American politics may not be as polarized as we thought, and more lessons from the chaotic 2024 US presidential race

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American elections often bring surprises. James K. Polk was such an unlikely victor that many Americans who voted in the 1844 presidential election barely knew who he was. President Harry Truman’s re-election victory over Thomas A. Dewey in 1948 was so sensational that The Chicago Daily Tribune’s morning-after headline got the result wrong.

These surprises came after voters cast their ballots. What makes this election distinctive is that the surprises have happened before the vote counting is complete – and many of them, including some not widely recognized, shape the future of American politics. Here are a few of them.

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The money game is different than it was even four years ago

There’s more to it, for starters. And it can mean less.

Democrat Kamala Harris has raised more than $1 billion, enough to buy the Miami Marlins baseball team — and enough to outspend Republican Donald Trump 34 percent on TV and digital ads. It has not given her the opportunity to seal an election victory.

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Mr. Trump, once dependent on small donations and proceeds from the sale of Trump-related items, now receives significant funds in huge bundles through super PACs, including $125 million from Timothy Mellon, an heir to the Pittsburgh-based Mellon banking family. Elon Musk weighed in at US$75 million, and that’s not counting the US$1 million checks that Mr. Musk gives to voters in swing states — payments that the Philadelphia district attorney filed a lawsuit Monday to stop. Campaign finance has never been like this.

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The old way of running presidential campaigns is dead

The two candidates are pioneering new ways to campaign, sometimes through podcasts that reach narrow but important constituencies, sometimes with public appearances designed to reach voters far beyond those in attendance. The target group for the convention, which Mr. Trump held Sunday in New York’s Madison Square Garden, for example, were not the 20,000 people in the seats; they were already strong Trump supporters. It was the media coverage of the event that mattered.

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At the same time, Mr. Trump turned the campaign rally into a spectacle that is part politics, part locker-room brutality, and part righteous. No presidential candidate since the baffling politicians of the 19th century has given speeches remotely as long as his 70-minute “weaver” or conducted a campaign rally that, in the case of his Madison Square Garden event, approached six hours in length.

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John F. Kennedy (1960), Ronald Reagan (1980) and Bill Clinton (1992) had celebrities at their rallies, but in this case the celebrity is the candidate himself – and the atmosphere outside the rallies is carnivalesque.

In 2024, Mr. Trump has also transformed the nature of politics in that his effort is as much a movement as it is a campaign. Two previous individuals who attempted that feat—William Jennings Bryan in the three campaigns of 1896, 1900, and 1908, and Theodore Roosevelt in his comeback attempt from 1912 – fell short.

The character is receding from importance in the presidential election

Mr. Trump has been impeached repeatedly and accused of sexual assault repeatedly, and he has still maintained his support among voters. Such episodes torpedoed Gary Hart’s 1988 presidential campaign, ended former Sen. John Edwards’ national political hopes in 2008, and led to the impeachment of Mr. Clinton.

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Mr. Trump seems immune. “It seems like a good portion of the electorate doesn’t care about things that would normally have killed a candidacy,” former Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, said in an interview.

Culture wars and identity politics now drive politics

There have been traces of this in the past. The election of 1828 saw the victory of the rough-hewn Democrats who supported Andrew Jackson over John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, both establishment figures. Temperance, with roots in colonial America, was an important cultural issue in the 19th century. Prohibition, which began in 1920 and ended in 1933, was a point of contention during the presidential elections of 1928 and 1932. Beginning in the 1980s, abortion emerged as a critical, divisive cultural issue.

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But the clash between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump has taken the very clashes that characterized the 1828 election — urban versus rural, those with college degrees versus those without, the elite versus the aspiring — to new levels of significance. This has made the 2024 election a contest as much about culture as it is about issues.

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American politics may not be as polarized as we thought

For a quarter of a century and perhaps more, commentators and political scientists have promoted the assumption that the close margins of the 2000 election and the rotating small partisan advantages in Congress are evidence that the United States is polarized, perhaps hopelessly so.

But that might not be the case after all. A study released last year by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that “American voters are less ideologically polarized than they think they are, and that the misunderstanding is greatest for the most politically engaged people.” On important philosophical themes – patriotism, respect for democracy, freedom of speech, fair elections and independent courts – there is broad agreement, according to the non-partisan Polarization Research Lab.

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The Carnegie report said that “partisans have high distrust of the other party’s preferences, leading them to believe that there are far fewer shared political beliefs.” This has been a major theme of the 2024 campaign.

“There is a tendency for Americans to expect the worst from the other side,” said Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth College who is the founder of the Polarization Research Lab, a group of researchers. “Most Americans agree on the principles of democracy, and that is important. We’ve seen assassination attempts this year, but we haven’t seen widespread violence, and while we’ve seen a lot of talk about democratic backsliding, it’s concentrated in the presidential campaign and is almost invisible in state and local elections.”

There is reason to hope that the future will not be a dystopian stalemate characterized by toxic politics. Researchers such as David Schultz from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn., and Sally Friedman of the University at Albany in New York, believe there is more consensus among young Americans than there is among their parents and grandparents, although on these very issues (abortion and immigration, for example), who share their elders.

This raises the prospect of at least one area of ​​life where younger Americans will be better off than their parents.