre of the coming election will, unfortunately, drown out any detailed foreign policy debate, and we’ll need to wait until after November 5 to get a clearer read on how it will change.
Given the furious pace of significant election developments, it would be foolish to prognosticate about the outcome, but it’s hard to ignore how Harris’ mix of humour and self-control are playing better among US voters than the schoolyard taunts that Trump brings.
If Biden’s decision to step out of the contest pulled the Democrats out of their electoral death spiral, Trump’s and Vance’s inability to shift away from lines of attack that only seem to help elevate Harris is likely to keep her trajectory intact and lead to one of the most stunning turnarounds in the party’s history.
The contest is increasingly hers to lose. Let’s hope she will be ready to speak to the world by November.