The Unbearable Absurdity Of US Presidential Polls

All of us can be forgiven for mistaking 2024 as the year of the longest-running live TV entertainment. Thankfully, one leg of it is over. As the votes get counted, the world can take a breather while regrouping and replenishing supplies for the second. The race to become the President of the United States has never been so absurd for the onlookers. Who or what, for example, was anyone rooting for?

According to a Pew Research Centre survey conducted in September, 69% of Americans admitted to following news about the presidential candidates for the 2024 election very (28%) or fairly (40%) closely. But what exactly were they getting or hoping to get? The survey report says, “Americans most often see news about actions on the presidential campaign trail, though they are most interested in their stances on issues”. A fair ask. Obviously unmet. 

Circus Of The Absurd

What the American voter has received so far is a concept of a plan from Trump and a promised continuum of Biden’s ‘problematic’ policies from Harris. Many Americans are sitting this election out, and who can blame them? A campaign trail inundated with descriptions of a golfer’s penis or how immigrants are eating other people’s animals, insinuations about a potential election steal on one side and an undressed stream-of-consciousness word salad on the other, has done little to convince the average American voter about the nobility and grandiosity of the White House. 

Both Trump and Harris have demonstrated an utter inability to learn from the past. While Trump got too bored of a decent, non-dramatic campaign just a few months into 2024 and unleashed his 2020 MAGA-man energy, Harris stubbornly refused to bring any course correction in her agenda on foreign policy issues despite her fellow Democrats’ public castigation. This election has been the most extensive testimony of what a lot of analysts within the US, as well as outside, have observed but have largely refrained from verbalising: both the Democrats and the Republicans fashion their electoral campaigns around the faults of the other side while doing absolutely nothing about their own. 

Kamala, The Saner One

Is it not ridiculous that the Harris campaign posited her only as the saner alternative to Trump? The fact that the Democrat incumbency became a burden and not a bolster for Harris should alert us that the new president’s arrival in the White House will probably be an extension of all the gaffes this campaign saw. And what about the process of candidate selection for both parties? Declaring Trump as their candidate for the third time, the Republican Party demonstrated an utter lack of imagination at a time when President Biden’s popularity was ebbing steadily. The Democrats changed their candidate from Biden to Harris with almost nil deliberations in their convention. The working-class voters, cold about Biden, have stayed cold towards her as well throughout the campaign.

But the US presidential elections are not about the American voters alone. What happens on Capitol Hill reverberates throughout the world. When Barack Obama won his first term, the symbolism of this victory was evident from young and old Indians celebrating at the India Gate in New Delhi. Presidents come and go, but their road to the Capitol paves ways across the world for ideologies, ideas, and geopolitical ramifications.

Nobody Knows Anything

From formulating trade controls to funding wars, what the POTUS decides goes a long way for the US and the rest of the world. Both Trump and Harris turned serious policy issues into farce during the campaign by sharpening the focus only on each other’s personalities. We still do not know what Trump’s plan is for the Middle East or the Russia-Ukraine war. Or China. Or Sudan or Bangladesh, for that matter. We only know that Harris is “committed to peace”, but her party’s ongoing actions have suggested otherwise. 

At this moment, it is an exercise in futility to assess what a Trump or a Harris win might mean for India or the larger Global South. There are no guiding principles to launch any such enquiry. Any scenario study will yield only fallacious conclusions because, simply, neither Trump nor Harris has stuck to either the party line or even their own stated beliefs. Trump’s transactionalism and Harris’s hubris are enough to defy any projections.

The US presidential election was once a lesson in how democracy asserts itself. In 2024, it has become something else. 

A glorified version of Hulk Hogan wrestling with his shirt.

(Nishtha Gautam is a Delhi-based author and academic.)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author