Thobile Jiwulane
With American voters going to the polls on Tuesday for the main voting process, many people South Africa at least know little that it is the candidate that must shine and appeal to the electorate than the party in the US Presidential Election.
The message of the individual and how he or she encapsulate and sells it to the voter determines whether the individual will emerge after the voting day on 5 November or not.
The parties are eye-ed as following either right-wing (Republican party) or leftwing (Democratic Party) policies and that’s what seems to matter to the political elite who drive the country’s politics. Obviously, the right-wing groupings and conservatives the world including the South African right-wing parties and civil society organisations would wish for a Donal Trump win while the Leftist or the “socialist oriented” would pray for a Kamala Harris victory. But to the South African leftwingers across-the-board, the Republicans and Democrats are all the same – they both represent American imperialism and capitalist hegemony that they so devoutly despise.
To the Left, Bill Clinton was a personal friend of Nelson Mandela but not necessarily to his party, the ANC and its left alliance partners, the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).
There is no election in the whole world that attracts so much interest in Africa especially among South Africans and perhaps the world over than the US presidential election. But they always discuss the candidates and not the political parties under whose colours they campaign because even American themselves don’t care about the parties but what the candidate has to offer.
American voters have no political party to follow nor are they members of any political parties, they change allegiances every election according to prevailing circumstances that include the state of the economy and what the candidate presents to them to influence their voting choice.
The US electoral system is so complicated even the winner of the national total results could be pronounced as the loser and the loser as the winner – a depiction of the tale of the US college electoral system. The party is just symbolic and it just gives the candidate the colour to campaign under, and a political platform than a political party being a core party cadre to espouse its policies like the ANC in South Africa does.
In the US, a candidate has just got to affiliate to either liberal or conservative values in line with those of the party. Also, the personality, his or her standing in society and patriotism play key role for an individual to be chosen as a candidate. But for the voter, foreign policy is not important to worry about as it is not a determining factor for electoral choice because it’s always the same for the Republicans and the Democratics or whoever is in the White House. That which must happen in foreign policy including military actions to be taken against a rogue or a so-called “undemocratic” country gets imposed to the voter to accept because politicians and securocrats take advantage of the citizens’ gullibility.
So, between the two candidates, they have to travel this predetermined road but they must have their own attributes that will attract the voter.
According to a US pollster at the weekend, Trump, who is seeking a return to the Oval Office and Harris, who became an accidental candidate when Joe Biden withdrew from the race due to his deteriorating physical condition, were on neck-and-neck at the swing states. Swing-states are states that would turn your fortune for the better or worse and it’s important to win on the majority of those states.
It’s an emotional moment either way to win or lose the swing-states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin because they are the must-win as they determine the candidate’s electoral strength towards the final count. While Trump and Harris were on par in these states as they concluded their campaigns there as Daily Signal reported, Trump was above Harris nationally, which doesn’t give him a guarantee of victory because the swing states were yet to swing votes in either candidate’s favour in reality for a win.
In an interview on Sunday with Daily Signal online pollster RMG Research president Scott Rasmussen gave Trump an uncertain chance of winning. “If the election were held today, Donald Trump would be likely to win. Now, I say that with some caution. It’s not a sure thing.”
Trump is strong and popular on domestic economics based on his America first’ philosophy accompanied by his trade tariff restrictions and Make-America-Great-Again. At the centre of it all is immigration – where he wants the borders to be closed to limit the flow of illegal migrants from neighbouring countries.
But Trump despises war and undertook to end the Ukrainian-Russian war sooner and to bring peace in the Middle East as he stated repeatedly. It’s believable from a man who had never had a war going on during his administration and who brought reconciliation between major west Asian Arab nations and Israel during his previous term of office. His affinity for working for peace in the world instead of seeking to plunge the globe in a nuclear catastrophe like Biden, makes Trump the favourite of anti-war lobbyists and global peace-lovers.
As for Harris, her strength lay in domestic issues such as pro-abortion which is an emotion matter for the pro-choicers. Many American women believe they should be the ones to decide what to do about their bodies and not the government telling them what to do, which is Harris’ campaign mantra.
On foreign policy, as Vice President there are things that already bind Harris to continue with such as, among others, the military support for Israel despite its heavy-handed attacks on innocent civilians including women and children in Gaza. Her leaning towards Israel emerged as she pronounced clearly that she would like to see the hostages held by Hamas since 7 October last year returned home and for the conflict in Middle East to end. But how she would do that remains to be seen because she had not stated whether her administration would force Israel to stop the massacre of the innocent who include air workers and healthcare personnel in hospitals.
The benefit of a Trump administration to the world, on the one hand, is his expressed willingness to prevent a third world war which is in the interest of everybody that it must never come. On the other hand, Harris has not pronounced any stronger on whether she would pursue dialogue with Russia and China and therefore minimise the chance of world war. Under her the war in eastern Europe could and the tension in the Taiwan Strait could continue because all that is what, her boss, Joe Biden wanted.
But one thing for sure, in the four years in power, Biden had never visited South Africa and so had Trump during his first administration and the continent does not appear to be anywhere on the agenda of both the 2024 US candidates either.
It is clear that Africa has not much to benefit from either candidate’s victory in the US election, but indications were that the continent would remain at the bottom of what the US cares about in Europe, Middle East and Asia in pursuit of its hegemonic interests.