My last post to The Donkey Vote - written in the immediate wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump - lamented the likely inflow of sympathy and resources that Trump would be able to leverage to strengthen his campaign for President for the remaining months until 5 November. That certainly is what appeared to be happening - with Trump amassing donations and a bump in the polls - until the withdrawal of Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate.

The wave of Democratic enthusiasm that Kamala Harris now rides has transformed the Presidential race. Harris now commands a slight edge in the polling, but after being burnt by the polls in 2016, the Democrats are expressing optimism but not complacency.

Despite the magnitude of possible ramifications that could emerge from this election, the greatest issue of our time - the as-yet unmitigated global climate crisis - has remained relegated to a low priority issue by both candidates and voters alike.

Immigration, the cost of living, women’s rights, the preservation of the integrity of democratic institutions, and basic questions about Trump’s competency all dominate the current election discourse. These aren’t unworthy issues - they should all be a core focus of the election debate - but given the stakes climate change should feature just as prominently.

Polling of the most important issues for voters consistently shows climate change as a low priority issue for voters. While a majority say climate change is an important issue, this is heavily skewed towards Democratic voters, and even few Democrats rate it as a top priority. This was true even in a Harvard University poll of voters aged under 30.

The deprioritisation of climate change as an election issue reflects multiple factors; voters are worried about the economy and their sense of ‘security’ more broadly. It’s also not an area of policy competition between Harris and Trump.

The recent Harris-Trump debate provided our first face-to-face encounter between the two candidates. Much of the subsequent analysis has focused on Trump’s bizarre assertions that immigrants are eating their neighbour’s dogs in Springfield, Ohio, and how Trump allowed himself to be bated by Harris’ not-so-subtle trolling on matters like his rally attendance. Refer to Australia’s own Jonathan Swan’s analysis in the NY Times for a great breakdown of Harris’ baiting.

However, there has been little critique of the unsatisfactory answers provided by both sides on the issue of climate change.

Firstly, it’s worth acknowledging that there’s clearly a Grand Canyon-sized chasm between the two candidates when it comes to their acceptance of climate change as an issue and the support they promise to provide to clean energy technologies.

We know where Trump stands on climate change because we saw what he did during his first term as President. He withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement and removed federal regulations that imposed limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power stations, cars, and oil and gas production. Trump also stacked a US Supreme Court with jurists who have since neutered the federal Environmental Protection Agency from pro-actively regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

In contrast, Harris has been unequivocal in her recognition that climate change is a real and growing danger, and during the recent presidential debate, she pointed to the track record of the Biden-Harris administration in implementing measures like the Inflation Reduction Act, which will direct $783 billion into clean energy projects.

But, there is an incongruity in Harris’ climate and energy policies.

This is what Harris said when a question about climate change was finally asked very late into the debate:

“What we know is that [climate change] is very real. You ask anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences who now is either being denied home insurance or is being jacked up. You ask anybody who has been the victim of what that means in terms of losing their home, having nowhere to go. We know that we can actually deal with this issue. The young people of America care deeply about this issue. And I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.”

- Kamala Harris, Presidential debate (September 10, 2024)

The last sentence is the kicker that has flavoured so much of the Democratic candidate’s approach to the climate issue. Earlier in the same debate, Harris proudly pointed to her history of supporting the expansion of the American oil and gas industries.

“I will not ban fracking. I have not banned fracking as Vice President of the United States. And, in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which opened new leases for fracking. My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil. We have had the largest increase in domestic oil production in history because of an approach that recognizes that we cannot over rely on foreign oil.”

- Kamala Harris, Presidential debate (September 10, 2024)

Evidently, committing to the phase out of fossil fuels is a lower priority for the Harris campaign than being seen to support new job creation and addressing energy security. Climate action takes a back seat to the issues of most importance to those in swing states.

Harris has not only backed away from an earlier position that supported a ban on fracking, but has openly supported and championed the growth of American fossil fuel industries. “The largest increase in domestic oil production in history” is part of the Biden-Harris legacy that she is selling to voters.

Those who will defend Harris’ approach argue that winning the presidency is the most important objective. Take, for example, the response from the Sierra Club - one of the world’s oldest environment groups - which issued an emphatic endorsement of Kamala Harris’ climate policy platform.

A second Trump presidency would be - by far - disastrous for climate action. That’s not untrue.

But, it is important to note the broad range of environmental impacts of fracking. An obvious impact is that it facilitates the growth of fossil fuel use. In its landmark Net Zero by 2050 pathway, the International Energy Agency stressed that - starting from 2021 - there could be “no new oil and gas fields approved for development”. More fracking is incompatible with that net zero by 2050 pathway.

Fracking is also much more than just a climate issue. The practice of fracking involves the injection of chemicals and other materials deep underground to deliberately trigger the breakup of sediment structures and release trapped gas. Due to the significant contamination risk, it is a threat to the health of nature and human populations alike. Fracking has a significant impact on land, poses a significant risk to the safety of drinking water supplies, and produces air pollution that is a direct threat to the health of nearby human populations.

If the underlying issues that matter to voters in swing states are indeed new job opportunities, lowering energy costs and reducing dependence on foreign supplies of oil and gas - then truly clean energy technologies (not gas) can achieve all of these objectives without the need for more fracking. Harris needs to have the confidence to make that pitch to voters rather than an unseemly embrace of a larger fossil fuel industry.

For the record, Trump’s response to the ‘climate question’ during the debate strayed into the assertion that he would stop Mexican-made, Chinese-owned automakers from selling cars in the United States. It was a response about jobs and protectionism and did not address climate as an issue.

Trump touched on clean energy at other points in the debate, including when he criticised solar energy projects for taking up too much land. In the desert.

“If she won the election, the day after that election, they'll go back to destroying our country and oil will be dead, fossil fuel will be dead. We'll go back to windmills and we'll go back to solar, where they need a whole desert to get some energy to come out. You ever see a solar plant? By the way, I'm a big fan of solar. But they take 400, 500 acres of desert soil. These are not good things for the environment that she understands.”

- Donald Trump, Presidential debate (September 10, 2024)

We’re left with an election that has relegated climate change to being a low-priority issue. Harris has not sought to capitalise on Trump’s conspiratorial opinions about clean energy technologies and his claims that climate action is some woke-agenda hoax. Instead, Harris has worked to minimise the perception that she may seek to diminish American fossil fuel industries to avoid upsetting crucial voters in swing states like Pennsylvania.

Even after a change in candidate, the stakes at risk in this election are very high. On one side, we have an experienced, qualified, and competent Democratic candidate who is campaigning on a platform that promises to save democratic institutions and offers a positive vision for the future. On the other side, we have Trump’s promises of an upheaval of institutions and retribution against his enemies - whether he wins or loses.

Trump also risks dragging other countries into climate inaction. Australia is an obvious example of this risk. A Trump Presidency would provide licence to a possible Dutton-led future Australian Government (after the next Australian federal election) to join the United States in winding back investment in clean energy alternatives and abandon international agreements.

It represents the unsatisfactory bargain that the American climate movement has had to make. It must support a candidate that celebrates fracking and the growth of a domestic fossil fuel industry because the alternative is Donald Trump.

This year was always going to be a wild, volatile, year in American politics. We’ve just had confirmation of just how extreme things could get.

I don’t think the events of this weekend have quite sunk in yet. Someone tried to kill Donald Trump. It was an assassination attempt on someone who is both a former US President and a major party contender to become the next US President.

My first post to The Donkey Vote was an expression of the ubiquitous dread that is being felt by so many about the possible outcomes of the US Presidential election. The shooting in Pennsylvania this weekend underscores the broad scope of possibilities that could play out in the United States this year and into the next.

Further political violence is a very real danger and it’s not fearmongering to say so. Much of the immediate reaction to the attempted shooting of Donald Trump has been an expression of shock, but not surprise. It has been an acknowledgment that an increasingly extreme political rhetoric meant that such a violent development was becoming an inevitability.

The response from political leaders has been quick and bi-partisan in their condemnation of the attack. Thankfully, Trump was not more seriously injured or killed. Tragically, at least one spectator at the rally was killed - including a former chief volunteer firefighter, Corey Comperatore.

Political violence obviously has no place in any peaceful democratic system. It particularly needs to be quashed with urgency in an environment that features a fractured populace now notably prone to embracing a wide range of conspiracy theories and one could potentially foster follow-up attacks.

We don’t know much about the shooter or his motives at this stage. But it appears confirmed that it was a 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania - whose history is now the subject of an FBI investigation.

Trump has long painted himself as a persecuted political candidate. Someone from whom the 2020 election was stolen, who has been the target of “politically motivated” criminal prosecutions. He has told his supporters that an unspecified “they” are coming for you, and he is their protector.

While much of what has transpired since the 2020 election has been a legitimate upholding of the law, Trump is now someone who has been the target of a very real threat to his life, during a very public political rally.

Trump can now - with some legitimacy - say that people are trying to kill him to prevent him from re-taking the presidency. Reagan enjoyed a 10-point boost to his approval rating in the wake of his own attempted assassination. But I don’t think it makes sense to assume things will play out the same way in 2024. It will take a bit of time to fully understand where things land for Trump and the broader presidential contest, but it is clear that he will use it as an opportunity to paint himself as a strong, brave, candidate who faced an assassination attempt and continued undeterred.

The shooting occurred in the weekend before the Republican National Convention, which Trump will attend in Milwaukee this week. Get ready to see a lot of Associated Press photographer Evan Vucci’s astonishing images, of a bloodied Trump, flanked by Secret Security, fist in the air, with the American Flag flying in the background.

As flawed as Trump’s rhetorical image may be - given his history of criminal behaviour - it will allow Trump to contrast himself against his opponent, President Joe Biden, whose physical and mental abilities had until this weekend, been the dominant story of the campaign.

The problem for Biden

The original draft of this post was going to be an analysis of the state of the Joe Biden campaign - following his pretty poor showing in the first televised debate, and the critical NATO conference and dialogues with key international allies.

The challenge that Joe Biden now needs to negotiate is that his campaign - and his presidency - has fallen into a political crisis death spiral that is usually inescapable, where his core flaws have become the dominant focus of the media’s coverage of his campaign. Flaws that are constantly being reaffirmed each time he appears publicly, sending him deeper into the spiral.

We’ve seen the dynamic play out in Australian politics. Tony Abbott’s term as prime minister ended after he was unable to shake a reputation for being harsh and out of touch with the Australian public. Ultimately confirmed by the bizarre decision to issue an Australian Knighthood to Prince Philip. Scott Morrison lost the 2022 election after it became widely held that he was chronically dishonest - a reputation that was cemented for perpetuity after losing government when it came to light that he had secretly appointed himself to multiple additional ministerial portfolios.

The prevailing narrative about the Biden campaign is that he is losing his mental sharpness, which could prevent him from serving another four years as a fully effective President. In fairness to Biden, he appears to be on top of his brief, and the key policies that his administration is pursuing both domestically and internationally. For the most part, he demonstrated this during the NATO conference.

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However, it is objectively true that Biden is showing his age. Biden is - by some margin - the oldest president ever to have inhabited the White House. The second oldest president, Ronald Reagan, was 77 when he ended his second term. Biden would be 82 at the start of his.

Biden is forgetting or confusing names and it often derails his train of thought at crucial moments. This is being interpreted as a sign that he is no longer fully fit to be President by both his peers and key Democratic Party figures, but also by voters.

The last few months have included developments that should have proven Earth-shattering for any normal set of Presidential candidates. But Donald Trump operates on a different plane to what would ordinarily trouble political aspirants - but he has a way of avoiding the political crisis death spiral. For example, Trump’s guilty verdicts in the hush money trial barely troubled polls, and potentially fortified his support.

The same can’t be said for Biden. His poor performance in the first debate had a notable impact on polls - gifting a 2 or 3-point gain to Donald Trump.

The problem for Biden is that the prevailing narrative about his fitness for office has been, and will continue to be, reinforced at future public events. When he misspoke and referred to Kalama Harris as ‘Vice President Trump’, or introduced Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as ‘President Putin’ during the NATO press conference, the narrative was reaffirmed. There will be more events like this during the rest of the presidential campaign.

Biden needed to find a way to reorient the campaign narrative to focus on the deep fundamental flaws and dangers of Donald Trump. Trump, just six weeks ago, was found guilty of 34 criminal counts of falsifying business records. Trump has been charged with additional offences relating to attempts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election result. These acts should disqualify Trump from being President - but he currently commands a 2-point lead in national polls, and that’s before any potential impact from the assassination attempt.

In the wake of this weekend’s shooting, Biden’s window of opportunity to change the narrative of the campaign is potentially closed. Trump will dominate the news cycle for weeks - because that is what an assassination attempt on a past and potentially future president dictates, but also because he will use recent events to sell his image as a persecuted radical.

Whether Biden drops out now is almost irrelevant. The challenge for the Democrats is that they need, somehow, to find a way to regain control of the narrative and convince voters that despite being shot at, Donald Trump remains an unfit person for the presidency.

This is the inaugural post of The Donkey Vote, a Substack I’ve started as an outlet for observations of US politics and the 2024 US presidential election. My family will temporarily relocate to New York City until May or June next year, and I’m excited and nervous about observing what could be a historically significant period for the United States.

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With those nerves, there is also a little bit of dread about what could develop after the first Tuesday in November (and I’m not referring to the Melbourne Cup). A dread almost uniformly expressed by friends and family we’ve told about our plans to be in the United States for the next ten months or so.

It’s a simmering concern that we might be approaching a turning point for one of the world’s most powerful countries. It is a historically significant event that could irrevocably change the system of Western democracy – with the scope to serve as a trigger for genuine threats of outbreaks of violent conflicts.

The next US presidential election is scheduled for 5 November. It will be an unprecedented contest in many troubling ways.

As it stands, it will be a contest between the two oldest-ever candidates for President. This surpasses a record already held by Biden and Trump, which they first set in 2020. It will be the first presidential election where one of the major candidates is a convicted felon. Additionally, one of the candidates will contest the election while facing criminal charges for electoral interference and the mismanagement of classified documents - although the conservative-stacked Supreme Court might undermine those charges.

Trump also seeks to become the second one-term President to win re-election to the White House for a non-consecutive second term. Grover Cleveland is the only one to pull off that feat, so far.

It should be a slam-dunk election for the non-criminal candidate, but he is also facing major questions about his fitness – his more literal physical fitness – to take on the role of President for another four-year term.

The electoral strategy behind Biden’s candidacy is to position him as the safe, experienced, competent candidate. He’s not the charismatic, progressive candidate that gets soft Democratic voters to turn out and vote. He’s not Barack Obama. Biden has adopted an ambitious stance on growing America’s green energy capabilities, but a very conservative stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It’s a calculated balance that contributes to political ennui within much of the Democratic base.

Biden’s most important attribute is that he’s not Donald Trump. But to succeed, Biden must demonstrate that he is actually the safe, experienced, competent candidate – and his poor performance during the first presidential debate significantly challenged that assumption. It led the New York Times to call for Biden to withdraw from the election.

The dread that so many people have raised with me is entirely independent of the election outcome. It’s not specifically a dread about a future Donald Trump presidency – although there is definite fear about what that would mean. It’s a dread for an America that is about to expose itself as deeply fractured, increasingly more extreme in its politics, and dread about a potentially historic turning point for one of the world’s superpowers that we all sense is coming.

Some of my friends have watched Alex Garland’s film Civil War. While the events of that film are highly unlikely to play out in the real world, the probability is not zero. That’s where some of the dread manifests. An actual Civil War is improbable. But… maybe? It has happened before in the United States…

That thought sits in the back of my mind and that of many others.

“At least you should be pretty safe in New York City, being such a strong Democratic base” is a very common comment from friends, families, and colleagues. “Just avoid Washington DC. And the South.”

If Donald Trump wins, the concern becomes about what that will entail for an American democracy that is already deeply struggling. Trump – and his supporters - have become increasingly extreme since his first presidential term. If Donald Trump wins, there will also be a real flow of impact for the rest of the world, including having a profound influence over the politics of an ally like Australia.

If Joe Biden wins, the consequences could be much more dramatic for the United States. The January 6 capitol insurrection is a clear example of what is within the range of possibilities. Four years of increasingly extreme right-wing politics suggests the intensity of the response to a Trump defeat could exceed the events of January 6.

We could also expect more right-wing controlled states to become increasingly isolationist in their policies, with more radical and extreme measures being introduced by state legislatures and governors in response to the perceived ‘wokeness’ of a Biden presidency.

Crucially, a Biden victory will never amount to the silencing of Donald Trump. He’s not some Voldemort-type villain that can be vanquished into some in-between world, never to assert influence ever again. Quite the opposite, a defeated Trump has the potential to become a much more troubling figure as a persecuted victim who manages to command the support of nearly half the country - with a strong bias towards those who own all the guns. And that’s despite conduct - or maybe even because of it - that would normally disqualify a candidate from public office ten times over.

Whatever happens, there will be a story to tell, and I want to seize the opportunity to tell part of that story from within the United States.

So this is the first post of The Donkey Vote, which I’ve launched to be my outlet for documenting and analysing the events of the next period in American history. I want to try to capture what this underlying dread feels like for those living in the United States - and how it influences daily life.

I’ll continue to post to my other Substack – Tempests and Terawatts – which will remain focused on developments in climate change and energy markets and policy—that other looming catastrophe.

Thank you for finding this Substack. I haven’t officially launched The Donkey Vote, but it will soon become home to regular writings about the upcoming US Presidential election and US Politics more broadly.

More details to come.

- Michael

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