There is a palpable sense of dread, particularly in Democratic-leaning parts of the country, over the water flowing under the bridge between a candidate declaring victory in the early hours of November 6 and the inauguration of a new president on January 20. Most people still think about the victorious person. election night will be the same person whose hand is on the Bible in January, but they know that the path will be strewn with pitfalls.

The Trump campaign is doing little to alleviate this sense of dread. The campaign has already reported questionable practices in several counties. In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, as Herald reported last week, Trump’s team successfully filed a legal appeal to extend the mail-in voting registration period after complaints were filed about the county’s preparedness. This victory showed that not all of the Trump campaign’s claims are vexatious.

The American electoral system is particularly vulnerable to allegations of tampering. It has several vulnerabilities. First, it involves several thousand local officials, often elected rather than nonpartisan civil servants. However, this has not been a problem in the past, with politicians removing their partisan garb to carry out their democratic duty. But it has become a problem today, with some Republicans under pressure to support election denialism.

A whole movement has sprung up around this belief, and it is popular. I spent hours at a Trump rally this weekend and found no one who would tell me that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

This strategy is a winner for Trump, who told his supporters on Sunday that he needs a landslide “too big to fake,” in other words, Republican turnout must be so high that Democrats don’t have no chance of “stealing” the election from him.

The campaign has money behind it. A Nevada cryptocurrency multimillionaire, Robert Beadles, has funded a campaign to challenge the certification of a Nevada county commissioner. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon asked his audience to focus on the fairness of local counts and local officials. This means that a repeat of the chaos that unfolded in Congress on January 6, 2021 seems less likely than the chaos unfolding in the thousands of counties spanning the United States as count after count is contested.

The Harris campaign appears ready to fight. Over the weekend, the campaign stopped talking about her as an outsider, presenting her as the favorite to win — an odd strategy if trying to increase voter turnout. A Washington Post the poll average does not entirely confirm this assertion. It shows that Harris’ lead in the seven swing states peaked with a 2.5-point lead in national polls in the second week of October, but fell to 2.1 points.

What no one talks about

One of the great contrasts between American and New Zealand policy is the lack of concern Americans give to the cost of promises. This is quite the contrast with New Zealand, whose last three elections have led to week-long debates over the existence or non-existence of budget holes.

The United States lives in a semi-perpetual budget hole. Since 1970, the federal government has run deficits in all but four years – from 1998 to 2001. The federal deficit was 6.3 per cent of GDP last year, compared with New Zealand’s equivalent measure of 2.4 per cent.

If New Zealand ran such a large deficit, much of the election would be spent debating how best to close it, through tax rises and service cuts. In the United States, neither candidate seems to care much about it and the only proposals on the table seem to expand it.

On Sunday, Trump repeated a costly triple pitch to the coalition of working-class voters he hopes to shore up for Republicans: no tip tax, no overtime tax and no Social Security tax. .

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects that the cost of these and other promises will add $7.75 trillion ($12.95 billion) to the federal debt by 2035 – the equivalent of 31 times GDP total of New Zealand at current prices.

At last week’s meeting hosted by Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, I heard the Democrats’ budget pitch: US$25,000 down payment assistance for 400,000 homebuyers in first generation.

The Biden-Harris administration has proposed providing up to US$25,000 ($41,000) in deposit assistance to first-time home buyers, which, based on the administration’s experience, New Zealand, will likely fuel further house price growth. The Harris campaign also proposes expanding the small business tax deduction to US$50,000 ($80,000).

The cost of all this translates into a relatively modest $4 trillion ($7.3 trillion) increase in the federal debt by 2035.

There is a good reason for Americans’ lack of interest in public finances. The country’s position as a reservoir of the global economy means that for now, they can borrow more or less what they want without much trouble from creditors – a luxury that no other large country has. medium or small, does not enjoy (just ask the old Brits). Prime Minister Liz Truss).

The other reason is that the US budget process means that there is a good chance that most of these measures will not pass the threshold of Congress, which will have to pass them in an appropriations bill before they can take effect. . What usually happens is that the two chambers trade bits of White House policy for measures in their own states or demands for cuts. The president can really promise whatever he wants on financial matters, knowing that he can blame someone else if it doesn’t come to fruition.

The net effect is a kind of political fantasy land, where, instead of discussing what the country needs and how best to finance it, candidates travel across the country for a year in a sort of tax stampede.

Thomas Coughlan is deputy political editor and covers Parliamentary politics. He worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018. His trip to the United States was facilitated by the American Embassy in Wellington.