John Rapley, Contributor
ALL INDICATIONS are that Tuesday's election in the United States will generate the highest turnout ever.
It has been a polarising, hard-fought and much-watched campaign, and it is still far from clear who will emerge the victor.
In the 1990s, when Republicans and Democrats seemed to agree on most policies, the only issue that really fired up the country was Bill Clinton's penchant for trouble.
Back then, more people tuned into the emerging genre of reality shows than to presidential debates. During the 1996 campaign, one poll found that most Americans felt the outcome of the election would make little difference to their lives.
Even at the height of the Clinton impeachment, apathy reigned supreme: while most Americans opposed President Clinton's removal, most also said it wouldn't really matter to them if it happened either.
Today, a minority of Americans display that sort of disinterest. A poll asking the same question as the 1996 survey found a large majority of Americans saying that a lot hung on the outcome of this election.
While John Kerry is still clinging to the centre, the gaps that have opened between him and President Bush have widened considerably. The divisions that have riven the country have manifested themselves in Democratic drives to register voters and Republican efforts to challenge those registrations.
Already, the briefing papers are ready for presentation in courts across the land the morning after the election. In anticipation of skulduggery by the other side, both parties have sent armies of lawyers fanning out across the land to take the fight into the nation's courthouses. Assuming the result is as close as it was in 2000, there is every reason to believe that nobody will be conceding defeat on Tuesday night.
Polls have consistently shown that the race is even closer than the 2000 campaign was. That one, of course, was decided by a few hundred votes and a Supreme Court intervention.
SIZE OF THE ELECTORATE
And yet, there are a number of variables which are frustrating the predictions of pollsters, and making it very difficult for anyone to predict with any confidence how the chips will fall on Tuesday.
First, there is the sheer size of the electorate. Voter-registration drives yielded a bumper crop of new voters this year. Conventional wisdom suggests that high turnouts favour the Democratic Party, and the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, has based his campaign in no small measure on appeals to uncommitted voters.
Nevertheless, turnout rates among such voters tend to be on the low side. Moreover, this election has confounded some of the old received wisdom, producing such surprises as pro-Democratic gun-owners and possible signs of a rise in Republican support among African-Americans. So it is very difficult to extrapolate just how a high turnout would affect the vote.
ELECTORAL COLLEGE
Then, there is the effect of America's peculiar way of choosing the highest office of the land. The Electoral College is a legacy of the early days of the republic, when the presidency was a largely ceremonial position. With power residing in the states, local elites were anxious to keep the federal government on a tight leash. The president was selected through a process of elite bargaining, whereby each state chose a slate of electors to go participate in a convention which would select the president.
Over time, though, the push for greater democracy, and the gradual expansion in the powers of the presidency, led states to put their electors up for election.
To this day, these elections are administered by state authorities, and so their conduct varies from one state to the next. That is why it is sometimes said that the U.S. presidential election is not one election, but 51 (the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia).
With only a couple of exceptions, states use a winner-take-all approach. Strictly speaking, voters do not choose the president. They choose the electors who will choose the president at a later meeting in Washington, DC.
Voters are presented with slates of candidates who pledge to give their vote to one party or the other. The candidate who wins the most votes in that state then gets to send his entire slate to Washington, even if he wins only a plurality of the ballots cast.
Thus, 'landslides' are not so exceptional in the U.S. A relatively modest difference in the popular vote can translate into a huge advantage in the electoral college if one candidate's support is spread fairly evenly across the country. This happened in 1984 when President Ronald Reagan won all but one state in the union.
CLOSE STAKES
There will be no landslides this year. But that is not to say that the final result will be as close as the polls suggest the popular vote is liable to be. It is possible that one of the two candidates could pull away in enough of the 'battleground' states to rack up a strong lead in the electoral-college vote. Indeed, either candidate could pull off a strong victory. And each man is employing different strategies to do so.
From the start, President George W. Bush, advised by Karl Rove, opted for a 'base' or 'core' approach. Focused not on winning uncommitted voters but on connecting with traditional partisans, Mr. Bush's message has consistently targeted the base of the Republican Party. Armed with a coherent, simplified conservative message, he has repeatedly drummed upon themes that resonate with his people, even at times at the risk of alienating swing voters who are more pragmatic than ideological.
The investment in his base has paid Mr. Bush handsome dividends. Polls consistently show that his support among Republicans is very high, and he has built up a large number of 'solid' states, which will together deliver him nearly 200 certain Electoral College votes.
Having such a strong bastion of support has freed Mr. Bush to concentrate his remaining resources and time in a smaller number of states. It has also allowed him to occasionally go to Democratic states, not because he has a chance of winning them, but because he can keep his opponent constantly on the defensive.
DOWNSIDE
There is, of course, a downside to Mr. Bush's strategy. While his corner may just be a sufficiently large swath of the U.S. to preserve his presidency on Tuesday night, Mr. Bush has nonetheless painted himself into a corner.
Having tilted unambiguously to the right throughout his campaign, Mr. Bush could not soften his message if he found that he needed to top up his numbers with some swing voters. That has left Mr. Kerry with more freedom of manoeuvre in the battleground states, since he largely has the uncommitted field to himself.
Indeed, Mr. Kerry's strategy has been predicated on turning out and picking up as many uncommitted voters as he can.
During the primary season, the insurgency of Howard Dean forced Mr. Kerry to tack to the left. However, almost as soon as the primaries were over and he was the winner, his advisers declared that the Democratic base was solid. Their estimation was that Democrats so disliked Mr. Bush that they were bound to turn out in droves come November. This left Mr. Kerry to concentrate his efforts on picking up enough uncommitted voters to put him over the top.
The Democrats have certainly not neglected their base. They have made remarkable efforts to register people and get them out to vote. However, Mr. Kerry's message has largely sought a middle ground in which he can appeal to voters whose ideological orientations are not strong.
This investment, too, has paid Mr. Kerry good dividends. In polls of uncommitted voters, he always shows a lead over Mr. Bush far greater than the narrow margin Mr. Bush still enjoys in national surveys. If the Democrats can actually get these people to the polls on Tuesday, Mr. Kerry should enjoy the sort of late surge for which he has become known, and which will put him over the top in the final tally.
UNCOMMITTED VOTERS
The question, however, is will that happen? Uncommitted voters and late-deciders are notoriously lethargic when election-day comes around.
The peril in Mr. Kerry's approach is that by softening his appeal it is not exactly speaking to the base when in an opening statement at a debate, a Democrat promises to govern like Ronald Reagan he risks alienating voters on the left wing of the Democratic Party.
In fact, Mr. Kerry was favoured by many in the Democratic establishment precisely because he was seen as sufficiently centrist to appeal to swing voters. He was, after all, a Vietnam war veteran who had authorized the use of force against Iraq, but who was also criticising President Bush for his conduct of the war.
This, as we know, left Mr. Kerry open to the attack that he was a 'flip-flopper'. As a result, he has almost certainly failed to capitalise on Democratic anger at the war as effectively as another candidate might have.
Polls show that the intensity of attachment to Mr. Kerry on the part of Democratic voters is much less than that of Republican voters to Mr. Bush. If Mr. Bush can make few inroads among uncommitted voters, he does not have to worry about slippage from his base the way Mr. Kerry does.
In one sense, this election is Mr. Kerry's to lose. Since President Bush has yet to rise above 50 per cent in public opinion polls, he has already lost the plebiscite on the continuation of his presidency.
KERRY'S CHALLENGE
But will those discontented voters turn out to support Mr. Kerry? His inability to generate real enthusiasm among his supporters is a weakness that may hamper him on Tuesday night.
With his solid base in the electoral college, Mr. Bush needs only pick off one of the three big battleground states Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania and a couple of the smaller ones. Or, he could just take two of the big states.
Neither scenario is out of the question. But there are few inroads Mr. Bush has left to make, and it will be difficult for him to climb the hump in all but Florida.
Mr. Kerry's challenge is different. He has a much smaller secure base in the Electoral College, and Mr. Bush continues to harass him on his flanks, tying him up in states where by now he should have been secure. He has to pick up far more states than Mr. Bush does, which means the last 48 hours of his campaign will be frenetic.
On the other hand, having avoided clear-cut positions like those of Mr. Bush, he can bend and sway to try and pick up uncommitted voters. He can also hope that the anger of rank-and-file Democrats at Mr. Bush will motivate them to turn out the voters on Tuesday.
In the meantime, it looks all but certain that the House of Representatives will remain in Republican hands. The Democrats have high hopes of retaking control of the Senate, but that is now looking like an increasingly remote possibility. The Republicans might even add a couple of seats in the Senate to their slim majority. What is clear, though, is that neither party will enjoy a stranglehold on the Senate.
This will provide some comfort to Democrats, since it will mean that should Mr. Bush win re-election, he will have less freedom than he would like to alter the composition of the Supreme Court: the Senate must approve all his court appointments, and Democrats will be in a position to stymie a nomination they didn't like.
My own feeling is that for all the hype, and the razor-thin margins in the polls, the result on Tuesday night might not be as close as the pundits are predicting. The lawyers may yet go home disappointed. But for the first time in a long time, we will have witnessed a compelling and fascinating election campaign.
The tensions and hostilities of this campaign might not have been pleasant for Americans to live through. But for us living abroad, it has made for enjoyable viewing.
John Rapley is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
