Campaign season delivers a peculiar sort of tumult, a unique brew of uncertainty and apprehension when the finish line approaches but victory remains elusive. Just as one may toss and turn in a stormy sea of inconsistent polling data, Kamala Harris seems to find herself rudderless, floating with a lead that is as ephemeral as it is surreal. Harris’s campaign, on one script, ascends by a mere three points in Michigan; on another, seemingly identical in timing, she’s submerged by two. On both September 10th and October 10th, she boasts a national lead over Trump by an unremarkable 2.5%, embodying the unnerving perseverance of our ideologically split country.
However, it seems that both political parties are caught in a cycle of their habitual responses. Unsurprisingly, and in alignment with tradition, the Democrats are seen stumbling into the familiarity of pre-election jitters. Alarm bells are ringing among strategists who warn that Harris’s campaign has reached a stagnant plateau and society’s call for an aggressive plan of action remains unanswered.
It is poignantly evident that Harris finds herself coerced into donning the attire of a centrist in an attempt to cinch the deal. A series of articles litter the media, dissecting and examining her relationships with diverse segments of electorate: male voters, Black male voters, Arab voters, Latino voters, and voters from historically pivotal states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The list extends to include problems fundamentally rooted in personalities such as Biden and Bibi, along with weather phenomena – an apparent hurricane problem, no less.
The Republicans, on the other hand, offer a starkly contrasting picture: unjustified bravado sprouts from their ranks. This peculiar characteristic seems to have permeated the party, injected directly from the robust and self-assertive image of their leading representative, Donald Trump. Rough waters and ridicule of poll numbers be damned – Trump maintains an unyielding persistence and remains stoically offensive.
Trump’s charisma is such that he oscillates between conviction, humiliation, election defeat, and always being ready to strike, relentless in his belligerence. Amidst the circus that is an election season, when the news broadcasts favorably discussed the newly released economic data pointing to an annual inflation rate dropping to 2.4%, a three-year low, the Republicans unrealistically maintained their optimistic façade.
Some truths underpin the very infrastructure of politics itself, truths both Republicans and Democrats understand too well: some races are simply too close to comma. But bear in mind that this unpredictable situation is in no way an endorsement for the lazy path of indifference and detachment. Bah, perhaps such an attitude contributed to landing our country in the turbulent situation it finds itself in today.
The aftermath of the 2020 election, with its attempt to spin the results, proved to be an erratic time that led many citizens, regardless of their party affiliations, to hold the erroneous belief that the dismissed President, banished to Mar-a-Lago, would fade into irrelevance. This complacency resulted in a collective cognitive dissonance of sorts. People started disengaging, tuning out.
The Republican representative during a fiery speech at the Detroit Economic Club barreled forward with calamitous predictions for the country under Harris’ leadership. Echoing the gloomy image of a Detroit under siege, he went on to forewarn tremendous tariffs on the rest of the world, a strategically careless move which could well steer the country into economic despair.
Recently, other criticisms against Harris surfaced, painting her as a harbinger of ‘darkness and despair’ to Pennsylvania, pegging her as ‘entirely incompetent and poorly equipped’, and branding her a fabricator over her claim of having held a summer job at McDonald’s during her college years, despite the fact that she did.
As the election draws repeatedly closer with each turn of the calendar page, one thing remains certain in the vortex of uncertainty: the memory of 2024 election will be etched with the silent screams of individuals like Mike DeWines. The ominously conspicuous absence of their call to caution begs the question: should the panic button not have been pressed already?
Perennially stuck between a rock and a hard place, Harris seems to need to juggle too many spinning plates at once in order for victory to be even remotely possible. The focus has been peripheral at best on her required shift towards centrism, hard proof of the numerous compromises and sacrifices candidates are often asked to make in the name of ‘strategy’.
And then there’s Trump. Never on the defensive, always in attack mode, he’s like a heavy hitter in a boxing match. Always ready with a jab or an uppercut, he relishes every moment in the spotlight. His audience feeds off this charisma, encouraging his mascot-like behavior, drawn to the magnetic force of his theatrics.
This, in essence, captures the circus that election seasons often devolve into. A spectacle of promise and dread, of charisma and incompetency, of optimism and complacency, and a sea of voters caught in between, making sense of the chaos and hoping for the best.