On a Knife Edge

Tim Walz leaps out of his tour bus and throws his arms into the air. Standing before him is a crowd of more than 2,000 cheering people who have been waiting hours for him to arrive. As the 60-year-old strides briskly towards the stage, John Mellencamp’s “Small Town”, the anti-reactionary anthem for an anti-urban America, booms forth from the speakers. Once the applause subsides, the music fades, and everyone has calmed down a little, Walz exclaims: “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever done.” And somehow, you kind of believe him.

Election campaigns in the US are a long, expensive, occasionally entertaining, but mostly agonizing spectacle. And on this Wednesday afternoon in early October, part of that spectacle is the smell of straw as it permeates the York Expo Center in southern Pennsylvania. Tim Walz stands amid bales of straw, and a trailer beside the stage is also filled with the stuff. Hanging on the wall are three gigantic US flags. Between them, two signs that read “Freedom for Pennsylvania”. All in all, an Americana-themed scene that one would otherwise tend to associate with the Republican Party — and this is precisely the desired impression. Democrat Walz, incumbent governor of Minnesota and running mate of presidential candidate Kamala Harris, is on the campaign trail looking to appeal to undecided and conservative voters in particular.

Walz starts off by playing to his greatest strength: his down-to-earth nature. He references his televised debate of the previous evening against Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance. “Not bad for a football coach, right?”, Walz asks with a grin. Before embarking on his career in politics, he was a high school teacher and sports coach. But it’s not long before he’s arrived at the topic of liberal America’s arch-enemy: Walz warns the crowd that Donald Trump intends to abolish Obamacare and implement further tax cuts for the rich. He does mention his own party’s objectives, but only in passing, and only in the broadest possible terms: to boost housing construction, prohibit price-fixing among major corporations, and expand child benefits. All of which are moderate reforms that would primarily provide relief for the middle class, and none of which are visionary.

In this year’s election campaign, no other federal state is in the spotlight quite like Pennsylvania.

It would appear, however, that the core objective of his 30-minute speech is an entirely different one: Walz is keen to show voters that his party is the nation’s true patriotic powerhouse. Accordingly, he praises Mike Pence, the former vice president and fundamentalist Christian, for refusing to subscribe to Trump’s false claims about a stolen 2020 election. Walz also pays tribute to Ronald Reagan, fortieth US president and neoliberal hardliner, for managing to tame the rising tide of communism in the 1980s. “We need the Republican Party back again”, he exclaims. And by that, he means the party before the advent of Trump. The implicit message of this event is that if you really love your country, you have no other option than to vote for the Democrats in the face of the MAGA cult.

The Battle for the Battleground States

Roughly 330 million people live in the US, some 250 million of whom are of voting age ­— however, only 161 million of all eligible voters in the country are registered to vote, which does not bode well for democracy. Because the “winner takes it all” rule — whereby a state’s winning candidate receives all of that state’s electors — applies in almost all US states, countless millions of presidential election votes ultimately end up going to waste.

In California, for example, the Democratic Party has consistently won by a clear margin for decades, which means that the Republican party will inevitably lose all of the votes in that state. In Texas, the situation is reversed. As such, election campaigns tend to almost exclusively target those states that carry weight in terms of their population size and in which the election outcome is otherwise undetermined — the “battleground states”. This year there are seven: Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

The battleground states are not a fixed category — Florida, for example, was one for many years, but is now a Republican stronghold — nor is it a coherent group in terms of demographic or economic parameters. While one third of Arizona’s population is Hispanic, Michigan’s Hispanic population totals a mere 6 percent. While the GDP per capita in North Carolina has grown in recent years, in Wisconsin it has remained stagnant.

In this year’s election campaign, no other federal state is in the spotlight quite like Pennsylvania, which, with its 19 electors, also happens to be the country’s largest battleground state. Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by a margin of less than 1 percent. He succeeded here primarily on the basis of presenting the working class, which was plagued by deindustrialization, with a scapegoat — specifically immigrants and Muslims. In stark contrast, many saw the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, in both her party programme and her demeanour, as the epitome of the liberal, urban, academic, and snobbish elite. In 2020, Joe Biden was able to win Pennsylvania back for the Democrats because enough people went to the polls in the state’s large multi-ethnic cities. He also won by a margin of less than 1 percent.

If you ask people at campaign rallies why they plan to vote for Harris and Walz, the conversation tends to shift gear in a matter of seconds, with fear of another Trump presidency and the radicalized Republicans emerging as the most compelling motivation for many voters.

Harris is leading Trump in the most recent polls, but with a race this tight, the top candidates can still be seen out on the campaign trail almost every week. The Democrats have set up more than 50 local campaign offices in the state of Pennsylvania, with hundreds of volunteers going door to door in the hope of mobilizing voters. By the beginning of October, the two parties had spent a combined 350 million dollars on campaign advertising in this state alone. On television, radio, and online, the clips are making their rounds.

Anyone who has travelled through Pennsylvania in recent weeks will not only have been treated to the spectacle that is the US election campaign, but will also have gained a sense of the state’s political geography. There are cattle pastures with enormous Trump banners hammered into the ground — the rural and predominantly white regions of the USA are Republican territory. In major cities like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Harrisburg, on the other hand, you will find neighbourhoods in which virtually every front garden is adorned with a Harris-Walz sign — the more urban, the more fiercely Democratic. But the suburbs of Pennsylvania — and this also applies to the rest of the country — are politically mixed. Some are blue, others red, and many purple. In other words: fiercely contested.

Optimism Versus Scaremongering

That the election race is close at all is due in large part to the fact that President Joe Biden only recently came to the realization that, at the age of 81, he was too old to campaign, much less run for a second term. In July, faced with mounting pressure, he withdrew his candidacy. Harris subsequently took over, and all of a sudden, a renewed sense of momentum was born that is still palpable at Democratic campaign events today.

While the Trump campaign relies almost exclusively on racist and nationalistic scaremongering, warning voters against the dangers posed by “criminal immigrants” and blaming Biden for the rising cost of living, the Democrats are opting for a combination of optimism and alarm. Harris and Walz continually emphasize their desire to bring “joy” back to politics. They talk about a “new way forward” and an “economy of opportunity”. But if you ask people at campaign rallies why they plan to vote for Harris and Walz, the conversation tends to shift gear in a matter of seconds, with fear of another Trump presidency and the radicalized Republicans emerging as the most compelling motivation for many voters.

“They’re stripping away our abortion rights, and it won’t stop there”, says Sheila Ford, a 69-year-old management consultant from Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania. As a Black woman in America, she knows that civil rights are not something to be taken for granted. Chris Cairy, a 65-year-old home carer who is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of his labour union SEIU, warns: “Trump is a narcissist and a deeply divisive force.” He is dumbfounded that anyone could “fall for Trump” at all. For 53-year-old Robyn Hodgson, a trans woman and wheelchair user, the outcome of this election will have fundamental existential repercussions. “If Trump wins and abolishes Obamacare, I’ll lose my healthcare”, she explains.