I had stopped paying much attention to the upcoming presidential election in the United States. The choice between Joe Biden, an octogenarian, and Donald Trump, shortly to become one, with the latter likely to emerge victorious, had turned me off completely.

In an article published in the Jamaica Observer on Sunday, November 13, 2022, a few days after the midterm elections, I wrote:

“By 2024 Biden will be 82 years old. He frequently displays cognitive difficulties, stumbling over his words, inaccurately referring to his son Beau as having served in Afghanistan and calling on Congresswoman Jackie Walorski at a White House event a month after she had died in a car accident.

America needs new leadership that can inspire its people to repair its identity, rescue its threatened democracy, reassert its cultural diversity and reclaim its influence in the world. So much of its achievements, including the work and legacy of the Rev Martin Luther King Jr, is at risk. Biden should recognise and accept his transitional role in history and not suffocate the succession that is needed.

“Trump, who will be 78 years old in 2024, needs to do the same but that is not likely to happen. He is too obsessed with his own genius and indispensability. Any attempt to dislodge him is likely to be messy. Going quietly is not a part of his DNA. Slash and burn is almost certain to be his reaction. Damaging the party is the preferred consequence of any effort to remove him.”

Up until late July, Biden was trailing Trump in almost every public opinion poll. His physical and mental decline had become more painfully obvious. His performance in the debate with Trump in June was an utter embarrassment.

I had become resentful toward Biden. He made Trump look like a much younger man although he has his own intellectual if not mental challenges. Without the teleprompter he often finds it difficult to express his ideas with much coherence, constantly interrupting himself with irrelevant “by-the-ways” and most times forgetting to return to the point he was trying to make. I found it wryly funny when Bill Clinton quipped at the Democratic convention that he had left office almost 24 years ago and he is younger than Trump, a comment he would dare not have made if Biden was still the candidate.

I thought Biden’s misplaced ego, if not his mental capacity, had caused him to put at risk not just himself but scores of down-ballot Democratic candidates at the national, state, city and county levels. How could he, I wondered, draft such a pathetic epitaph to his more than 50 years of dedicated public service and leadership?

Then on a Sunday afternoon in late July Biden announced his decision to withdraw as the presidential candidate and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris as his replacement. The game had been colted. The dominoes had to be reshuffled. I sensed the rush of adrenalin across the American body politic. It was like an oxygen mask had been affixed to a patient experiencing severe hypoxia. America’s political calculus had dramatically changed.

The Democratic Party suddenly took on new life. Campaign volunteers started signing up in droves — more than 170,000 in the first week alone. Campaign donations — US$200 million in the first week — with two-thirds of that coming from small, first-time contributors, shattered previous records. The euphoria was palpable. Non-affiliated voters found something that stimulated their interest if not yet excitement.

I found myself re-evaluating my resentment toward Biden. Had he simply caved in to pressure from within his own party to step back or had he planned it this way, if not all along, for some time? In politics timing is defining. Had he announced that decision six months earlier the party would have gone through a series of primaries state-by-state. With such diverse ideological tendencies within the Democratic Party, it would inevitably have caused some fractures and left some wounds that would probably not have fully healed before the November elections.

Announcing his decision just four weeks before the Democratic National Convention and simultaneously endorsing his vice-president put to rest the ambitions of all others who would have fancied their chances of becoming the party’s presidential nominee. Was Biden playing to his own script? I kept asking myself. Only his memoirs may provide that answer.

Kamala Harris hit the ground instantly almost as if she was in on the script. She has been dominating the news cycles. She quickly recruited David Plouffe who was Barack Obama’s super-effective campaign manager in 2008. She turned the tables on Trump in her debate with him and exposed his frailty in ways that Biden could not. Her campaign rallies have been attracting huge crowds that Biden would not have been able to mobilise. The Democratic Party now has an army of paid staffers and campaign offices in the battleground states that far outnumber those of the Republican Party.

But Kamala Harris’ path to the White House is not a sure thing. She and Trump each have stronghold states that, barring a seismic upset, they are certain to win, handing her 226 electoral college votes and him 219. With 270 needed for the narrowest of victories, the winner will be determined by the results in the seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin which have an aggregate of 93 electoral college votes.

Prior to Biden dropping out, polls had showed Trump leading in all seven. Kamala Harris has been able to retake the lead in four, but the polls continue to show razor-sharp margins in all seven and both campaigns are laser-focused on them. Of these seven, Pennsylvania with 19 electoral college votes, which is one of those where Harris is now ahead in the polls, is the most pivotal. Win Pennsylvania and she needs only to pick up Michigan and Wisconsin to get to the 270 needed. Lose Pennsylvania and Trump needs only to take Georgia and North Carolina to get to his 270.

Harris has her work cut out for her. In the short time she has been the presumptive or declared candidate, she has recovered a lot of the support that Biden had lost among black and Hispanic voters but she has still not reached the level of support that Biden received in 2020 from these two important demographic groups that make up 29 per cent of eligible voters and have traditionally given overwhelming support to Democratic candidates. But she is doing exceptionally well among Asian-American voters, albeit they constitute only six per cent of eligible voters. She is also doing well among two even more significant demographic groups — women and young voters.

But she needs to do much more. Several polls continue to identify inflation and illegal migration as the two biggest concerns among the voters. They also show that a significant majority of them have greater confidence in Trump than her to deal with those two issues, especially since she is part of the current Administration that they feel has failed to address these problems. She has to reverse that perception.

She had a golden opportunity in the debate with Trump with 67 million viewers when she was asked the perennial question, which she must have anticipated, whether people were better off today than when she and Biden were elected almost four years ago. She ducked the question completely, promising instead to build more houses, provide tax cuts for child support and funding for small business start-ups.

She should have addressed that question head-on with the same passion and empathy with which she speaks about abortion. The inflation that American voters are seething about as it affects their rent, mortgage rates, utility charges and grocery bills is not a mystery that can’t be explained in a credible narrative, given its global context. In addition, inflation has been on the downturn and is almost back to normal with 2.5 per cent recorded at the end of August.

The Biden/Harris Administration is not without bragging rights. Trump handed her an easy catch when he blurted “They’ve had three-and-a-half years to create jobs. Why hasn’t she done it?” She must not have heard him because she made no mention of the 16 million jobs created under her Administration, one of its stellar achievements. But she must have heard him for she mentioned 800,000 new manufacturing jobs. The unemployment rate at 4.2 per cent is lower than when Trump left office and wages have increased by 17 per cent. Not once did she mention the massive US$400-billion infrastructure programme involving 40,000 major projects across all 50 states. She has since made a good effort to address this deficit in a speech she gave in Pittsburgh this past week where she made a much more comprehensive presentation of her economic programme.

Helpful as that speech was, Kamala Harris would be well advised to assemble a team of policy experts that can work the news networks and social media providing detailed explanations of her policy prescriptions, especially on the issues of greatest concern to the voters. They can’t expect voters to search for it on her website.

The “Democratic strategists” frequently appearing on the TV networks don’t cut it; their talking points can’t withstand rigorous challenge. And her spokespersons should contrast her policies sharply with the bizarre Project 2025 proposals from which Trump has tried but should not be allowed to distance himself. Voters would then get a better sense of what her presidency would be like.

On the issue of illegal migration she rightly blamed Trump for ordering his Republican members of Congress to kill the Border Security Bill to which they had previously agreed because he wanted to exploit the border problem as a campaign issue. But she failed to provide much detail as to how that would have reduced the flow of illegal immigrants so that voters could redirect their anger toward Trump. I haven’t bothered to research it and the average voter can hardly be expected to do that either.

She failed even to mention the fact that executive action taken by Biden after the Bill was defeated to no longer allow asylum applications at the border has resulted in a 50 per cent reduction in border crossings. At the time of writing, she was scheduled to provide details of her border control policy during a visit to Arizona on Friday.

Even if Kamala Harris wins the election, her task as president is going to be daunting. The American Government structure requires collaboration between the two co-equal branches of Government. The political polarisation that exists today has made the environment so toxic that collaboration is difficult to achieve. The Republicans currently control the House of Representatives by a slim majority and although that could flip, it seems likely that the Democrats will lose their 51-49 control of the Senate with losses in Montana and West Virginia and possibly Ohio even if Colin Allred creates an upset by defeating Ted Cruz in Texas.

A choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump seems to me to be a no-brainer. Next week I will offer some thoughts as to how so many American voters think it’s a no-brainer of a different kind.

— Bruce Golding served as Jamaica’s eighth prime minister from September 2007 to October 2011