A POLL this week showed that one in four Americans fear a civil war might break out after the country’s election on November 5.
I’m surprised the number is not higher.
AFPIf Trump does win the election, the Left in America will certainly riot[/caption]
AFPIf Kamala Harris wins there could be another refusal to accept the result[/caption]
The poll found 27 per cent of voters saying that they fear violence is “very or somewhat likely” after the country votes for a new President in just under two weeks. Of course they do.
In 2016 the surprise election of Donald Trump to the White House drove half of America into a type of nervous breakdown.
Then in 2020, when Trump refused to concede the election, the breakdown happened on part of the other side.
Throw in the summer of BLM riots in 2020 and much more and you can see why the fear of violence breaking out is so common.
On top of this, there have been two assassination attempts on the former President already — one of which came within a hair’s breadth of blowing Trump’s brains out on live television.
Add in Joe Biden’s own party finally realising he has almost completely checked out and swapping him for Kamala Harris.
And Harris’s own campaign moving from the theme of “joy” on to “Trump is literally Hitler” and you can see the fears.
If Trump does win the election, the Left in America will certainly riot.
They will make sure cities they believe they dominate go up in flames again.
And if Kamala Harris wins? Who knows if there could be another refusal to accept the result.
But a candidate such as Harris, who absolutely nobody was enthusiastic about until they were forced to pretend to be, will certainly stir up strong feelings.
The truth is that the US election is still far too close to call. Both sides are pushing around polls that show them in the lead.
But in the key swing states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, most of the polls show less than a one per cent lead in either direction.
The 2024 presidential election will most likely be decided by a couple of hundred thousand voters and whether they have really been honest with the pollsters to date.
It’s not surprising that in this situation, and with such a crucial choice, every election detail is being pored over.
There are reports of a surge of early voting in the state of Georgia.
Hopeless campaign
Almost two million voters have already cast their votes there, in a state which Trump only lost in 2020 by a little over 10,000 votes.
But which side does it benefit?
Over the past four years, Trump has waged a constant assault on the corruption potential of absentee, postal voting.
He has repeatedly pointed out the system’s ability to be rigged. So it has been assumed that a surge in postal voting would favour Harris.
But in recent months Trump has done a switcheroo and since giving postal voting his blessing, a large number of Trump voters may now feel happy to do their voting that way.
We won’t know the result for a couple of weeks, of course. And perhaps longer.
It wasn’t just the 2020 election that took a long time to be settled.
In 2000 the election of George W Bush famously came down to a few “hanging chads” and a court action in Florida.
Corruption potential
America is used to its elections being decided on a knife edge.
Yet even by these standards, this election feels fraught.
In part it is because both candidates have such clear downsides as well as upsides.
At this stage there probably isn’t a voter in America who doesn’t have an opinion on Donald Trump.
Many of them love him. Many will be keen for the drama of his years in office not to be repeated.
Yet look at the last four years under Biden-Harris and there is plenty of chaos there too.
Illegal migrants
The current administration allowed America’s southern border to hang wide open, allowing in millions of illegal migrants who are causing problems familiar to us here in Britain too.
Harris could have seized the opportunity to show how she’d do things differently.
But she has run a hopeless campaign.
She keeps saying that she is the “change” candidate.
But whenever she is asked what she would do differently from the past four years in the administration she was a part of, she fails to come up with anything.
Trump’s message is clear: Vote for me and I’ll clear up this mess.
Harris’s message, by contrast, is itself a mess: I’m proud of how we broke things and I’m also going to fix it.
In truth Harris has only one real rallying point, which she has now fallen back to using. Which is: Vote for me because I’m not Donald Trump, who is literally Adolf Hitler.
It’s not exactly a positive vision. But then America isn’t in a positive place right now.