November 5 is America’s election day. It’s onerous to foretell who will win the presidential race: Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. Present polls recommend a really tight contest. Which means it lastly turns will rely on a number of things, some uniquely American, particularly the electoral school. The US was famously known as by Samuel Huntington “a Tudor Polity”, roughly which means excessive decentralisation and no nationwide uniformity.
States within the US not solely have disproportionate energy; additionally they have fairly completely different electoral guidelines. Not like India the place the Election Fee conducts and certifies electoral outcomes, that energy within the US belongs to states. And such energy, most of all, is embodied within the idea of an electoral school which is, comparatively talking, an uncommon establishment. It has the capability to undo fashionable will.
Allow us to start with a bigger national-level overview, which can permit us to unpack the intricacies of the electoral school later. The US has a inhabitants of roughly 335 million, and there are roughly 245 million eligible voters. If the turnout is as excessive as 66-67 per cent, the extent it touched in 2020, among the many highest in many years, anyplace between 160-165 million votes can be solid. That can make it the third largest election train in 2024, exceeded solely by India and Indonesia.
The 4 largest voting teams by ethnicity/race are the Whites (67 per cent), Latinos/Hispanics (13 per cent), Blacks (12 per cent) and Asians (5 per cent). The political inclinations of the three minorities are simply described. In 2020, these teams voted 65-87 per cent in favour of the Democratic get together, with Blacks going as excessive as 87 per cent. In accordance with the latest polls, vote for Democrats is down in all three classes, however it isn’t essentially going massively in favour of Trump.
The doable shift amongst Black males has come to be broadly famous, particularly after President Obama exhorted them to train knowledge and sense, not typical gender prejudice. In comparison with ladies, 7-8 per cent fewer males are saying they’ll vote for Harris.
In accordance with James Carville, a long-time adviser to Democrats who shot to fame as lead strategist to Invoice Clinton in 1992, the reason being that some Black males suppose the Democratic get together has develop into too feminised. They’re unwilling to just accept a feminine president. However this downside is probably not confined to Black males. The US has all the time had a male president. Is it prepared to just accept a girl because the nation’s highest chief and commander-in-chief? Some imagine Hilary Clinton additionally suffered because of this.
What can we are saying concerning the White vote? Its division seems to be each on racial and sophistication strains, particularly if schooling will be seen as an indicator of sophistication. The Pew Analysis Heart reviews that Republican voters are “overwhelmingly White”, accounting for 79 per cent of the overall vote for the get together. And “total, about half of Republican voters (51 per cent) are White adults with out a school diploma, making them the one largest bloc throughout the get together when taking a look at race, ethnicity and schooling collectively.”
Allow us to study these numbers a bit in a different way. In accordance with the US Census Bureau, solely 38 per cent of the US inhabitants (age 25 and older) was school educated in 2021, and 42 per cent of White inhabitants belonged to this class (as in comparison with 28 per cent of Black, 21 per cent of Hispanic, and 61 per cent of Asian communities). Almost two thirds of White help for Trump is non-college educated and solely a 3rd school educated.
In non-White communities, the education-based class polarisation is just not so sharp. Trump is more likely to get solely 31-32 per cent of non-White, non-college educated vote, with practically two thirds of non-White non-college vote going to Harris. In sum, most college-educated Whites would vote for Democrats and most non-college-educated Whites for Republicans, whereas for non-White communities, ethnicity and race would trump class.
However, in spite of everything is claimed and executed, these country-level disaggregations should not going to be decisive. Harris seems to be forward in nationwide vote, however it’s the electoral school that may decide who wins — it’s doable to win the nationwide vote however lose the presidential election, which has occurred 5 instances in American historical past, twice not too long ago — in 2000 and 2016. However how would such divergence come about?
The electoral school has 538 votes: 435 for the Home of Representatives, 100 for the Senate and three for Washington DC. The Home is totally population-based. Within the Senate, each state has two seats no matter its inhabitants dimension. This makes the electoral school not totally based mostly on nationwide fashionable will. Moderately, the favored will will get a coating of small-state bias. Basically, to win the presidency, a candidate should receive 270 votes of the electoral school. Some states, reminiscent of California and New York, are reliably Democratic, whereas others, like Texas and Florida, unquestionably Republican. As of now, Harris is certain of 226 votes, and Trump 219. To be president, the previous wants 44 extra electoral school votes, and the latter 51.
The place will these votes come from? From the so-called battleground or swing states. Presently, there are seven such swing states: Pennsylvania (19 votes), Georgia (16), North Carolina (16), Michigan (15), Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10), Nevada (6). They’re deadlocked. As a result of they’ll swing an election, these states take up a disproportionate power of campaigns. Harris and Trump all the time appear to be campaigning there (over three many years in Massachusetts, practically all the time Democratic, I’ve seen just one candidate marketing campaign. Barack Obama got here in 2012, and solely as soon as).
A conceptual class can be utilized to sum up the state of affairs. This election will rely on what students name “intersectionality”. An unpredictable mixture of gender/race/ class/state will decide who wins. However whichever means this combine finally settles, will probably be, considerably although not wholly, in reply to 2 basic questions.
Is America prepared for a Black lady president, or would White supremacy make a comeback by way of Trump? Will America proceed to be engaged on the earth, or wouldn’t it descend right into a world of Trumpian tariffs, immigration cuts and isolationism?
The author is Sol Goldman professor of Worldwide Research and the Social Sciences at Brown College, the place he additionally directs the Saxena Heart for Modern South Asia on the Watson Institute. Views are private.
