America finally votes tomorrow, after an incendiary election campaign that has at times felt more like an outlandish Netflix fantasy-drama than it has the contest to become the leader of what used to be called the free world.
Adding to the sense of jeopardy is the fact that there is nothing to separate Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in the opinion polls.
In June Trump pulled ahead of President Joe Biden following their excruciating televised debate. Within weeks Biden was shown the door by the Democratic Party’s powerbrokers and Harris, his lacklustre vice president, installed as the candidate.
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She enjoyed a bounce in the polls over Trump - who in the meantime had survived, in yet another bizarre plot twist, an assassination attempt. By the end of last week Trump seemed to have found some momentum, photosynthesising Biden’s “garbage” comments into renewed energy. The gap narrowed again over the weekend; today, it is emphatically too close to call.
If Harris wins, we can be certain that Trump will not graciously accept defeat and recede back into the darkness from where he came
The idiosyncrasies of the archaic US system mean that seven ‘swing’ states will decide whether Trump or Harris accumulate enough electoral college votes - 270 is the target - to win the White House. Their choice will affect us all.
We in Ireland enjoy a long and deep connection with the United States. That does not particularly help us rationalise the fact that America voted for a figure like Trump to be president once before, and may well do so again.
The alarming possibility is that he is not as unhinged as he first appears, but that he is more unhinged. A convicted felon, around whom swirls a tawdry litany of other cases, Trump specialises in invective and insult.
Perhaps the most benign view of a second Trump presidency is that he is all talk, but little action, and that he won’t follow through on his authoritarian threats to round up his opponents and anyone else he imagines has slighted him. That is, perhaps, clutching at straws.
If Harris does win, we can be certain that Trump will not graciously accept defeat and quietly recede back into the darkness from where he came.
That there has been little real enthusiasm for Harris - there is no discernible Obama effect - reveals Americans’ lukewarm feelings about the Biden-Harris administration. The cost of living has gone up on their watch, for example.
Harris is nonetheless a more conventional politician but choosing her simply because she happens to be less-worse than a villain like Trump is an indictment of the state of US politics - a system which has lost its moral compass by facilitating Israel’s bludgeoning of Gaza. Depressingly, neither Harris nor Trump is likely to change that.
