With two and a half months to go for the 2024 Polls in the United States, these are still early days to size up the campaign and postulate the election outcome. But the gaining support for Kamala Harris among the underprivileged, the marginalised and the women, predominantly immigrant, segments cannot be ignored.
That the US is indeed a melting pot of people from around the globe, sucked in by the lure of the legendary American Dream over generations marks the American democracy as unique.
Donald Trump’s strategy of unashamedly placating the white middle-class voters and his outlandish grandstanding for big business initially appealed to many average Americans. There has been widespread concern about the fast-fading sheen of the US's economic superiority and political dominance in the global scenario.
Trump’s slogan of ‘Making America Great Again’ and his reassertion of white supremacy in economy and polity, though a visibly retrograde approach loaded with the risk of unmaking the image of composite America, did appeal to the middle bulge of the population in the country. That explains why Trump's campaign did seem strong and sustainable through the elections.
Biden’s physical fitness and mental alertness raised questions about his being the right candidate to take on the belligerent and turbo-charging Trump. The Democrats saw Biden’s dismal performance in the first Presidential debate as the alarm signal to replace him as the nominee for WH. Things moved fast since then and as of today, Kamal Harris, as the new nominee to take on Trump, appears to be gathering significant support.
Kamala has had a remote, insensitive and ‘straight-jacket’ image so far in her VP role. She has been too formal, cold and lacking in empathy. How is it that she seemingly has morphed into a forceful contender against the arrogant and narcissistic Trump?
The answer lies, according to me, in the voter psychology of harnessing the collective, submerged, hatred and obsessive aversion to the brand of democracy that Trump represents. Especially for the underprivileged, the jobless, homeless lower middle class, Kamala is now seen increasingly as one among them, a fighter against the odds.
She is finding increasing traction among the larger American voter base outside traditional, right-to-far-right sections of society.
In the political fight over the next couple of months till the elections, the dark horse in Kamala is likely to go for a pathbreaking push to gain wider acceptability among voters. If she eventually pulls through, it will create history in the land of promises.
A coloured woman, an immigrant with the odds against her, seems to be on the verge of the greatest upsets of American electoral history. A glass ceiling that refused to give way for over two centuries is about to crumble! The scenario that seemed an improbable one till recently seems a distinct possibility now.
Decades back there was a book on Mao’s rise to power, titled ‘The Red Star over China’ by Edgar Snow; we are most likely about to see the blossoming of ‘Pink Star Over Manhattan’.
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