Us politics

Today’s reports about the confident noises coming from Hillary Clinton’s camp made me think about the reports I picked up about how confident David Cameron was about the EU referendum on voting day. We later found out, his pollster Andrew Cooper had research from his firm, Populus, predicting a ten-point victory. The MPs I spoke to, who had been out campaigning in the field, seemed to agree: after all this fuss, Brexit would all blow over. By lunchtime on polling day, the bookmakers put the odds of Leave at 15pc; they would later sink to 7pc. The noises that I picked up – that noises pretty much everyone in my trade were picking up – hummed the same tune. Just like today. Who, out there, is predicting that Donald Trump will win?

Since 1996, federal law has prevented non-citizen US residents, like myself, from voting in elections. We pay taxes, hold down jobs and own property, but don’t get a say in the leadership of the nation. This isn’t uncommon: in the UK, only Irish and Commonwealth citizens get to vote in the general election, on top of those already qualifying as British. But in the US, the discourse is polarised between citizens and illegal immigrants, with little discussion spared for the people caught somewhere in the middle. And with just a day left in the race, President Obama has created another small furore – in certain circles – with his ambiguous statements about non-citizen voting.

It's all fixed! Julian Assange, Infowars, Russia Today, millions of Internet users, and even Trump himself are convinced that 'the powers that be' will ensure Hillary is the next US president. The globalists will cheat democracy to maintain the status quo. Obviously. Or as Assange put it, Trump 'won't be allowed to win'. But what if 'the system' turned out not to be rigged, and we have a President Donald J Trump in January? It would come as a nasty shock to many Trump fans. The Trumpist movement would in a way be robbed of its purpose. The populist right would celebrate a victory for people power -- similar to Brexit -- but would there not also be lingering unease? Would the alt-right not be a little disappointed that the globalist tyranny hadn't done more to stop them?

Forget your state-by-state polling; your analysis of the voting preferences of suburban mothers in Pennsylvania; never mind your understanding of America’s shifting demographics; your breakdowns of the Latino vote in swing states, or your perception of America’s anger issues. This election, like most elections, will be decided by personality. We all know that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton score very low on the likeability front. Trump is more reviled than Clinton, but in one important way he has the edge on her: he is funny and she is not. Look at this clip of him addressing the crowd in Florida: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ciMtD45hxI Now that, no matter how much you loathe him, is quite amusing.

It is such bad luck for Mrs Clinton that her last-minute troubles have come upon her because of the curious 21st-century men’s habit of sending pictures of their genitals to people via social media (‘Dickileaks’, is what the New York Post calls the scandal). If only Anthony Weiner, ex-congressman and recently estranged husband of Mrs Clinton’s close assistant Huma Abedin, had refrained from this pastime, and from ‘sexting’ a 15-year-old girl, it seems unlikely that the FBI would have excavated the family computers. Then Mrs Clinton would have had a clearer run at the White House. It should be a major advantage of the woman candidate in any political race that she is, on average, much less likely than the male to be caught up in this sort of thing.

Once upon a time Republicans routinely accused Democrats of being soft on Russia. Irving Kristol, writing in Commentary in 1952, famously allowed that Joseph McCarthy was a 'vulgar demagogue' but emphasised that 'there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.' It seems likely that the grand old man of neoconservatism might well rub his eyes in disbelief were he to observe the ideological somersault that has taken place in the 2016 presidential race.

If Hillary Clinton does somehow lose the 2016 US presidential election, FBI director James Comey might turn into one of the most hated people on earth — hated even more, perhaps, than the incoming Commander-in-Chief, Donald J Trump. Comey’s curious intervention against Mrs Clinton – in case you missed it, the FBI has announced that it is reviewing newly discovered emails that might be related to her notorious private server – will be seen as ‘the October surprise’ which rattled the Clinton campaign and handed momentum back to the Trump Train. Comey has already enraged senior Democrats.

Hillary Clinton is infinitely wiser than Donald Trump, or so we are lead to believe. You might think, then, that she and her clever campaign team would be wary of hubris. They should know better than to take victory for granted, and that excessive pride leads to a fall.   Well, they don’t. Clinton may have a seemingly unassailable lead in the polls. And yet Hillary, her staff, and the Democrats seem to be doing their damnedest to invite nemesis —in this case, a Donald Trump presidency — by showing off too soon, and putting off millions of American voters simply by being smug. They've ignored the great Texan proverb: ‘Don’t taunt the alligator until after you've crossed the creek.

Poor Donald Trump. Even Utah, which has voted for Republican presidential candidates with metronomic regularity since 1964 and which I'm visiting for a few days, looks like it's about to turn its back on the New York tycoon. There are no ‘Make America Great’ or Trump signs in Salt Lake City, the citadel of the Mormon religion. Nor is there any fervour for Trump to be discerned in neighbouring towns like Provo. On the contrary, former Republican candidate Mitt Romney made plain his revulsion for the libertine Trump months ago. It had a real effect. Many Mormons are looking elsewhere than Trump. The winner of Utah's electoral votes may thus turn out to be neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton but Evan McMullin. His credentials?

Donald Trump needed to win bigly, as he would put it, in Las Vegas. He didn’t, and his campaign is still a disaster. The major news line from the final presidential debate is Trump’s hint that he may not accept the election result – to which Clinton replied that he is ‘talking down democracy.’ But Trump’s promise to ‘keep you in suspense’ on that point is a silly sideshow. The very fact he is making a story over whether he will accept defeat suggests, ironically, that in his muddled psyche he has accepted defeat. The last presidential TV debate was, overall, the best so far, which isn't saying much. Trump didn’t go bananas, or at least not fully.

Did you think, after the second presidential TV debate last week, that democracy couldn’t sink lower? Well, think again. Tonight’s clash between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in Las Vegas — already dubbed ‘fight night’ — looks certain to mark a new low for civilised politics, and a new high for elections as trash entertainment. If you thought Trump and Clinton hurling insults about sex in the Townhall-style showdown in St Louis was grim, expect grimmer. If you thought Trump’s last pre-debate stunt of holding a press conference with the Clintons' sex victim ‘accusers’ was silly, expect sillier.

Donald Trump probably won the second presidential debate tonight, overall. But overall probably doesn’t matter. The clash between him and Hillary Clinton over the lewd sex-bragging tape will be what people talk about, and he did not come out well on that score. The Donald maybe did enough to stop the Republican Party deserting him en masse, but his campaign still looks like a disaster. Trump arguably lost the night before the debate began by putting on a typically surreal, car-crash-bad press conference with Bill and Hillary's 'accusers' -- women who claim to have been sexual victims of the Clintons' iniquity -- just before the debate began. It was a ridiculous stunt, which showed that Trump had no intention of handling the accusations of sexism sensibly.

The Donald Trump story and the Jeremy Corbyn story are same tale told by different countries. A political party reinvents itself in the 1990s, wins power, but then dishonestly drags its nation into a terrible war in Iraq. It becomes widely reviled. The party is still in power a few years later when the financial system collapses. The party takes desperate measures to keep the country's economy going – rescuing failed banks – but that in turn leads to more unpopularity and distrust among the public. It loses power. In opposition, the party's base – its core voters – starts to revolt. The party then loses another election. Then the party's grassroots have a chance to reject the party leadership, which they do.

The funniest thing about the lewd Donald Trump tape is how unshocking it is. It’s less of an 'October surprise' more of an 'October of course'. Everybody who knows anything about Trump knows that he is, to use a Donald favoured word, braggadocious about his sexual exploits. The newly unearthed video of him boasting of his sexual misadventures is embarrassing for him, of course, but it’s not much worse than what he said in his interviews with Howard Stern, which has been extensively reported. It will hurt his chances with women voters, and of course grumpy Republicans are using the story as an excuse to try another coup against him, but I can’t really imagine many American voters will be sitting at home today thinking: ‘What? Donald Trump is vulgar and sexist?