Everything rests on the third-party vote Double-haters could decide the election

This is partly due to circumstances that came to light even before Biden stepped aside. By choosing Vance as his running mate, Trump has crafted a populist ticket which, on issues such as trade and immigration, might benefit third-party candidates such as the Libertarian nominee, Chase Oliver. As well as being a former Democrat, Oliver’s support for an unlimited number of non-criminal immigrants joining the workforce could win the vote of some traditional free-market Republicans.

But there are other, more important factors that could simultaneously stop Democratic defections — and chief among them is the centrality of identity politics to American progressive ideology. Put simply, it is unlikely that those who voted in protest against Biden — an old white man — would also vote against a female black and half-Asian Democratic nominee.

What of Harris’s policies? One of the great sports of American politics is pretending that the detailed policy positions or voting records of presidential candidates matter. But the truth is the vast majority of Americans will vote for a party regardless of its nominee. And many of the swing voters who are undecided at this late stage are what political scientists and pollsters rather kindly call “low-information voters” who pay little attention to politics. Such “disengaged voters” — predominantly less educated, lower-income, and young — have little knowledge of party positions and do not follow political news. One study suggests that voters who are poorly informed about the positions of the parties are more likely than better-informed voters to be influenced by a candidate’s looks.

If policy positions are not necessarily the basis of political success, neither is favourable media coverage. The editors and reporters of the American mainstream media organs, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio (NPR), are overwhelmingly Democratic in partisanship. Having helped to cover up Biden’s debility since the 2020 campaign, the Left-leaning American press no doubt will pivot now and portray Harris in the most flattering light possible, while demonising Trump and Vance as sinister neo-fascists who would replace democracy with dictatorship if they were elected.

Of course, the credibility of the mainstream media has been damaged by their promotion of bogus claims in recent years: about Russia’s influence on the 2016 election, the origins of Covid, and falsehoods about Biden’s health and mental acuity. Biden’s disastrous debate performance exposed their mendacity. In any event, most of the Democratic press’s audience consists of partisan Democrats — not the low-information swing voters which both presidential campaigns will try to reach. The exception to the generally limited influence of the media on public political opinion may, however, be live, televised debates. With no intermediaries engaging in spin, Americans can view candidates directly for a prolonged time. It was, after all, Biden’s shockingly poor debate performance that ultimately drove him from the race.

Harris can hardly do worse. She has often been ridiculed for her meandering syntax as well as her laugh. But Harris wouldn’t be debating a slick, conventional politician. Instead, her debate rival would be a man who often veers off into preposterous boasts or rambling anecdotes. Harris may, in fact, benefit from how Trump is often as inarticulate as she is.

This is crucial. By historical standards, all of this year’s presidential candidates — Trump, Biden, and possibly now Harris — have been extremely unpopular, marking a sharp rupture with the previous performances of Obama and even Biden at the beginning of his term. Indeed, political scientists and pollsters have identified a new breed of American swing voter, the “double hater”, who despises both parties and their candidates and makes up 14% of the electorate this year. In this environment, presidential races are unpopularity contests. According to one study, one in three voters this year is motivated by opposition to the other candidate. The winner can be widely loathed as long as the loser is loathed even more.

When Biden was the presumptive nominee, Democrats ran a negative campaign based on vilifying Trump and his Republican supporters rather than emphasising the policies of the Biden administration. We can expect that if the unpopular Harris replaces the unpopular Biden, the Democrats will double down on demonising not only Trump and Vance but also RFK Jr and other independent candidates who threaten to prevent an anti-Trump coalition from uniting behind the new Democratic nominee. The American presidential race following Biden’s withdrawal is going to be very nasty indeed. Welcome to the most important unpopularity contest on the planet.