My Times column this week (appended below) was an abbreviated version of my long piece about doorknocking in Pennsylvania last month. Though the polarisation is worse in the US, I see lots of parallels with British politics, particularly the disconnect between the snooty, self-righteous centre-left “priesthood” and the rest of the country. David Brooks is very good on this in the New York Times. Excerpt
When parties were primarily political organizations, they were led by elected officials and party bosses. Now that parties are more like quasi-religions, power lies with priesthood — the dispersed array of media figures, podcast hosts and activists who run the conversation, define party orthodoxy and determine the boundaries of acceptable belief.For my weekly CEPA column I reviewed Keir Giles’s new book, a scathing and gloomy take on European defence.
Best regards, Edward
Why independent voters are turning to Trump
On the ground in Pennsylvania, the Harris campaign comes across as weak and out of touch
Edward Lucas
Monday October 21 2024, 12.01am, The Times
In the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg heady rhetoric fires up the troops. At stake: the country’s fate and quite possibly the world’s. Not for the first time.
In July 1863 this was the site of a crucial battle in the American civil war. A few months later President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address. The sacrifice of the fallen, he said, should inspire Americans to ensure that government “of the people, by the people, for the people” should not perish from this earth.
That seems anything but a done deal. Democrats think Donald Trump will end American democracy; Republicans, with equal fervour, think their freedom will be crushed under Kamala Harris’s wokery.
The hinge of history again runs through Pennsylvania. Just a few thousand undecided or apathetic voters will decide the state’s 19 electoral college votes. So individual efforts matter. Even mine.
By the frenetic standards of a contest in a British marginal seat, the Harris-Walz Gettysburg HQ seemed worryingly short of volunteers. A nearby Trump campaign stall had far more bustle. Merchandise included baseball caps reading “Jesus is My Savior, Trump is My President”.
After some brief training — “putting leaflets in a letter box is a felony” was a new one on me — I headed to my target “turf”, an hour’s drive away. Its palatial homes would sell for millions in Britain but go for a small fraction of that in easy-build America. In decades of door-knocking as a Lib Dem, I’ve encountered punches, spittle and dog bites. But ubiquitous gun ownership and frazzled tempers added an extra tingle of risk.
What bothered me more were broader failures of imagination. I had spent the previous week in Washington, among my tribe of foreign-policy wonks. Their view was unanimous. Trump’s re-election would be an apocalyptic disaster. Yet my suggestion of a weekend’s campaigning, just 90 minutes away by car, prompted only excuses.
I also wondered how the thousands of fallen in the hallowed ground of Gettysburg’s haunting military cemetery would regard the partisan divide that disfigures modern America, and what warning they might provide. Roughly half of American voters are voting for someone that my friends regard as a crook, idiot and perhaps traitor. Blaming this only on propaganda, ignorance and racism is too easy. Actually talking to Republican voters paints a quite different picture.
By far the biggest issue was illegal immigration. A retired Polish-Jewish couple from New York were ex-Democrats, keen to stress that they had no truck with racism (“how could we?”). They could not support Harris because of her failure as vice-president to visit the border. A burly young man, Todd, with four pairs of soiled work jeans neatly laid out to dry on his driveway, explained: “I work my butt off and they come here, break the rules and get stuff free.” A roaring leaf-blower curtailed further conversation.
An intense bearded man, Randy, told me about his prized AR-15 assault rifle. Harris would take it away. Who would protect his family from terrorists then? The conversation swivelled to deterrence in general, and then to China. Trump was bad with allies, he agreed. But Harris would be even worse. In any case, he would read the Bible before voting.
The voters I had been sent to talk to were, alarmingly, registered independents, notionally open to persuasion. Every one of them was voting for Trump, either because his message broadly matched their pious, patriotic principles, or because they found Harris unconvincing: a weak candidate with a weak record and weak messages, wildly over-promoted, boosted by a fawning liberal media and a sinister, duplicitous, left-wing Democratic political machine. Highlighting Trump’s reprehensibility works poorly with these voters; it implies they are wicked for even considering him.
With dusk (to my relief) bringing an end to door-knocking, I tried my luck on out-of-town visitors to Gettysburg. Emerging from a souvenir shop, a group from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s rust-belt capital, expressed dismay at my Harris-Walz badge. “Take that damn thing off,” they hooted. Hearing my British accent, they stopped joshing me and took on an almost apologetic tone. “You guys think we are all bigots and rednecks, but we’re not,” said the paterfamilias. “He’s a CFO,” added his wife, by way of explanation.
Other members of the group made thoughtful, worried points about the green energy transition (too ideological), growth-killing taxes, the cost of living, political correctness, and — again — the failure to secure the border. They were no dunces on international affairs either. Biden had followed Trump’s China policy, far better than Obama’s. Trump had got Saudis and Israelis talking. Yes, he clicked with Putin, but that’s the art of the deal: “You have to reach out to both sides.”
They readily conceded Trump’s flaws. “He says the wrong things sometimes,” said another Pittsburgher, before pointing out quite fairly that Harris spews word salad too. “But the media is unfair on him.” We parted amicably, amid mountainous helpings of ice cream.
My friends in DC know all about strange and distant lands. But not the one I had just visited.
Explaining that sober-minded, kindly, well-informed voters there were voting for the ranting, orange-skinned huckster prompted incomprehension, then irritation, directed at me. “Couldn’t you persuade them?” asked a Russia expert, crossly. If Trump wins, his bossy, self-righteous critics should blame themselves, not the voters. But they won’t.