Women could make the difference in today's American election

English original of article published in Italian this morning by La Stampa

The cliches are everywhere: the American election is going “down to the wire”, it is “too close to call”, it is going to be won on “razor-thin margins”. In any language such phrases are simply statements of the obvious truth, that we don’t know whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump is going to win. But we do know what is likely to make the difference.

The shock opinion poll in the midwestern state of Iowa, usually a Republican stronghold, which on Sunday made Trump even angrier than usual, showed us what will make the difference. In case you missed it, this poll, from a well-respected local pollster with a good track record, suggested that Harris has jumped into the lead in a state which Trump won easily four years ago when running against Joe Biden. And it suggested that if this swing away from Trump to Harris were reflected nationally she would win by a landslide.

The basis of Harris’s unexpected lead in that Iowa poll came from rising support among female voters and, although this is notoriously difficult to measure, from a rising expectation that more women than usual will turn out to vote. If they do so, it will be because of anger over the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn the constitutional right to abortion 50 years after the court case that established it, known as Roe v Wade, as well as over a belief that Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance are misogynists and, in Trump’s case, a proven sexual predator.

The unanswerable question throughout this race, which since Biden withdrew in July and Vice-President Harris replaced him has looked a statistical dead-heat once polling margins of error are taken into account, has been what kind of mistake the opinion polls might be making in 2024. In 2016 and to a lesser extent in 2020 the opinion polls under-estimated Trump’s true support. Then in the 2022 mid-term Congressional elections, opinion polls predicted a disaster for the Democratic Party which turned out to be a triumph, at least relative to expectations, as abortion provoked a big rise in the turnout of Democratic voters.

Opinion polling can never be an exact science, as it is too difficult to know whether the sample of voters that pollsters reach is sufficiently representative of the country as a whole, especially in a large and varied country like America. So pollsters adjust their results in the hope of compensating for past errors in their sampling and hence in their predictions.

But this year it has been difficult to know which past errors to compensate for. And Harris’s late emergence as the Democratic candidate has made it unusually hard to gauge the public’s view of her, as it has been in a daily process of formation. Everyone knows everything they ever need to know about Trump, but not about Harris.

Data about the 75 million Americans who have taken advantage of their states’ varying opportunities to vote ahead of election day, either in person or by mail, suggests that turnout for early voting is high among registered Republicans and Democrats alike, but especially high among women.

Hence the perhaps excessive attention that has been given to Sunday’s Iowa poll: suddenly, in a dramatic fashion, that poll appeared to confirm the Harris campaign’s greatest hope and the Trump campaign’s greatest fear, that a combination of high turnout and strong female support could give Harris a victory too clear for Trump to have much chance of challenging it in the courts, in Congress or on the streets.

Here's another way to look at this election race. With inflation unusually high during the past four years and the world in a state of turbulence, the incumbent in the White House started with a natural disadvantage, whether it was Biden before July or Harris afterwards.

Just as Biden defeated the incumbent Trump thanks to the chaos of the covid pandemic, so the Republicans stood a strong chance to defeat the incumbent Democrats. Opinion polls show that something like three-quarters of Americans say they are dissatisfied and two-thirds think their economic conditions are getting worse.

In principle, that ought to make the election a walkover for Trump and the Republicans. However, Trump is a nasty, polarising candidate who gives plenty of Republican voters ample reason to vote against him or stay at home; and abortion and other issues of the rights of the female 50% of the population have, since the 2022 Supreme Court decision, become a galvanising factor. We shall see.