Seven states hold the keys to reach the 270 of the 538 electoral college votes required to win next week’s US election and three represent Kamala HarrisThe clearest path to power: the “Blue Wall” of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

In the most important PennsylvaniaDemocrats recorded only half of the 630,000 voter registrations they did in 2020. But according to some social media commentators, Harris could have reached the 400,000 vote “firewall” needed to hold off Republicans on election day.

As I write this, prediction markets are giving Donald Trump the odds of victory are three to two, but polls generally place the two candidates within a percentage point of each other.

Trump leads male voters 54% to 45%, according to one of the latest polls, while Harris leads female voters 55% to 43%.

For now, such numbers don’t matter much. The race is a real toss-up and we won’t know the numbers that really matter until the polls close next week and the final votes are counted.

In the many hours I’ve spent studying them – or downloading endless takes from professional experts like Nate Silver (whose instinct chooses a Trump victory) – I could have finished half-read books, tackled new recipes, or built Lego cities with my kids.

I live in New Plymouth, not New Hampshire.

The nearest U.S. county seat is more than 4,500 miles away. I may be oddly interested in their voting habits, but I’ll probably never visit Scranton, Atlanta, or Grand Rapids.

I’m about as American as Marmite is on Molenberg.

So why do I care?

I may be a young parent deeply concerned about global stability and global warming.

Or that I work in a profession that has been both distracted and demonized by Trump for the better part of a decade.

A quick survey of my friends, family and non-journalist work colleagues, however, suggests that I am far from alone in watching with a tinge of apprehension.

And according to a July Talbot Mills poll, three quarters of Kiwis are affected on the prospect of a second Trump term.

Among the 5,000 people surveyed separately by Professor Marc Wilson last year, two major concerns stood out about the election: its potential implications for the global economy and our worsening climate crisis – especially for left-wing respondents.

Others spoke of their discomfort with the American political polarization that reverberates here, says the Victoria University psychologist.

So far there is little indication of this: other Talbot Mills surveys indicate about two in ten Kiwis support Trump (55% favor Harris), while Wilson’s survey puts local support for the former president at around 10%.

“Despite everything that has changed in recent decades, New Zealand is still a much more egalitarian society: as a result, we are responding to the stratification that American politics symbolizes,” he says.

Danny Osborne, associate professor at the University of Auckland, thinks our fascination with elections may be because the United States is both the “archetype” of the world’s representative democracy and a superpower with a great influence on the world order.

Despite these old-fashioned Kiwi values ​​cited by Wilson, what happens here matters, whether we like it or not.

“I think it’s quite easy to draw a direct line between the insurrection of January 6 and the 2022 anti-mandate protestsas well as protests in support of Bolsonaro in Brazil,” Osborne says.

“We have also seen in the United States a lot of rhetoric about affirmative action and allegations of reverse discrimination being imported into our local politics.”

And for foreigners interested in the United States, the Trump factor alone is mysterious.

“There’s a lot of intrigue about how some 47 percent of American voters might support a convicted felon with a history of lying,” Osborne says.

“It’s almost like watching a soap opera.”

As a native Californian with family back home and an academic interested in the intersection of politics and community psychology, Osborne is not as removed from the drama as many of us.

“I follow American and New Zealand politics much more closely than is beneficial to my well-being,” he says.

“That said, my research side has, to some extent, been able to intellectualize a lot of what’s going on. »

I ask Wilson how much of this election anxiety comes from plain old uncertainty about the future, which many of us experienced those strange first months of the pandemic.

If this matters to us, he replies, it is perhaps because the race has been presented by both parties as “a sort of Manichean apocalyptic event”.

“If Harris wins, it is either the triumph of democracy or the end of a free and fair America; If Trump wins, it’s either a victory for God over Satan or the beginning of a fascist autocracy,” he says.

“It’s hard not to worry that it’s all or nothing, even though the last U.S. election was also all or nothing and the world didn’t end.”

Wilson says we can counter some of the uncertainty by remembering that we’ve seen both candidates in government before.

But he adds: “Where I think uncertainty is particularly relevant is the perception of Trump’s unpredictability.

“He has done and said some truly outlandish things and it is not unreasonable to wonder what that means when he has the nuclear red button under his finger.”

Victoria University political scientist Associate Professor Lara Greaves agrees that concerns about the outcome of this election are well-founded, although it’s hard to say what this means for us here in New Zealand.

“The instability of a new Trump presidency is another concern flagged by commentators and pundits, while a Harris presidency is seen more as a continuation of business-as-usual politics,” Greaves says.

Osborne is a little more direct about the potential implications.

“I really think this is one of, if not the most, important elections of our lifetimes,” he said.

“The potential consequences are enormous, particularly given the current situation. UkraineTHE Middle East And Taiwan.”

Osborne admits he feels much of that uncertainty himself, particularly when he recalls the shock of Hillary Clinton’s surprise defeat in 2016.

“When I get too stressed, I try to remind myself that most voters only pay attention to a fraction of a percent of what’s actually going on,” he says.

“This seems to lead to more stress, but it reminds me to humanize those who vote for candidates I disagree with.”

For the average American voter, he explains, elections are more about supporting your team than a particular policy, or even a candidate.

“I run too. A lot.”

What about the rest of us?

If you’re exhausted from election overload, Wilson’s simple advice is to reduce your media diet.

On the one hand, he says, research shows that people who consume more information tend to perceive the world as a more dangerous place than others.

“These searches used to be for TV news, but now we have access to algorithmically curated online and social ‘news’, as well as US cable news networks like Fox or CNN ” says Wilson.

“This means that media consumers will likely receive a much more biased reporting of facts and concerns, which will only exacerbate the perception that the end of the world is coming, one way or the other.”

“Doomscrolling” in itself, this is enough to give rise to unpleasant emotions like worry and anger, which we must manage for our well-being.

But blowing off steam doesn’t work, he says, and trying to suppress those thoughts doesn’t work either, even if it helps in the short term.

One step is to distract ourselves from what matters most to us, whether it’s our hobbies, friends, or family.

Another effective approach is “revaluation”: or changing the way we think about a situation to modify its emotional impact on us.

“At some point, these elections will be over, there will be a new president and we will be able to move on from campaign saturation,” Wilson says.

“But if someone is so worried that it’s affecting the way they go about their days or their relationships, it’s high time to seek help.”

Wilson doesn’t want to pretend that this election isn’t important to all of us.

There’s a reason we hear interference reports from foreign powers like Iran and Russia – or why climate scientists and security analysts are worried about Trump returning to the Oval Office.

But it’s also easy for us to think it’s more important than it actually is, Wilson says.

“Don’t look Fox Newsspend less time on social media, and you’ll find that it really affects your life less.

An election that I cannot vote in and have no control over is now less than three days away.

But summer is 28 days away; Christmas is a little over 50 years old.

Perhaps it is better to focus on these figures.

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