Vice President Kamala Harris vs Donald Trump 2024

You have to remember though that the US in 2024 and Ireland in 2024 are two very different places in terms of attitudes towards religion and how people interact with religion.

A lot of Americans are highly religious, heavily involved in faith communities and very outwardly religious. To a lot of Europeans that seems like something from a very long time ago, but we make the mistake of projecting our contemporary values onto a foreign country. The US is not Ireland, the UK, France or anywhere else. It's very much its own thing culturally.

Ireland is a lot more line with the coastal US urban attitudes in many ways, particularly in the North East and very much in line with Western Europe these days, which wasn't always the case. Ireland's relationship with the church is also one that tends to have been one of being quite oppressed by a top-down hierarchical organisation and then quite dramatically throwing it off. The same is true in a lot of countries in Europe at various times and even the big European protestant churches are mostly establishment focused and very hierarchical. American religious groups are often subcultures with a siege mentality and can be quite bottom-up, community identity driven and often see the broader society and the state as an external threat. They wear their religiosity as a badge of identity.

Most of Europe is post-religious at this point and tends to see highly religious societies as backwards or a relic of a bygone era. That's the reality of it.

If Harris only appeals to the urban populations, she will win the popular vote and lose the election. They don't live in a one-person-one-vote democracy for this kind of federal election. It's also not proportional. It's an archaic and complicated electoral college system conceived in the 1780s, designed to keep an early federal state system together, long before urbanisation and that's heavily weighted towards votes per state and that tilts it into very much a geographical representative system rather than a population based one, which massively overweights rural and small town voters.

There are a lot of flaws in the system, but that's what she has to work with. They're not likely to change anytime soon.

Part of her messaging has to audiences we just aren't all that familiar with. There's no point in her winning more votes in places she's already going to win. It's all about the marginal areas and swing states.

It's also a continental scale federal system which covers a lot of different regional takes on things, enormous urban-rural divides and so on.

The Irish window on the US tends to be through the very socially progressive cities in the northeast and through the West Coast and media / tech bubbles. That's why we end up with a distorted view and being shocked when we encounter genuine rednecks. We know it well, better than a lot of Europeans do, but it's still a view from afar and from a particular perspective.

Yeah, he has broad appeal in some of those areas, at least potentially anyway.

I think on the GOP side of it they've leaned so far into extreme religious-conservative points of view though that they are more at risk of alienating middle ground voters.

I'd separate out that Trump himself carries a large personal vote around a cult of personality that's more about some imagined idea of sticking it up to the establishment, even though he's a billionaire establishment figure, he's seen as a rebel by some. However, he's bringing a long a lot of crazy in the entourage and increasingly leaning more and more into that. That's going to potentially alienate people more so than Harris doing bit of a shout out to the faith communities.

I could see quite a bit of old 'blue collar' middle America being quite turned off by it. He really 'borrowed' votes that would typically have leaned towards pro-labour democratic candidates in some places.

Harris has to ride the mainstream wave to win. Trump's quite capable of doing all the wrong things and she needs to capitalise on that.

Also, unlike Biden, I don't think she's as worried about taking the gloves off. Biden was far too polite and Hillary Clinton is basically a technocrat. She played by the rules while Trump was playing VERY dirty.