FIRST READING: Canada gets screwed either way – the U.S. election explained

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Today is the U.S. presidential election. It is likely to rank as one of the most-covered news events in history, and one of the few times when most of the world’s newspapers can reliably be expected to put the same story on their front page.

With all that said, here is our hubristic attempt to tell you things about the election that you may not have already known.

Polls are cartoonishly close, but the prediction markets have it for Trump

It’s famously difficult to accurately poll an election involving Republican nominee Donald Trump, since his supporters are disproportionately composed of Americans who wouldn’t otherwise vote. You’re not modelling a conventional voter cohort; you have to account for tens of thousands of potential wild cards.

The poll analyst FiveThirtyEight — generally the most trusted source on this subject — delivered this incredibly unsatisfying forecast on the morning of election day: In 100 simulated elections, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris would win 50 of them, Trump would win 49, and one would be a tie.

The betting markets are much more unequivocal: Most gamblers are putting their money behind a Trump win. According to the prediction market Polymarket, Trump is favoured 62 per cent to Harris’s 38 per cent.

But this is where we should mention that the prediction markets got it dead wrong when Trump first ran for president in 2016. The Irish bookmaker Paddy Power lost the equivalent of US$5 million by assuming that Trump would lose in 2016. “Boy did we get it wrong,” a spokesman said at the time.

Neither outcome is a clear win (or loss) for Canadians

The Canadian preference in this election is clear: By poll data, a smashing majority of Canadians would favour Harris if it was up to them.

However, in terms of the material effects the outcome will have on Canadians, there’s no obvious “pro-Canada” candidate. Trump and Harris may have served in administrations with few parallels, but they both found time to screw over Canadians in their own unique ways.

Trump showered tariffs on Canadian imports during his presidency — something which he’d be likely to do again. A blanket tariff of 10 per cent has been proposed by the Trump campaign, which would have massive impacts on the Canadian economy if Ottawa wasn’t able to negotiate an exemption.

Biden’s preferred method of gut-punching the Canadian economy, meanwhile, was by showering U.S. manufacturing with subsidies and “Buy American” mandates. Both had the effect of shunting out Canadian imports. The Trudeau government’s recent spree of throwing utterly unprecedented quantities of corporate welfare at foreign-owned EV factories was done in large part to keep up with the Americans.

This could be swung by voters in Canada

There’s been a lot of Canadian influence in this election. The Democratic candidate spent part of her childhood in Montreal (she went to Westmount High School). One of the most prominent backers of Trump is Canadian citizen (and Queen’s University graduate) Elon Musk. Trump, incidentally, met his first wife Ivana Zelníčková at a fashion show in Montreal in 1976. 

But given the tightness of the race, the result could come down to absentee votes sent in by U.S. citizens living in Canada. Canada has more American expats than anyone else; about one million. And both the Republicans and Democrats have been actively soliciting the dual-citizen vote. The Canadian Press even found one of each to interview: An Alberta-based Minnesotan who’s voting Harris, and a Toronto-based New Yorker who’s voting Trump.

U.S. elections are unbelievably complex by Canadian standards

Canadian elections are some of the most straightforward in the world: Only one level of government is ever voted on at a time, and (at least in provincial and federal elections) the voter only has to mark a single name on a paper ballot.

Each U.S. state runs their presidential voting differently, but every American voter will have to stare down a ballot that — by Canadian standards — is more daunting than a census form.

The average Floridian, for instance, will be expected to cast their vote in more than two-dozen distinct elections and referenda. Depending on where you live in Florida, this year’s ballot could well include entries for president, U.S. senator, a House of Representatives congressman, state senator, state representative, sheriff, county commissioner, Florida supreme court, Florida appeals court, Florida circuit court, Florida county court as well as the mayor and councillor of your specific city.

There’s also six amendments to the Florida constitution on the ballot, as well as amendments and ordinance questions specific to each community and county.

The endorsements have been absolutely wild

This campaign has almost come to be defined by wildly unexpected out-of-the-blue endorsements — for both candidates.

Harris got the backing of Dick Cheney, the former Republican vice-president who, not too long ago, was the Democrat’s leading archetype of a corporatist, war-mongering right-winger. Among her campaign volunteers was Barbara Bush, daughter of U.S. president George W. Bush and granddaughter of U.S. president George H.W. Bush.

In the final hours of the campaign, Trump was endorsed by podcast host Joe Rogan, who only four years ago had cited his preferred presidential candidate as far-left Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Trump also got a late campaign nod from feminist author Naomi Wolf, who once worked as a senior campaign adviser to Democrats Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

It’s similarly notable who isn’t endorsing Trump; massive swaths of cabinet members, appointees staffers from his presidency. This includes his vice president Mike Pence, who right up to election day seemed to be hinting that he wasn’t going to vote at all.

The nightmare scenario(s)

Both sides of the American political spectrum have a bit of a problem with refusing to accept election results. So, whoever wins, the ideal scenario is that it’s decided quickly and decisively.

But if the race is close enough that victory hinges on a single state, the U.S. could be plunged into at least two weeks of electoral limbo. Officials in Georgia, for instance, are already warning that if the election comes down to them, they might not have a final count until mid-November.

Even more disruptive is that it’s a tie: Harris and Trump both win a proportion of states that leave them with precisely 269 electoral college votes each. (The U.S. president isn’t selected by popular vote. Rather, each state has a number of “electors,” equal to the number of senators plus the Congressional representatives they send to Washington. It’s these 538 “electors” who ultimately pick the president; what voters do is to decide who their state’s electors will favour.)

It sounds fanciful, but there are three ways in which it could feasibly happen.

If there were to be a tie, the U.S. would have to wait until its next Congress is seated, at which point they would decide a winner. And the Congressional election, by the way, is also really close; either party could conceivably control the House of Representatives by Tuesday night.

But the truly nightmare scenario is one in which Harris narrowly wins, but the margin she wins is due entirely to botched 2020 census results. Those botched results are not a conspiracy; the U.S. Census Bureau has acknowledged that its numbers were way off in 2020, in part due to the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But the miscount resulted in fractional changes to several states’ sway over the final presidential election. The Trump-leaning states of Florida and Texas have seen their votes count a tad less towards the final result, while the Harris-aligned states of Colorado, Minnesota and Rhode Island have seen their count a tad more.

So if tonight’s vote comes down to one of those states, it could feasibly be argued that the 47th U.S. president owes their position to some wonky census numbers.

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