American politics may not be as polarized as we thought, and more lessons from the chaotic 2024 U.S. presidential race

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American elections often bring surprises. James K. Polk was such an unlikely victor that many Americans who voted in the 1844 presidential election barely knew who he was. President Harry Truman’s re-election victory over Thomas A. Dewey in 1948 was so startling that The Chicago Daily Tribune’s morning-after headline got the result wrong.

These surprises came after voters cast their ballots. What makes this election distinctive is that the surprises have happened before the vote count is finalized – and many of them, including some not widely recognized, are shaping the American politics of the future. Here are a few of them.

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The money game is different than it was even four years ago

There’s more of it, for starters. And it may mean less.

Democrat Kamala Harris has raised more than US$1-billion, enough to buy the Miami Marlins baseball team – and enough to outspend Republican Donald Trump by 34 per cent on television and digital ads. That hasn’t allowed her to seal an election victory.

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Mr. Trump, who once depended upon small donations and proceeds from the sale of Trump-related items, is now getting substantial funds in huge bundles through super PACs, including US$125-million from Timothy Mellon, an heir to the Pittsburgh-based Mellon banking family. Elon Musk weighed in with US$75-million, and that’s without counting the US$1-million cheques Mr. Musk is giving to voters in swing states – disbursements that the Philadelphia district attorney filed legal action Monday to stop. Campaign finance was never like this.

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The old way of conducting presidential campaigns is dead

The two candidates are pioneering new ways of campaigning, sometimes through podcasts that reach narrow but important voter groups, sometimes with public appearances designed to reach voters far beyond those in attendance. The target audience for the rally Mr. Trump held Sunday at New York’s Madison Square Garden, for example, wasn’t the 20,000 people in the seats; they were already strong Trump supporters. It was media coverage of the event that mattered.

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At the same time, Mr. Trump has transformed the campaign rally into a spectacle that is part politics, part locker-room crudeness, part state fair. No presidential candidate since the stemwinding politicians of the 19th century has delivered speeches remotely as long as his 70-minute-plus “weaves,” nor conducted a campaign rally that, in the case of his Madison Square Garden event, approached six hours in length.

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John F. Kennedy (1960), Ronald Reagan (1980) and Bill Clinton (1992) had celebrities at their rallies, but in this case the celebrity is the candidate himself – and the atmosphere outside the rallies is carnivalesque.

In 2024, Mr. Trump also has transformed the nature of politics in that his effort is as much a movement as it is a campaign. Two earlier figures who attempted that feat – William Jennings Bryan in the three campaigns of 1896, 1900 and 1908, and Theodore Roosevelt in his comeback attempt of 1912 – fell short.

Character is receding from importance in presidential choice

Mr. Trump has been indicted repeatedly, and accused of sexual assault repeatedly, and he has still maintained his support among voters. These sorts of episodes torpedoed the presidential campaign of Gary Hart in 1988, ended the national political hopes of former senator John Edwards in 2008 and led to the impeachment of Mr. Clinton.

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Mr. Trump seems immune. “It appears that a good part of the electorate doesn’t care about things that ordinarily would have eradicated a candidacy,” former senator John Kerry, the Democrats’ 2004 presidential nominee, said in an interview.

Culture wars and identity politics now drive politics

There have been traces of this in the past. The 1828 election saw the triumph of rough-hewn democrats supporting Andrew Jackson over John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, both establishment figures. Temperance, with roots in colonial America, was an important cultural issue in the 19th century. Prohibition, which began in 1920 and ended in 1933, was a point of contention during the 1928 and 1932 presidential elections. Beginning in the 1980s, abortion emerged as a critical, divisive cultural issue.

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But the clash between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump has taken the very clashes that characterized the 1828 election – urban versus rural, those with university degrees versus those without, the elites versus the striving – to new levels of importance. This has rendered the 2024 election a contest as much over culture as over issues.

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American politics may not be as polarized as we thought

For a quarter century and perhaps more, commentators and political scientists have promoted the assumption that the close margin in the 2000 election and the revolving slight partisan advantages in Congress are evidence that the United States is polarized, perhaps hopelessly so.

But that may not be the case after all. A study released last year by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that “American voters are less ideologically polarized than they think they are, and that misperception is greatest for the most politically engaged people.” On important philosophical themes – patriotism, respect for democracy, free speech, fair elections and independent courts – there is broad agreement, according to the non-partisan Polarization Research Lab.

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The Carnegie report said that “partisans hold major misbeliefs about the other party’s preferences that lead them to think there is far less shared policy belief.” This has been a major theme of the 2024 campaign.

“There’s a tendency for Americans to expect the worst from the other side,” said Sean Westwood, the Dartmouth College political scientist who is founder of the Polarization Research Lab, a group of scholars. “Most Americans agree on the principles of democracy, and that is important. We’ve seen assassination attempts this year but we haven’t seen broad violence, and though we have seen a lot of talk about democratic backsliding, it is concentrated in the presidential campaign and is almost invisible in state and local elections.”

There’s reason to hope the future may not be a dystopian deadlock marked by poisonous politics. Scholars such as David Schultz of Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., and Sally Friedman of the University at Albany in New York, believe that there is more consensus among young Americans than there is among their parents and grandparents even on the very issues (abortion and immigration, for example) that divide their elders.

This raises the prospect of at least one part of life in which younger Americans will have it better than their parents.