'I voted' stickers are seen during early voting for the U.S. election at a polling station at Ottawa Hills High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Nov. 3.KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images
This is a period in American history when the stakes could not be higher, a time when great matters of national purpose, national identity and national character are being determined – and an age of upheaval and massive shifts in political assumptions and party allegiance.
This week’s moment of mystery and dread – the outcome of the titanic struggle between former president Donald Trump and Vice-President Kamala Harris remains unknown in the last few days of the campaign – is the result of an unusual confluence of forces and personalities that have combined to produce a presidential election that carries enormous implications with few, if any, precedents.
Tote up the American political scoreboard for the 21st century and you will find 12 years of Democratic rule in the White House and 12 years of Republican presidencies. Tuesday’s election is the tie-breaker.
“This is a hugely critical moment, with so many unprecedented elements,” said Graeme Mack, a University of Richmond historian who was born and educated in Canada. “The repercussions of this election may determine the course of the century. I’m not sure there have been many junctures like this in Canadian history.”
As election day approaches, an extraordinary number of elements remain in play, each one a vital question that political analysts are weighing at this hour and that campaign strategists are seeking to influence:
– How will the seven swing states swing – and is there a hint in any of the four of them that report voters by party registration where in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona there have been increases in formal Republican allegiance?
– Will women concerned about abortion rights, and thus drawn to Ms. Harris, outweigh the electoral power of men, increasingly drawn to the machismo mantras of Mr. Trump – and if so, will that occur across the continent or in all or part of the seven swing states?
– Will the minority groups that have been the bulwark of Democratic support rally to the side of Kamala Harris, a Black woman with Asian heritage, or will they continue their slow slip from the party and into the embrace of the Republicans, who have sought their allegiance since the ascendancy in prominence, in the late 1970s, of then Rep. Jack F. Kemp of New York and the emergence of Mr. Trump, who has courted them assiduously?
– Does a large group of undecided voters remain in the United States, or is the more relevant question whether there is a large group of Americans who are undecided on whether to vote – and how does the answer to that question affect the vote totals of either candidate, particularly in the swing states?
– Will Americans and Canadians in the continental time zones know the resolution of the months-long campaign before they tumble into anxious sleep – and if not, how long will it take for the declaration of a clear winner?
– Will Mr. Trump reverse the outcome of the 2016 election and win the popular vote, which has no meaning in American elections, but lose the Electoral College, the state-by-state, crudely population-based tally that determines the winner – and if so, will he tolerate such a result or decry it as proof that the election was rigged against him?
– Will this election be decided by voters, or by lawyers, or by courts, even the Supreme Court, which ultimately decided the contested 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore in a 36-day overtime?
This contest, often regarded as a clash of American values, is being conducted against the background of an unusual emphasis on those very values as well as on a strain of dawn’s-early-light patriotism that until a few months ago seemed like a remnant of the 20th century.
Mr. Trump opens his rallies with Lee Greenwood’s song God Bless the USA, with its reprise line “And I’m proud to be an American/Where at least I know I’m free.” In remarks that could easily have been uttered by Americans from Daniel Webster and Franklin Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, Ms. Harris told tens of thousands of people on the Washington Ellipse last Wednesday, “These United States of America, we are not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised.” She reprised the theme in her appearance on Saturday Night Live over the weekend when she spoke of her “belief in the promise of America.”
These mirror-image campaign messages stand as proof that the candidates – and, according to several polls, Americans themselves – regard this election as a turning point.
Mr. Trump’s Make America Great Again theme, derided by his critics as a plea to return to a white-supremacist past and an olden-days view of the country, suggests a past of American strength abroad and comfortable images of picket fences and puppy dogs at home redolent of the 1984 Reagan campaign. Ms. Harris’s “We’re not going back again” theme, vulnerable to critics’ views that the country’s economy and international profile were stronger in the Trump presidency (2017 to 2021), is redolent of the Bill Clinton 1992 campaign based on the Fleetwood Mac lyrics “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.”
Backward or forward, shaped by liberal-leaning women or conservative-leaning men, reflecting the polls or defying them, this election finally has produced one thing that Americans agree on with enthusiasm: They’ll be glad it’s over – whenever it actually ends.