On November 5, the United States will elect its 47th president. Elections in the largest economy with the most powerful military have always commanded the attention of the rest of the world.
The interest is even more intense this year, with the wars going on in Ukraine and the Middle East, rising tension in the South China Sea, Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, and the uncertainty of the electoral outcome.
The elections, described by the Americans themselves as the most consequential in their post-war history, confronts a deeply divided electorate with starkly contrasting choices. Obvious differences between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in gender, generational, ethnic/cultural and personality traits have themselves become election issues.
Their social and professional backgrounds also differ. Harris has occupied subordinate positions in large bureaucracies at state and federal levels. Trump has exercised CEO powers in business most of his life, never served in government until his election as president in 2016, and prides himself on his personal ability to drive deals with his counterparts to get things done.
These differences have doubtless helped shape the way they have dealt with subordinates and peers. Beyond management style, the candidates present diverging policy perspectives on how the US should conduct relations with the rest of the world on critical concerns related to the global economy, geopolitics, human rights and climate change.
Second, with less than three weeks until the voting, the contest remains at a dead-heat deadlock. The gap between the contenders in the constant barrage of polling surveys falls within the 3% margin of error.
The unipolar moment of unrivaled Great Power dominance has passed. Americans are not electing the supreme global leader and external parties do not much influence their decision. From a big picture perspective, countries that see the US as blocking their national interests, may view with indifference who emerges as the winner.
As a BBC expert source on China explains, Chinese leaders view the election as offering them a choice between “two bowls of poison.” Not that this perspective has discouraged their efforts to influence the elections.
Think tanks, network platforms and US security agencies have documented attempts since the 2016 elections from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and their allies to reach voters through AI-powered disinformation campaigns. The intent is not necessarily to tip the scales in favor of a candidate than to sow doubts on the election results, deepen dysfunctional domestic discord, and disrupt government policy-making and implementation.
As broad as the global interest in the elections may be, the electoral outcome may depend on the decisions of small, local American communities. Because of a deliberate design in the electoral system to balance the power of the federal government and the individual states, the choice of the majority of voters will not necessarily prevail.
Americans do not elect their president directly. They vote instead for their state representatives, chosen by their political party, to the College of Electors who will cast the votes for the president. The number of state electors varies and, apart from Maine and Nebraska, all the votes go to the winner, regardless of the margin of victory.
The candidate who collects at least 270 of the 538 electoral votes wins the presidency — George Bush against Al Gore in 2000, and Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Bush and Trump lost the popular vote, but captured more state electoral votes. 2024 election strategies have thus focused on a handful of “battleground states,” whose results can swing the outcome of the race.
Within these states, the goal of both parties is to mobilize their base to vote, but also to locate and persuade the uninformed, uncommitted or, perhaps, uninterested in smaller demographic segments to cast a ballot for their candidate.
Census and survey data have identified these electoral pockets among naturalized, ethnic, immigrant communities and, in particular, among Asian-Americans. Both parties have links to these constituencies; Harris and the wife of Trump running mate JD Vance are of Indian descent. This kind of retail, sachet marketing is difficult to implement. Asian-Americans constitute a diverse group of language, religious and communities from different cultural and political traditions and often limited in their command of English.
Campaign ground staff frequently lack the campaign materials for these groups and the linguistic skills to engage them in political discussions. But the effort appears necessary and the political parties are looking for volunteer translators and interpreters.
Doug Emhoff, campaigning for wife Harris, made an appearance at the Hmong festival in Wasau, Wisconsin, the city with the most Hmong people per capita in the US, where they had found refuge from the Vietnam War.
Biden won Wisconsin in 2020 by a margin of 20,000 votes, a state with 60,000 eligible Hmong voters. Biden won by an even thinner margin of less than 12,000 votes in Georgia, where Forsyth County, with a 20% population of Asian-Americans, gave him 16,000 votes. Of the roughly 300,000 Asian-American voters in battleground Arizona, nearly 100,000 Filipinos form the biggest block.
We do not know what changes will come with the next US president. Not only because we cannot be certain who will claim the presidency but also because we do not know which candidate will really bring about change. We do know that, whoever wins, some things will not change. Ongoing conflicts around the world will not magically end in November. The process of global warming will proceed.
At home, the populist pressures, the culture war, and the clash between internationalists and isolationists will continue, limiting even more the ability of the US to intervene abroad. Whoever wins, American allies will face the pressure to contribute more to their national security.
Nor will other nations abandon what they perceive as their national interests. Whatever their preferences, they must focus on how to protect these interests, whether Harris or Trump is elected. – Rappler.com
Edilberto C. de Jesus is a senior research fellow at the Ateneo School of Government.