Voters work on their ballots at a polling place at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on election day, Nov. 5, in Simi Valley, Calif.Chris Pizzello/The Associated Press
There has never been a U.S. election like this one. Its unexpected events have brought new heights of drama to the workings of American democracy, with two assassination attempts and a sitting president dispatched from the ballot partway through his campaign. It is expected to set new records for spending, once those tallies are complete. Yet its polls, showing a lockstep march between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, have given new meaning to “nail-biter.”
Even its initial results underscored just how unusual this election has been. The six voters in the tiny New Hampshire community just south of the Quebec border that is one of the first in the country to report results, split their ballots evenly between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump.
Elsewhere, in the states most likely to determine the next president, there was reason to think voters were paying attention as never before. In Pennsylvania, some voters began to queue in the dark before dawn, more than an hour before polls opened. In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger reported at midday that the numbers were trending toward a new turnout record. In Michigan, too, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said “we’re on track to break turnout records yet again.”
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Across the country, a fraught atmosphere hovered over the counting of ballots. Fully three-quarters of U.S. voters are anxious about the possibility of post-election violence, an AP-NORC survey reported last week. More than eight in 10 worry that violence will be fomented against candidates or election officials.
In an electorate riven by seemingly unbridgeable divisions, this was an election in which partisan loyalties competed to define not just political policies, but the very essence of right and wrong.
“What makes it the most unprecedented election of my life is that we have a 34-time convicted criminal running as the Republican nominee,” said Rick Wilson, a Florida political strategist who co-founded The Lincoln Project, one of the most prominent organizations devoted to dissuading Republicans from supporting Mr. Trump.
“We have a guy who is out there every day expressing overtly authoritarian wishes who wants to arrest and kill his political opposition. And a meaningful fraction of the American population seems to be okay with that.”
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For his supporters, however, Mr. Trump represents a defence of the fundamental underpinnings of the American republic. Dale Payne, a retired metal fabricator in Macon, Georgia, keeps in his wallet a slip of paper on which he has written a quote from Winston Churchill that begins: “Socialism is the philosophy of failure.”
“The Dumb-ocrats are socialists in disguise,” he says. Mr. Trump, he argues, “loves this country and he wants to make a change for the better. He sees the direction that we’re going with the socialism.”
The war between those entrenched sides has been fought on airwaves, cellphone screens and mailboxes, all of them inundated by the enormity of the country’s political advertising machine. Open Secrets, which researches money in politics, estimates spending on this year’s election will reach a record US$15.9-billion. It’s a sum billions of dollars greater than the Canadian government’s acquisition budget for an entire new fleet of F-35 fighter jets.
Such spending has given sharp relief to a fundamental contradiction at the heart of modern U.S. elections. Even as the amount spent increases, the number of voters who actually decide elections has shrunk. In 2016, less than 80,000 votes decided the outcome. In 2020, it was roughly 44,000.
It all suggests a political intransigence, too, that has little precedence.
Georgia voter Rob Marvel, for one, struggles to understand it. He has rejected both major parties, voting instead for libertarian Chase Oliver.
“All the Trump supporters were going to vote Trump, no matter what anybody said. All the Kamala supporters were going to vote for her, no matter what anybody said,” he said Tuesday.
“I don’t know why they wasted so much money, because I don’t think it probably made any difference at all.”