Former United States Vice President Kamala Harris is set to participate in a conversation with renowned Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the London Literature Festival on Thursday, October 23.
Harris’ book reflects on her brief but intense presidential campaign, offering readers an insider view of the challenges, lessons, and emotions behind the scenes.
“I look forward to being in conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Thursday as part of the London Literature Festival,” Harris tweeted.
The event is part of Harris’s ongoing book tour for her memoir, “107 Days,” which chronicles her brief but intense presidential campaign.
Donald Trump pulled off a historic White House comeback in Monday’s United States presidential election when he comfortably defeated the Democratic Party candidate, Kamala Harris. The election had been projected as a very tight race. But, it became obvious that Trump was coasting home to victory after he swept several key battleground states and won a commanding lead in the national popular vote.
Harris, President Joe Biden’s deputy and the daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants was hoping to become America’s first woman president. But she failed in that bid. Two women have now lost elections to Donald Trump. In the 2016 presidential election, Trump defeated former First Lady Hillary Clinton to secure his first term. In this week’s election, Harris, a sitting vice president, also lost under similar circumstances. What went wrong? Democrats across America must be asking themselves. Has it got anything to do with her skin colour or is it sexism rooted deep in American culture that has blocked yet another woman from occupying the White House? Democrats are now questioning why the choice of Harris. Was she the right choice to take on Trump? Should they have looked elsewhere? Or should they have stuck with Biden?
The Democratic Party was basking in popularity when Harris became the party’s nominee for the presidential ticket, following President Biden’s withdrawal from the race under pressure from within the party in July, following that fateful debate in June. Her emergence energised the Democratic Party Biden’s horrifying debate performance against Trump. The campaign pushed a message of joy, optimism, and hope. This encouraged engagement in Democratic politics again, leading to a surge in fundraising at the grassroots level.
However, after such a remarkable start to her campaign, Harris failed to close the deal by defining what she stands for and what she intends to bring to the table. In an unfortunate echo of Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, Harris spent far too much time trying to argue that Trump was unfit for the presidency and too little time delivering a coherent message about why she would be better. Despite overpowering Trump in their only debate on September 10 and raising more than $1 billion in donations in just three months—a new record—Harris often floundered when challenged to deliver a convincing summary of her agenda on critical issues such as the economy and immigration. She also fumbled badly in explaining her flip-flops on many issues.
Observers believe that the country was crying out for change when Harris, 60, became her party’s candidate. As a result, it is widely believed that Trump won because Harris inherited a tough situation from Joe Biden — and ultimately could not overcome it. According to close watchers of American politics, when she joined the presidential race in July, after Biden stepped aside, she faced three formidable obstacles. First, the economy is in bad shape. But, this not peculiar to the US. Following the pandemic, there has been a global trend of incumbent parties, even in developed democracies across the world, struggling, with inflation hitting the rooftops. The situation in the US is telling on Americans from all walks of life and naturally voters were expecting a change.
The second issue is Biden’s unpopularity. The president has become unpopular long before his disastrous debate with Trump, and poll after poll showed voters irate with his handling of the economy and immigration. Foreign policy, particularly the Israel-Gaza war that divided Democrats’ coalition, was a problem too. Since Harris had served in his administration as vice president, she was expected to figure out what to do about that.
Typically, such dynamics would seem to point to a “change” election where the incumbent party is booted. In such elections, the opposition can often put the blame for the current state of affairs on the incumbents, make vague promises that they will do things differently, and ride to victory. In the end, Harris took a kind of middle path. She downplayed, disavowed, or simply avoided mention of many of the progressive policies she had supported back in 2019. The vice president wanted to keep the Democratic coalition happy, pleasing as many people as she could, rather than taking sides in any factional fights.
In addressing Biden’s record, too, Harris tried to strike a balance. She decided not to criticize Biden, throw him under the bus, or break with him — or the Biden-Harris administration’s policies — in any significant way. When pressed about voter anger over inflation and unauthorized immigration, she did not acknowledge the error. Rather, she tried to argue that the economy was doing well now and blamed Trump for not supporting a bipartisan immigration bill.
However, it was a futile effort; a large chunk of the American public were more resentful of inflation under Biden than they were about Trump’s attempted election theft four years ago. So, they simply turned back to the candidate they kicked out of office just four years ago.
The defining moment of Kamala Harris’s campaign, according to reports, was when she appeared on ABC’s “The View” last month; it was supposed to be a friendly forum to introduce herself to Americans unfamiliar with her story. But, the Democratic presidential nominee instead struggled to explain what she would do differently than President Biden. “Not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris, the incumbent vice president, told the hosts.
In an interview with Politico in the final weeks before the election, Trump campaign manager Jason Miller agreed that it was the turning point of the race. This came after weeks of polling in Harris’ favour following her abrupt—and, by some accounts, undemocratic—emergence at the top of the ticket on July 21. Miller said it was Harris’ botched answer to an easy question from a friendly TV anchor, Sunny Hostin, co-host of The View, who asked Harris on Oct. 8 if she would have done anything differently from Biden over the past four years. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris awkwardly responded, horrifying her advisors and sparking an eruption of Trumpian triumphalism online. In subsequent weeks, Harris tried to recover, telling CNN, “[My administration] will not be a continuation of the Biden administration,” but the damage was done. “Who would have thought that Sunny Hostin from The View really killed Kamala Harris’s candidacy?” Miller said. “But you can make the case that Sunny did.”
Harris faced a nearly impossible task by trying to defend Biden’s poor disapproval ratings, because almost two-thirds of voters at the time believed the nation was on the wrong track. Though the government had consistently maintained that the president and his vice deserve a second term based on the government’s remarkable legislative record, including a major bipartisan infrastructure spending bill, historic climate investment, and the CHIPS and Science Act, all of which poured billions of dollars into manufacturing and clean energy. This was one reason Biden refused to step aside for as long as he did, despite concerns about his age and mental acuity; because he was that he was convinced voters would sooner or later realize how effective a president he has been.
It also appears that Harris entered the contest late and did not have enough time to plan and execute her campaign. After Biden’s long delay in withdrawing from the campaign, Harris was thrust from the vice presidential shadows into public view but had scarcely more than three months to sell herself. Trump has had eight years to do the same—including the four years of his first term as president and the four years since. This culminated in a primary battle against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Trump’s former United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, which allowed him to redefine his presidency, absurdly, as one of the best in U.S. history. With inflation and two wars raging abroad, many voters fondly recalled a pre-pandemic world that was mostly at peace and economically prosperous under Trump. After Trump decisively won the GOP nomination, even Republicans like Haley who had once opposed him kowtowed and embraced his falsehoods—most of them, anyway.
Despite the foregoing, it can be said that the United States is not ready for a woman president yet. Despite Harris’s role as the first female vice president, she failed to secure the backing of American voters to lead the nation. As a large percentage of American men were believed to have rooted for Trump. Many of these male doubts about the vice president were fanned with fierce cynicism in what was known as Trump’s “bro-whispering” strategy—with Trump sitting for interviews with influencers, comedians, and podcasters who have huge audiences of young men. Many of these target audiences were young white men who felt sidelined by progressive causes that tend to favour women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and minorities, and who weren’t as responsive to Harris’s relentless focus on reproductive rights. But Trump also reached out to young non-white voters.
A report quoting a poll by the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School said the amount of male voters under 30 who identified as Republican increased by seven points since 2020. John Della Volpe, director of the institute, said Trump won many of this group “by weaving a hyper-masculine message of strength and defiance into his broader narrative that undermines confidence in democratic institutions.”
The dismal performance of the Democratic Party candidate among traditional Democrats supporters, such as Blacks and Latino voters, as it happened in 2016 when Mrs Clinton was the party flag bearer, suggests that it has something to do with their gender. Trump’s victory became all-but-certain when the former president was the projected winner of the battleground state of Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes. It is a state that Democrats had only lost once since 1988. That came in 2016 with Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton.
The Harris campaign devoted significant resources to four Sun Belt battlegrounds − Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and North Carolina − but she appeared unlikely to win any of them. And the Democrats’ so-called “blue wall” crumbled with Harris trailing Trump in Michigan and losing outright in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The Democratic nominee lost the election in large part because she was unable to prevent core Democratic constituencies − Black, Latino and young voters − from splintering their votes. Harris underperformed with voters of colour − particularly Latino voters − but also Black voters in urban centres such as Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee. Despite maintaining Democrats’ growing strength in college-educated suburbs, it was not enough to overcome Trump’s gains in Democratic strongholds.
Harris won Black voters by 86 per cent/12 per cent margin and Latino voters’ 53 per cent/45 per cent, according to CNN exit polls. In contrast, in the 2020 election, Biden won Black voters by a wider 92 per cent/8 per cent margin over Trump and Latinos 65 per cent/32 per cent.
From the beginning, Harris tried to make the race a referendum on Trump. In the final weeks of the campaign, Harris escalated her rhetoric, calling the former president a fascist, warning that he is “unhinged and unstable”, and highlighting the assessment of Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, who alleged Trump made past admiring statements about Adolf Hitler. She increasingly leaned into framing the election as a fight for democracy, much like Biden did before he dropped out of the race in July 2024.
“Kamala Harris lost this election when she pivoted to focus almost exclusively on attacking Donald Trump,” veteran pollster Frank Luntz said on X, formerly Twitter. “Voters already know everything there is about Trump – but they still wanted to know more about Harris’ plans for the first hour, first day, first month and first year of her administration. “It was a colossal failure for her campaign to shine the spotlight on Trump more than on Harris’ ideas,” Luntz said.
Harris campaigned aggressively on restoring abortion access. But, at the end of the day, the 54 per cent/44 per cent margin victory she scored among women voters, according to CNN exit polls, was lower than Biden’s 57 per cent/42 per cent performance with women in 2020. Trump won male voters over Harris by the same 54 per cent/44 per cent margin as Harris won women.
With her defeat to Trump, Harris’ dream to become the first woman President of the United States has been shattered.
Donald Trump said it was a “magnificent victory for the American people” as he declared victory as the 47th President of the United States.
Mr Trump declared his victory after winning Pennsylvania, putting him just four electoral votes shy of defeating Kamala Harris to retake the White House. The Republican’s election win was later confirmed when the swing state of Wisconsin was called for Trump, giving him the 270 electoral votes he needed.
Ms Harris, 60, would have been the first woman, black woman and person of South Asian descent to serve as president. She also would have been the first sitting vice president to win the White House in 36 years.
Mr Trump, 78, will be the oldest president ever elected and the first defeated president in 132 years to win another term in the White House. He is also the first person convicted of a felony to take over the Oval Office.
British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the UK-US special relationship will “continue to prosper” following Mr Trump’s “historic election victory”.
“As the closest of allies, we stand shoulder to shoulder in defence of our shared values of freedom, democracy and enterprise,” he added.
When will Trump be sworn in as president?
While the 2024 US presidential election took place on 5 November – the winner will not be sworn into office until Inauguration Day on 20 January, 2025 – an 11-week wait. In contrast, in the UK, the winner of the general election is inaugurated the next day.
The longer wait in the US can in part be explained by the complex inauguration process.
Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has cancelled her election night speech following the surging victories of Donald Trump in the US Presidential race.
“You won’t hear from the vice president tonight but you will hear from her tomorrow,” Cedric Richmond, Harris campaign co-chair, said in Washington.
With crucial victories in North Carolina and the contested battleground state of Georgia, Trump’s lead has left Harris with limited paths to victory in an exceptionally tense and divisive race.
The Republican Party has also successfully regained control of the Senate, flipping two Democratic seats, which further strengthens Trump’s political momentum.
Despite intense campaigning, Harris is struggling in key regions where Democrats had hoped to gain a stronger foothold. In light of these emerging results, Harris’s campaign decided to cancel a planned watch party in Washington, D.C.
With a few votes to seal the victory for Donald Trump, various news outlets in the U.S are calling the shots in favour of the republican.
U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Democrat candidate Kamala Harris are running neck and neck ahead of the presidential election, a fresh Leger poll released by the New York Post showed.
Both candidates have 49 per cent support ahead of the Tuesday vote, while the other 2 per cent of respondents said they would vote for someone else.
Trump and Harris are equally expected to improve Americans’ quality of life, at 44 per cent each.
However, the Republican candidate took advantage of his Democrat rival in terms of the clarity of his economic strategy plan, at 45 per cent against 42 per cent.
The poll was conducted from Oct. 31 to Nov. 3 among 950 likely voters, with the margin of error not exceeding 3 points.
Owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the New York Post endorsed Trump for President in late October.
There is no doubt that the fervent deniers, particularly in Nigeria’s February 25, 2023 presidential poll, borrowed substantially from the playbook of former President Donald Trump and his rabid supporters in their response to the latter’s failure to win re-election for a second term in 2020. Trump, who had hinted darkly in his 2016 contest with Hillary Clinton that he would only accept the outcome of an election in which he was victorious, had adamantly maintained that the 2020 election was massively rigged against him even without the slightest iota of evidence and scores of election petition cases filed against the outcome were dismissed by the courts. In the run-up to next Tuesday’s presidential election in which Trump is running against Vice President Kamala Harris, there is no indication that the former President will graciously accept defeat if he loses particularly as the opinion polls suggest a tight race in which the two contenders are running neck to neck and victory could go either way.
To those who have long respected the United States as one of the best models of liberal democracy and one worth emulating by less advanced democracies, it is astonishing that the former President who unabashedly instigated the January 6, 2021, riotous attack on the Capitol Hill with large scale destruction of property and loss of lives, is free to participate in another election and has bright chances of being re-elected to the White House. This is in addition to his conviction by a law court for a felony and his long-standing entanglement with the law over tax evasion and manipulation charges as well as allegations of sundry sexual indiscretions by numerous women. That in spite of these seeming albatrosses, Trump retains the fanatical support of at least half of the electorate illustrates just how divided American society is and how divorced politics has become from morality in ‘God’s own country’.
From its once-upon-a-time dizzying heights of fidelity to the values and principles of liberal democracy which made her the proverbial ‘shining city on a bill’, millions of Americans now share with an emergent democracy like Nigeria, a deep and destructive distrust of democratic values, principles, and institutions. More than any other political actor in contemporary America, Trump has substantially shredded the fabric of mutual trust and fidelity that is critical to democratic sustainability. In his current campaign to return to the White House, he and his Republican fellow travelers, a party he has virtually completely taken over, have not desisted from questioning the integrity of electoral and state institutions as well as the credibility of public officials.
Even more alarmingly, he has stated a readiness to utilize state power to intimidate his political adversaries while expressing admiration for the almost unlimited powers wielded by some of the world’s totalitarian leaders. Thus, some of those who served in his administration in the first term have described him as a fascist while others fear the gross retardation of the country’s constitutional democracy should Trump be re-elected.
Of course, the delinking of American politics from its ethical moorings did not begin with Donald Trump. Its seeds were sown over time among others by Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam in the 1950s to early 1970s, President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal that resulted in his impeachment, President Ronald Reagan’s Irangate scandal, President Bill Clinton’s salacious’Monica Lewinsky’ affair and President George Bush’s war against Iraq under the false pretext that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction.
Large numbers of Americans had over time begun increasingly to distrust members of the political class across party divides. Matters were not helped by the periodic worsening of the capitalist economic crisis despite its demonstrated capacity to bounce back from periods of recession and record momentary expansionary booms. Donald Trump did not just accidentally happen on the American political terrain to undertake a hostile takeover of the Republican Party as well as seize the country’s politics by storm. The grounds for the emergence of such a figure to fill a vacuum in American politics had been laid for quite some time.
In his book, ‘Capitalism’s World Disorder’, published in 1999 by Jack Barnes, long-serving national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, he traced the roots of political demagoguery in the country long before the political ascendancy of Donald Trump. Focusing particularly on the 1992 presidential election between Bill Clinton and George Bush, Barnes points out how Ross Perot, an independent candidate, and Patrick Buchanan, an outflier Republican candidate, both men from outside the political mainstream, had garnered relatively significant votes in that election.
Commenting on the appeal of Perot’s candidacy, Jack Barnes writes, “Perot taps into a conviction growing among millions of people that the established bourgeois politicians are incapable of addressing the social crisis. More and more people are open to the suggestion that these figures are at worst plotting conspiracies; at best they are immoral, not fit to be in office. Millions are convinced that the government is rotten; Washington and all it represents is morally degenerate; the parliamentary and democratic institutions under capitalism are cesspools where thieves and bureaucrats and maneuverers hide. And more and more believe that something radical must be done to break through this spreading corruption”.
Continuing, Barnes writes, “But Ross Perot got nearly 20 percent of the vote – 4 to 5 percent more than predicted on the basis of those who said beforehand they would vote for him. The Perot vote registers the growing view that no established Democratic or Republican Party candidate will ever be any different”. As for Patrick Buchanan who contested on the platform of the Republican Party, he stressed the imperative of using the U.S Army and National Guard units to win the war “for the soul of America”. He told the Republican Party convention in 1992 that “And as those boys took back the streets of Los Angeles block by block, my friends, we must take back our cities and take back our culture and take back our country”. Was this not a foretaste of Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ and anti-immigration rhetoric that has formed the fulcrum of his campaign?
But then, this is the trend in major democracies and advanced economies across the world where anti-immigration sentiments are having a major influence on the direction of politics. It does not matter to those who harbour such sentiments that, as Teresa Hayter put it, “People need to migrate for two main reasons: first to improve their economic situation, and second to escape from wars and persecution. Imperialism bears much responsibility for both needs. It has created extreme polarization of wealth internationally. When European expansion began in the 16th century, the levels of prosperity and technical development they encountered in what is now the Third World were often more advanced than what then existed in Europe. The Europeans plundered the Third World, destroyed industries, and reduced much of it to levels of poverty and malnutrition which had not previously existed”.
Unfortunately for Kamala Harris, she was the immigration Czar under the Joe Biden administration during which large numbers of immigrants are believed to have entered the country and a fact that Trump is harping on. Although some experts contend that the American economy is holding on well within the context of global inflation and war-induced disruptions in international trade, not a few voters will agree with Trump that massive immigration is partly responsible for their economic woes.
It would also appear that in championing abortion (reproductive rights) and sexually deviant behavior such as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights including taking prayer out of public schools, the democrats have moved far from the Jeudo-Christian foundations of American politics and values thus alienating a not insignificant section of the populace. As a leading Christian conservative thinker, Charles Colson, notes on abortion, for instance, “Abortion has always been about more than abortion. It is the wedge used to split open the historic Western commitment to the dignity of human life. In 1973, when pro-life proponents warned that Roe was taking us down a slippery slope to all manner of horrors, they were mocked as alarmists. Later events proved them prescient”. Given his first term record, it seems that Trump will be less militarily adventurous in his second coming than a democratic administration and it would appear to me that American institutions are too firmly rooted for fascism or tyranny to thrive in that country no matter who emerges as the next President.
With a few days to the November 5, U.S. presidential election, the tempo of the campaign has reached fever pitch, with the two candidates, Vice-President Kamala Harris ( Democrat ) and former president, Donald Trump (Republican) in a dead run to the finish line. The final national New York Times/Siena poll, published on October 25, had the two candidates deadlocked at 48% to 48% for the popular vote. Aggregate of national polls also project the election as neck-to-neck, with the two candidates tied at 48%, making it a cliff-hanger.
Both candidates have carried the electoral battle to the battleground states which oscillate in their voting pattern between the two parties, states whose votes can swing the election either way. About 10 states are considered swing states , with seven of them – Michigan 15, Wisconsin 10, Pennsylvania 19, Georgia 16, North Carolina 16, Nevada 6, and Arizona 11, with a total of 91 electoral college votes – being of focal attention in this race. In 2008, former President Barrack Obama won in eight of the states, Trump took Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2016 to clinch the presidency while in the 2020 election, Biden not only took back the three states but also wrestled Arizona and Georgia from Trump, on his way to the White House.
Two major issues have dominated the 2024 presidential election campaign, the economy and immigration with issues of abortion, Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender (LGBT) and foreign policy taking second place. The economy, under the Biden/Harris administration had experienced high inflation rate and consequent higher cost of living felt by all. Trump highlights the improved economy under his administration before the advent of COVID-19, the global pandemic that ravaged the world economy. Trump plans to use tariff on imports to raise revenue and as well protect local industries. Harris is for taxing the rich to generate revenue but laissez faire on unbridled imports, in spite of its consequent drag on the U.S. economy, a manifestation of Democrats’ Father Christmas disposition to making America a liberal market for imports.
On immigration, while Trump is not opposed to legal migration, he pledges to stop the tidal wave of illegal immigrants from South America on its southern border and to deport illegal immigrants. According to him, illegal immigrants are polluting American way of life and taking the jobs of Americans. Some dub this a racist agenda but it resonates well with Trump constituency. Democrats are liberal on immigration and not committed to forceful removal of illegal immigrants, a stand that earns Democrats 65 % of Latino votes in southern U.S. States.
The issues of abortion and LGBT are not just election issues but are matters which have deeply polarized America to the extent that die-hard conservatives have fire-bombed abortion clinics and launched murderous attacks on gay and lesbian gatherings. Trump is opposed to LGBT and an indiscriminate, free for all abortion. Democrats, and particularly Kamala Harris, celebrate LGBTs with Harris insisting they should be allowed to flaunt their sexual preferences! She is a disciple of Barrack Obama, the evangelist for gays and lesbians, who had threatened African countries which enacted anti-gay laws with sanctions! The Democratic candidate’s vocal stand on LGBT has its cost in votes.
Foreign policy may be a muted election issue but it had in recent times crept into American public consciousness with Israel’s genocidal war against Hamas in Gaza for the Palestinian group’s October 7, 2023 incursion into Israel which left about 1200 Israelis dead and over 200 abducted and being held hostage. However, Israeli military killing over 40,000 Palestinians in its one year battle with Hamas has prompted unprecedented outrage and demonstrations across America, especially on university campuses, against Israel and the Biden/Harris administration for its refusal to pressure Israel to agree to a ceasefire. Vice President Harris risks loss of votes in this regard, particularly in the crucial swing state of Michigan with an estimated 200,000 Arab-American population. On Europe, while Trump regards the Russia-Ukraine war as avoidable and pledged to bring it to resolution if elected, the Biden/Harris government is inclined to perpetuating the war, recently pledging additional $20 billion military package to embattled President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. This runs counter to emergent American mood against avoidable war and its cost to American taxpayers. The anti-war voters will be a loss to Harris. These seemingly little losses of votes for Kamala can become significant in tight election contests where razor-thin victory vote margins can win bountiful electoral votes.
For instance, in the 2008 presidential election between Senator John McCain ( Republican ) and Senator Barrack Obama (Democrat), McCain narrowly won Arizona with just 3, 903 votes out 2,887,725 votes cast in that election!
Trump’s foray into presidential election contest in 2016 as an unconventional outsider, as against the deodorized correctness of professional politicians, literally took the political establishment by storm, and electrifying the electorate. In the 2016 presidential election between Trump and former U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, voter turnout was 136,787,187 (59.2%) as against 129,139,997 (58.0%) in 2012, an increase of 7.6 million voters. By the 2020 election that pitted President Trump against former Vice President Joe Biden, the stakes got higher and so was the surge in voter turnout, with 158,429,631 voters (66.8%) casting their ballot, an increase of a record 21.6 million voters over the 2016 turnout. The turnout promises to be higher again in 2024.
Top billionaires, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Elon Musk have waded into the presidential contest. Gates and Buffett were one time the richest men in the world while Musk is the current richest man in the world. Bill Gates donated $50 million to a pro-Harris non-profit organisation while Buffett who had endorsed Presidents Barrack Obama and Joe Biden has decided this time around not to endorse any candidate, which, by inference, meant non-support for Kamala Harris. On his part, Musk has not only donated $75 million in support of a Political Action Committee (PAC) engaged in getting out the vote for Trump, particularly in the swing states, he has been actively engaged in political election campaigns with the Republican candidate.
Contrary to what has become a contentious media practice of endorsing presidential candidates, owners of major newspapers have stopped planned endorsements of Harris in this election cycle. These newspapers include The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, America’s largest newspaper chain, The Chicago Tribune and Minnesota Star Tribune. Gannett, owners of USA Today, in announcing the stepping down of Harris endorsement stated: “Our public service is to provide readers with facts that matter and the trusted information they need to make informed decisions”. For decades, American media had brazenly violated media code of ethics which demands fairness, accuracy and non-partisanship in media content.
Kamala Harris brought sunshine charm, infectious laughter and irrepressible energy into the 2024 American presidential election campaigns that almost rattled Trump, and which gave her an initial momentum. However, this momentum has since waned. That former President Obama had to complain that Black American men are not enthusiastic enough about Harris’s presidential bid is indicative that she may not get the huge Black American block vote of 87% given to Democratic presidential candidate Biden in the 2020 election. Her ardent advocacy for gays and lesbians will be another significant vote loss. During the campaign, Harris could not defend the administration’s performance record on the economy, but would rather launch into what she would do, if elected. So, her biggest albatross is a national economy that is in the doldrums and which remains a big concern for the electorate who will be inclined to vote for a change in government for a new economic direction. The omens are, therefore, dicey for Kamala Harris.
As for Trump, he faces a formidable battle in the gang up of America’s Political Establishment – Democrats and Republicans – against his re-election. Former Republican Vice President, Dick Cheney, and his daughter, former Congresswoman, Liz Cheney, lead the anti-Trump posse. Trump’s abrasive and perceived crude manner will alienate votes. Ultimately, though, the parlous state of an inflation-wracked economy under the Biden/Harris administration, and a sustained, aggressive grassroots get-out-the-vote mobilization have the prospect of tilting the presidential election outcome in Trump’s favour. This makes Trump the man to beat.
•Dr. Olawunmi, senior lecturer, Department of Mass Communication, Adeleke University, Ede, is Fellow, Nigerian Guild of Editors (FNGE)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris rebuked her contender, former President Donald Trump, yesterday for comments that he would be the protector of women “whether the women like or not.”
The Republican nominee made the remarks Wednesday at a rally in the state of Wisconsin.
“My people told me about four weeks ago – I was saying, No, I want to protect the people. I want to protect the women of our country. I want to protect the women. ‘Sir, please don’t say that.’ ‘Why? They said, ‘We think it’s very inappropriate for you to say.’ I said, ‘Why? I’m president. I want to protect the women of our country,” said Trump.
“They said, ‘Sir, I just think it’s inappropriate for you to say.’ I pay these guys a lot of money. Can you believe it? I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it. Whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them,’” said the former president.
Speaking to reporters before heading to the West Coast for the last leg of her campaign, Harris called Trump’s remarks “offensive.”
“It actually is, I think, very offensive to women in terms of not understanding their agency, their authority, their right and their ability to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies,” said the Democratic nominee.
“And this is just the latest on a series of reveals by the former president on how he thinks about women and their agency,” she said.
“Whether he has said, as he has, that women should be punished for their choices, whether he has talked about his pride is taking away a fundamental right of women, whether it be how he has actually created a situation in America where one in three women lives in a Trump abortion ban state,” Harris added.
The exchange comes less than one week before Election Day, as Trump works to narrow the gender gap between himself and the vice president.
Election Day – including presidential and congressional elections – is set for Nov. 5.
Top Democratic strategist James Carville has predicted that Kamala Harris is “certain” to win the presidential election.
Carville, 79, has worked on several presidential campaigns, including former president Bill Clinton’s in 1992. Now, he has explained in a New York Times opinion piece why he’s confident Harris has this race in the bag.
“While I am not one to take part in the political prediction industry — recently ballooned by mysterious crypto investments gambling on a Donald Trump victory — today I am pulling my stool up to the political poker table to throw my chips all in: America, it will all be OK.”
The Democrat cited three main reasons for his prediction: Trump is a “repeat electoral loser,” Harris is out-fundraising her opponent and he “refuse(s) to believe” voters will “make the same mistake twice” by re-electing the former president.
“I refuse to believe that the same country that has time and again overcome its mistakes to bend its future toward justice will make the same mistake twice,” Carville wrote for the Times. “America overcame Mr. Trump in 2020. I know that we know we are better than this.”
With just 12 days until Election Day, the latest average of national polls indicates Harris has a 1.7-point lead over Trump. In the seven key swing states, neither candidate is more than a few points ahead, according to fresh polls from The Washington Post.
United States (U.S.) Vice President Kamala Harris held a marginal 46 per cent to 43 per cent lead over Republican former President Donald Trump, with a glum electorate saying the country is on the wrong track, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
Harris’ lead in the six-day poll, which closed on Monday, differed little from her 45 per cent to 42 per cent advantage over Trump in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted a week earlier, reinforcing the view that the contest is extraordinarily tight with just two weeks left before the Nov. 5 election.
Both polls showed Harris with a lead within the margin of error, with the latest poll showing her ahead just 2 percentage points when using unrounded figures.
The new poll showed that voters have a dim view of the state of the economy and immigration – and they generally favour Trump’s approach on these issues.
Some 70 per cent of registered voters in the poll said their cost of living was on the wrong track, while 60 per cent said the economy was heading in the wrong direction and 65 per cent said the same of immigration policy.
Voters also said the economy and immigration, together with threats to democracy, were the country’s most important problems.
Asked which candidate had the better approach on the issues, Trump led on the economy – 46 per cent to 38 per cent – and on immigration by 48 per cent to 35 per cent.
Immigration also ranked as the No. 1 issue when respondents were asked what the next president should focus on most in their first 100 days in office.
Some 35 per cent picked immigration, with 11 per cent citing income inequality and 10 per cent shares citing healthcare and taxes.
But Trump fared poorly on the question of which candidate was better to address political extremism and threats to democracy, with Harris leading 42 per cent to 35 per cent.
She also led on abortion policy and on healthcare policy.
Harris’ lead over Trump might not be enough to win the election, even if it holds through Nov. 5.
National surveys, including Reuters/Ipsos polls, give important signals on the views of the electorate, but the state-by-state results of the Electoral College determine the winner, with seven battleground states likely to be decisive.
Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, triumphing in the Electoral College even though she won the national popular vote by 2 points.
Polls have shown Harris and Trump are neck and neck in those battleground states.
The share of sure-to-vote poll respondents was up from 74 per cent in a Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted Oct. 23-27, 2020, when 74 per cent of Democrats and 79 per cent of Republicans said they were certain to cast ballots.
