Throwing Spaghetti at the Wall

AS ELECTION DAY NEARS, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are out to win that last voter; it’s that close. No trick must be left untried, for who knows what will click? The American phrase “throwing spaghetti at the wall” describes this and that is exactly what Trump and Harris are overdoing in the final phase of this election. Every vote counts.

Kamala is rallying in Atlanta, Georgia with R&B singer Usher and she was in Detroit, Michigan earlier with musician Lizzo. But she has hit a snag here. In the only two Muslim-majority cities in the US, Hamtramck and Dearborn, both in Michigan, there is discontent with Democrats for their, allegedly, incoherent stand on Palestine.

Trump knows these unhappy Muslims won’t come en masse to his tent, but he went over anyway. If he can keep their anger bubbling, a critical number of Muslims here may not vote at all. For exactly the same reason, many non- Muslim Democrats too would rather abstain, “vote from home”, to express their disdain of the political system.

If Michigan is iffy for Kamala, Arizona is Trump’s worry. Biden squeaked through there in 2020 by a 0.3 per cent margin but Arizona has long been Republican. That may no longer be true on account of demographic changes, reflected, for instance, in Maricopa County where the white population fell from 77.3 per cent to 59.8 per cent between 2000 and 2020.

Nevada, famous for its Las Vegas gambling casinos, has drawn both Kamala and Trump and they are betting with the same card: no income tax on tips. Working-class people in these pleasure spots live in good middle-class homes because of the tips they receive from happy gamblers. Covid hurt their business and they are looking to recoup.

Trump, for his part, broke the mould again. He campaigned hard not just in swing states but, daringly, in New York, a Democrat bastion, and he did it differently. Instead of an entertainer by his side, he chose to glad hand around a barber shop in the Bronx. Even Democrats in the crowd confessed they got a buzz out of it.

Democrats suspect Black men are tuning off Kamala for gender reasons and to correct this, Barack Obama has been pressed into service. Speaking of which, several members of Obama’s team are now working for Kamala. She has great expectations, in particular, of Mitch Stewart who helped Obama win Virginia, a rare feat for a Democrat.

There’s more spaghetti on the wall. After Trump scared his side by playing music and swaying to it half the time in a Philadelphia townhall, he did reassuringly well defending his maximal tariff agenda in his interview with Bloomberg News. Kamala took on the combative Bret Baier in a fiercely fought interview on Fox TV and did well too.

Kamala is now on a roll. She has proposed paid family leave and childcare support that Biden had earlier struck down. Trump vowed that he could, if he had to, raise tariffs to a 1,000 per cent to keep jobs in America. If pushed, at this stage, both of them might even promise to put a gold mine in your backyard.

An interesting analytical aside on states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona. These swing states have actually been Republican from 1960 onwards but before that they were always Democratic. The shift happened when Democrats, Kennedy first, followed by Johnson, pushed for civil rights. That alienated the white folks here who then closed ranks and became Republican.

Obama’s 2008 narrow lead of 0.3 per cent in North Carolina was a fluke. Even where the white majority is slight, as in Georgia, it is their consolidation and gerrymandering that assure them electoral superiority. If in the 1960s, Democratic leaders knew that civil rights would forever kill their chances in these states, would they have persisted?

Democracy moves forward when risk-taking leaders choose to do what is the right civic thing even if not electorally wise. Had civil rights not exercised Democrats in the 1960s, many of these swing states would probably never have become Republican. America would have remained racist, run by Jim Crow laws, but under Democratic rule.

In normal times, with the usual politicians, it’s hard to read this writing on the wall for there is so much spaghetti on it.

About The Author

Dipankar Gupta

Dipankar Gupta is a sociologist. He is the author of, among other titles, Q.E.D.: India Tests Social Theory and Checkpoint Sociology: A Cultural Reading of Policies and Politics