By Leon Hadar.
I RECENTLY visited the north-eastern- most state of Maine, known for its breathtaking natural scenery, like the granite and spruce islands of the Acadia National Park.
But with its small population of 1.8 million residents, 90 per cent of whom are white (you don’t meet many African Americans and Hispanics here), Maine has been assigned three electoral votes in presidential elections since 1964. So it isn’t a state that pollsters have visited to gauge the national electoral trends during this year’s race to the White House.
Voting for Republican presidents for most of its history, Maine has voted Democratic in the last six elections, with Barack Obama winning by 15 percentage points over Mitt Romney in 2012, helping to turn it into a “purple” battleground state.
Indeed, with voters here embracing a mix of liberal social cultural values and conservative economic principles, it has become difficult to pigeon-hole Maine’s voters as either Republicans or Democrats. Hence it is represented in the Senate by a liberal Republican and an Independent, and is led by a conservative Republican governor.
So perhaps it isn’t surprising that of all the states that were once seen as clearly in the column of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, a new survey identifies Maine as perhaps most likely to tip to her Republican opponent, Donald Trump. A recent Colby College-Boston Globe poll indicated that the presidential race in Maine was within the margin of error, with Mrs Clinton leading Mr Trump 42 per cent to 39 per cent.
Being a political junkie, I decided to conduct my own very unscientific poll among the seven cab and Uber drivers who took me around Maine during my visit. Not remarkably all of them were men (because not many women drive cabs even in large states like New York and California); and considering the racial make-up of the state, it was also not surprising that they were all white.
Moreover, since according to most national opinion polls, a majority of white men were planning to vote for Mr Trump, it made a lot of sense that five of the drivers were ardent Trumpists, one was going to cast his ballot for the Libertarian presidential candidate, Gary Johnson, and another described himself as “undecided”.
A bit intriguing, however, was the comment made by my undecided driver. He was leaning towards the Republican nominee but, as he put it, “I am looking for an excuse to vote for Trump. Maybe the (televised presidential) debate will help me find one”.
Consider for a moment when you have heard people telling you that they were “looking for an excuse”. None of your friends has told you that, for example, they were looking for an excuse to marry someone. But many have revealed to you that they were looking for an excuse to break up with a boyfriend or a girlfriend.
Indeed, we usually look for an excuse when we want to get rid of something, to do an unexpected thing, and to rationalise it. For example – “jittery investors have been looking for an excuse to take money off the table following a protracted period of low volatility” – and not “bullish investors have been looking for an excuse to buy high-performing tech stocks”. After all, no one is looking for an excuse to do something that makes so much sense and is in line with the person’s modus operandi and set of values, like in “Mom, I decided to marry Jack and I am sure I don’t have to give you a reason”.
But that was clearly not the case when it came to my undecided cab driver. He could have said something like, “I respect and admire Donald Trump and his business record and his leadership qualities and hope that his performance in the debate would only help boost my confidence that he is qualified to be the next president”.
Obviously, that was not the way he had felt. He actually admitted that he found many of Mr Trump’s comments and his behaviour quite offensive, and was not sure whether he wanted to see someone who seemed to be driven into a frenzy when someone else posts an unfriendly tweet, to handle US ties with China.
But then my driver just couldn’t stand Mrs Clinton and would not vote for her under any circumstances. So now he was hoping that the Republican nominee would do so well in the coming debate that despite all his many misgivings, he would help convince him to vote for him on Nov 8.
Looking for an excuse to vote for someone you really don’t like, may be the way many more American voters would be approaching the debate between the two presidential candidates that will be hosted by Anderson Cooper from CNN, in Fordham University in Long Island, New York, next Monday evening.
According to a recent Morning Consult Poll, the upcoming presidential debate on Sept 26 is expected to be watched by nearly three-quarters of voters, including 44 per cent who say they were “very likely” to watch, and with a slight majority who believe that Mrs Clinton would have an edge over Mr Trump during the debate.
With most opinion polls indicating that the two presidential candidates were running even nationally and in the major battleground states, the conventional wisdom has been that the debate next week, as well as the other two that will take place in November, could have a major impact on voters’ attitudes and could help tip the balance in the race either way.
The nightmare scenario among Mrs Clinton’s campaign aides is that the debate could accentuate some of the Democratic candidate’s weaknesses: That she is too much of a boring policy wonk who cannot connect with voters; that she projects a certain aloofness, if not a sense of elitism and superiority over the “regular folks”; that she cannot be trusted to tell the truth; that she doesn’t have a core of values and adjusts her positions based on political necessity.
More troubling to Mrs Clinton’s campaign has been the focus on her medical condition, including her recent brush with pneumonia, highlighted by a video of her buckling and stumbling as she got into her van.
Mr Trump’s political and media advisers are worried that Mrs Clinton would try to bait their candidate into losing control during the debate and lead him to lash out in less-than-presidential ways, by using offensive language, by mocking the Democratic presidential candidate, and by acting like a buffoon.
Or to put it differently, Mrs Clinton would try to use the debate to ensure that undecided Republican voters would not find any excuse to vote for Mr Trump after the Republican presidential candidate performs in a way that convinces my driver that he is just not qualified to become the next president. Do you want this man to have his finger on the nuclear button?
But Mr Trump would have an opportunity to act “presidential” and to project steadiness and strength while trying to draw Mrs Clinton into an exchange that would make her look unreliable and weak. That may help lead undecided Democratic voters to conclude that they have no excuse to vote for their candidate. Would you really trust this woman to stand up to the Islamic terrorists?
What is so unique about this election season is that so many voters aren’t undecided in the sense that they aren’t sure which candidate is better. Instead, as the polls suggest, a large majority of Americans dislike both candidates, one of them more than the other.
Many Democrats believe that Mrs Clinton isn’t telling the truth while a similar percentage of Republicans think that Mr Trump is a bigot. They aren’t ready to vote for their opponent and are sceptical about the idea of voting for a third-party candidate. But despite everything, they are just looking for an excuse to vote for their political party’s candidate.
Mrs Clinton’s main electoral weakness lies with Millennials, who don’t like her, and with African American voters, who aren’t crazy about her.
Members of these two electoral groups had been enthusiastic supporters of Mr Obama in 2008 and in 2012. But many young voters who had backed Senator Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries, have been drawn to Mr Johnson and the other third party candidate, Jill Stein, while Mrs Clinton cannot count on large masses of black voters in battleground states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania to go out and vote for her. At the same time, Mr Trump needs to regain the support of two Republican voting groups – college-educated whites and women who have been alienated by his boorish behaviour and offensive language.
It is not clear whether the debate would provide them with the opportunity to give excuses for these and other voters to support them. But I do expect those drivers I met in Maine would be the target of heavy campaigning by both camps.
Indeed, with the presidential race tightening, raising the possibility of an electoral deadlock in the competition for the large battle- ground states, Maine with its three electoral votes could end up determining the outcome of the race.
Adding to the suspense is the fact that Maine – like another state, Nebraska – doesn’t use the “all-or-nothing” approach to awarding electoral votes. Instead, the winner of the popular vote in Maine gets two electoral votes, while the third one is assigned to the winner of each of Maine’s two congressional districts. That means that Mr Trump, for example, could win two electoral votes there, while Mrs Clinton could be awarded with one electoral vote. And vice versa. Which explains why the two will be spending a lot of time campaigning there before Nov 8.
