Seven minutes into a searing takedown of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Michigan last week, former first lady Michelle Obama posed the question millions of other Americans have been asking: “Why on earth is this race even close? I lay awake at night wondering what in the world is going on.”

Many Australians are wondering the same thing. How can it be that Americans may be days away from re-electing a man who was convicted of falsifying business records, denied the results of the 2020 election, encouraged an attempted coup in the US Capitol, uses increasingly fascist rhetoric about migrants “poisoning the blood” of the country and openly says he wants to use dictatorial powers to circumvent the courts and Constitution to take vengeance on his enemies?

And that’s only to count things that have happened since Trump was dumped from office in 2020, the first president since George H. W. Bush to be denied a second term.

Yet with election day approaching, most polls show the race is a coin toss, especially in seven key swing states that will decide the outcome. While the polls may be wrong (more on that later), they suggest it won’t be a runaway victory for the candidate promising to maintain democracy, Vice President Kamala Harris. Which, in turn, raises a big question for the Democrats: how did they let this happen?

Divided country

The first thing to understand about modern American presidential elections is that they are close regardless of who is running, and generally have been since 2000, though former president Barack Obama defeated John McCain decisively in 2008.

We know the country is divided, fuelled by echo chambers where people’s views are reinforced by partisan news sources, podcasters and social media influencers, with a dearth of agreed facts. Few voters are open to persuasion; the proportion of undecideds in this election was between 5 and 13 per cent, lower now in the final days of the race.

And while there has been some uncertainty about Harris – who she is and what she stands for – the same can’t be said for Trump. This is his third consecutive presidential election as the Republican candidate; most voters have already decided whether they like or loathe him.

Still, that doesn’t explain why so many have stuck by him as his rhetoric has grown more extreme and legions of former staffers, associates and establishment Republicans have disavowed him.

Mike Madrid, a moderate Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, says the election is really a cultural debate about the direction of the country and satisfaction with life, rather than a contest of ideas or two people. In a sense, it doesn’t matter who they are.

“This is two parties with two demographic groups with two distinct views of the world having a cultural conversation,” he says. If you feel optimistic about the future, you likely vote Democrat. If you don’t like change and want to go back to the ‘good old days’, you likely vote Republican.

It’s the exact scenario retired home restorer Tom Niesen describes from his bungalow in central Phoenix, one of several in the street affixed with Harris-Walz signs (he also has a large American flag on the front porch).

“If you really want to understand America, you need to do a cross-country road trip and go to small towns,” he says. “You find out the people are friendly, but you also find out they don’t like change. They want everything to stay the same. They want to live like their parents did, their parents before them. They want that slice of America which no longer exists.”

Madrid says this phenomenon is a taste of where most democracies are heading. “These are very deep-seated issues. It may not be unique to the US, but it’s most pronounced in the US,” he says. “We’re having an existential threat to our cultural direction. And in the US, which doesn’t have a strong cultural commonality, we’re probably uniquely susceptible to that kind of chaos and disruption.

“We are clearly not having the traditional debate about the role of government, or policy. This is about culture and identity, almost entirely. That’s why it’s so emotional, that’s why it’s so contentious, that’s why it’s so close and that’s why it’s so stable.”

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Legitimate grievances

Whatever Australians might think looking on from afar – a Resolve poll for the Herald and The Age found majority support for Harris and only one in five people backing Trump – the administration of President Joe Biden and Harris finishes with some significant electoral baggage.

One is financial. It is a cruel reality for Biden and Harris that the US economy is going gangbusters, and they are given next to no credit. The country rapidly recovered from the COVID pandemic and data released on Wednesday showed annual gross domestic product growth at 2.8 per cent, down from 3 per cent the previous quarter. By comparison, Australia’s GDP grew 1.5 per cent in 2023-24, and just 0.2 per cent in the June quarter. The US unemployment rate is sitting at 4.1 per cent.

The US economy is going gangbusters.

But the Democrats also presided over a period of high inflation, peaking at 9 per cent in June 2022, which sent prices skyrocketing. That’s what voters live and breathe every day, says Alex Hinton, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, and it sticks in their minds at the ballot box.

“What they think about is: I used to get my cup of coffee for $US2.99 and now it’s $US5.99,” he says. “It comes down to basic things like that.”

Hinton, who has written about why people still support Trump “after everything”, has spent much time speaking to fans at Trump’s rallies and observing his campaign messages. He describes a sign he sees often: “‘Trump, prices down. Harris, prices up.’ The messaging is that simple, and then it gets roped into the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’.”

Lifelong Republican Sarah Longwell is a political strategist who has spent years conducting focus groups with centre-right voters and so-called “flippers” – people who voted for Trump in 2016 then flipped to Biden in 2020. She also publishes conservative news opinion website The Bulwark and founded the group Republican Voters Against Trump.

“Joe was going to get crushed,” Longwell says. “One of the reasons I think it’s so close is that people blame him – rightly or wrongly – for the economic environment. Despite the actually strong macro environment, people really did settle into the idea that things were bad. Inflation really was high and, while it’s cooled, everything is more expensive for a lot of these voters, especially housing and groceries. That’s part of it.”

Then there’s immigration. US Border Patrol encounters on the southern border with Mexico soared under Biden, reaching a record 2.2 million in 2022, partly due to Biden’s decision to rescind Trump-era policies, such as the border wall. In response to government policy changes, the numbers have started to fall. But the damage was done, and voters rate the Democrats poorly on border management. Australians don’t need to be told how politically potent that can be.

And it’s not just an issue in the border states of the south, where Republican governors have bussed migrants north to Democratic “sanctuary cities”. That’s creating fear Trump happily exploits, as he did when he claimed, without proof, that migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs. “Immigration is in people’s faces in a completely different way,” Hinton says.

Double standards

A more proficient Democratic operation in Washington might have defended itself better against those legitimate critiques, especially as the administration accomplished a lot; on healthcare and price controls for prescription drugs, climate change (the $US2.2 trillion, about $3.3 trillion, Inflation Reduction Act), infrastructure, semiconductor production and more.

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But, partly due to his age, Biden struggled to explain many of the decisions he was making to the American people. They don’t know a lot of the bills he passed; the Democrats were essentially in a communications vacuum with Biden not being able to execute from the bully pulpit for a long time, which allowed public opinion to harden against him.

After Biden’s disastrous showing in the debate against Trump, the transition to Harris, though necessary, was always going to be tricky and exploited by the Republicans, who accused her and her party of covering up Biden’s decline.

Harris enjoyed a honeymoon of sorts, but also struggled to differentiate herself from Biden and define herself in a clear and compelling way. Commenting on Harris’ performance in a solo CNN town hall, Barack Obama’s strategist David Axelrod said she had a tendency to go to “word salad city”– verbose answers that don’t really say much.

But Axelrod and Michelle Obama also stress Harris is held to a higher standard than Trump. His meandering responses are so familiar to Americans they are expected – even humorous – while Harris labours under the expectations of a more traditional stateswoman.

“We expect her to be intelligent and articulate, to have a clear set of policies, to never show too much anger, to prove time and time again that she belongs,” Michelle Obama said in Michigan.

“But for Trump, we expect nothing at all, no understanding of policy, no ability to put together a coherent argument, no honesty, no decency, no morals. Instead, too many people are willing to write off his childish, mean-spirited antics by saying, well, ‘Trump’s just being Trump.’

“Rather than question his horrible behaviour, some folks think he’s funny. And if you remember, that’s exactly how he got elected the first time. Folks gave him a pass and rolled the dice, betting that he couldn’t possibly be that bad.”

“Rather than question [Trump’s] horrible behaviour, some folks think he’s funny.”

David Axelrod

Doubts about democracy

There were also people, Michelle Obama said, who thought it would be a good idea to blow up America’s democracy. And this group is not so small. Some Democratic Party hardheads worry safeguarding democracy from Trump is not the persuasive argument it might have seemed.

Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye is executive director of the Georgia Democrats, whose task is to run the party’s campaign and strategies in one of its most critical swing states. He admits the Democrats’ heavy focus on democracy under Biden was simply not resonating with people of colour (a large chunk of the fastest-growing parts of the electorate) and the party has had to lift its ground game and give people a reason to show up.

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“If you tell a person of colour that the democracy is on fire, they will tell you, ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Because for a great many of them, democracy has not ever worked. That is not a real strategy for being able to make those folks turn out [to vote],” Olasanoye says.

Instead, he says the party needs to be talking about children’s education, making sure people can afford their essential bills and save some money at the end of the month, and opportunities for people of colour to access capital to realise their business goals and dreams.

“We’ve just got to get out of this place where we think that we could scare the hell out of voters of colour and tell them that the other guy is really scary and that they should show up to vote for our person – without ever having engaged in a real conversation about their concerns and things they care about.”

Alex Hinton, the anthropology professor, says the apocalyptic rhetoric and visions from both sides have inured voters to claims about the end of democracy. For many, Trump has poisoned the well by sowing doubt about the country’s democratic institutions, and though his supporters may disagree with some of his extreme pronouncements, they are willing to overlook them.

“There is definitely desensitisation to it. It’s normalised,” Hinton says. “They’ll chuckle and say, ‘Oh, there he goes again, he shouldn’t have said that.’ ”

That’s if his comments don’t register at all. Endorsing Harris in October, The Atlantic magazine pointed out opinions about Trump “aren’t just hardened – they’re dried out and exhausted”. “The man’s character has been in our faces for so long, blatant and unchanging, that it kills the possibility of new thoughts, which explains the strange mix of boredom and dread in our politics.”

November surprise

There is, of course, an alternative theory to all this: that the polls are wrong, and the election isn’t as close as it seems. In the 2016 presidential election, for instance, most national polls accurately predicted Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead, but underestimated Trump’s support in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Many of the polls had smaller sample sizes, making them less reliable; some stopped polling a few days before the election, missing a last-minute swing towards Trump in those states; some failed to account for a significant turnout surge from non-college-educated white voters, especially in rural areas. There was also the notion of “shy” Trump voters, who weren’t willing to state their support. Which raises the question: could there be a “shy Kamala voter” this year?

Kevin Wenker a former pastor who voted for Trump in 2016 and was bullied out of his congregation for turning against him, certainly thinks so. He cited first-hand knowledge of people who are not planning to support Trump at the ballot box, but simply don’t want to suffer the same fate he did by openly admitting it.

“They’re being quiet about it because there is a very strong minority, and a very strong MAGA group here in Arizona, which can make it difficult for you if they know that you are actively opposed to Trump,” he says.

Military veteran Tiffany Koehler, a Republican who ran for the Wisconsin state assembly in 2018, tells a similar story. She says some of her neighbours – including elected local officials – do not support Trump’s antics but still have lawn signs endorsing him.

“Knowing who they are, and their character, I think they’re afraid to say they’re not going to vote for Donald Trump because they know the repercussions politically and professionally,” Koehler says.

The Harris-Walz campaign also launched an ad voiced by actor Julia Roberts targeting women who want to vote for Harris but are worried about the reaction from conservative husbands or family. In the privacy of the ballot box, Roberts assures, “no one will ever know” how you vote.

Speaking at the Sydney Opera House this week, former British MP and The Rest Is Politics podcast host Rory Stewart said pollsters, spooked by their mistakes in 2016, are making wild guesses about who might turn out for Trump in 2024.

Predicting a 50-50 race was a safe, comfortable position for pollsters, Stewart said, but he was confident Harris would win comfortably.

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