Democrats

What has kept Donald Trump in the presidential race is his electoral base. It consists of white men, rural and small-town voters and small-business owners. The big bucks for the campaign come from a coterie of wealthy loyalists. This bloc will stick with Trump whatever he says or does.
But the attitude of other groups that one might expect to be Trump’s natural supporters, such as big business, financial markets, a lobby like the chamber of commerce – “capital”, in other words – is far less clear cut. If anything, as Joe Biden’s lead has stabilised, so too has their optimism. With an eye to an impending shift of power, the Chamber of Commerce has endorsed a cluster of Democrats in tight House races, provoking outrage from the president. These unexpected alignments point to the scrambling of assumptions that is characteristic of the Trump era.
The GOP is normally the party of business. The president himself is a businessman. His administration has been stacked with plutocrats, CEOs and lobbyists. It has delivered tax cuts and deregulation. The tax-collecting IRS is a shell of its former self; the Environmental Protection Agency has been gutted, and financial regulations slashed. Trump has packed the courts with judges who will deliver judgments against labour rights, environmentalism protection and business regulation. If, as seemed possible at the beginning of this year, the US economy had stayed on course and the Dems had selected the leftwing Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders as their candidate to run against Trump, the battle lines would have been clearly drawn.
But that is not what happened. The Democrats selected Biden, a centrist who as senator for Delaware between 1973 and 2009 represented one of the greatest tax havens in the western world during the height of financialisation. And then came the coronavirus shock and the most severe crisis that the US economy has suffered since the second world war.
The initial response of the Trump administration and Congress was less dysfunctional than one might have expected. The Cares Act was generous both to ordinary Americans and business. But since April the intractable corona-crisis has brought out the worst in Trump. The culture wars unleashed by Black Lives Matter protests have solidified Trump’s base, but they have not widened his appeal. And, as the public mood has shifted, business leaders have remembered the issues that made them leery of Trump in the first place.
In 2016, Trump struggled to gain endorsements. The Chamber of Commerce was neutral, backing neither Trump nor Clinton. It could not support a Republican candidate who was protectionist on trade, hostile to immigration and openly critical of the Fed chair, Janet Yellen.
Within hours of Trump’s victory on the night of 8 November 2016, that hesitancy was forgotten. Markets boomed. And Trump has delivered the goods in terms of tax breaks and regulatory giveaways. But on the strategic issues he has been every bit as disruptive as could have been imagined. His trade policy has been the most aggressive since the second world war. Relations with China, the big play of US business since the 1990s, are deteriorating into a cold war. Last year, Trump denounced his own Fed chair, the mild-mannered and cooperative Jerome Powell, suggesting he might be more dangerous than Xi Jinping. As recently as the second week of March the markets were jolted by rumours that Trump might be about to oust Powell. Meanwhile, Trump exploits the immigration issue for rabble-rousing purposes. American business is as keen as ever on cheap labour and the actual flow of newcomers has slowed to a historic low. The real issue – addressing the racist treatment of Latin American workers in the US – remains unaddressed.
On the climate emergency the attitude of American business has evolved more than one might have expected since 2016. Trump’s boast of reviving the coal industry is evidently absurd. Outright climate denial is no longer the order of the day, even for the likes of Exxon or Chevron. They now favour some kind of carbon tax. The smart money is on renewables as the cheap energy alternative.
If big business were the commanding political force that its critics sometimes imagine it to be, it would come out openly and state the obvious: Trump is a menace, he needs to go.
What stops them from doing so? They profess to fear the left. They talk up Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “the squad” and their socialist agenda. But that is nonsense. The actual threat is on the right.
First, in the 1990s, there were Pat Buchanan with his anti-globalisation “new nationalism” and Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution. Then, in 2008, there was Sarah Palin. In 2010, the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus. Then there was Steve Bannon and Breitbart. Now there is QAnon. Again and again, the seam in the GOP coalition between big business interests and less aligned forms of nationalism, populism and xenophobia has torn open. The difference in 2020 is that it is the radicalised GOP base that has its man in the White House.
Having gerrymandered the electoral districts, the GOP doesn’t fear the Democrats but primary congressional selection challenges from its own side. This is what explains the behaviour of Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, over the second round of Covid stimulus.
It is clear that the US economy desperately needs a second boost. In an election year you would think it would be in the GOP’s interest. Business is pleading for it. But McConnell has not thrown his weight behind Treasury Secretary’s Steven Mnuchin’s effort to cut a deal with Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats. Unemployment may be a disaster, but for the congressional Republicans it is a far bigger threat to be viewed as disloyal by the rightwing base, Trump’s loyalists; and this would happen were he to negotiate a giant government stimulus with Pelosi.
That leaves the US, once the anchor of the western world, still the world’s largest economy, hanging in the balance. The greatest fear, of course, is of a disputed election, which would shake US institutions to their core. This is the risk that the markets have hedged against by buying the Vix, the so-called fear index. Normally, insuring yourself against future risks is more expensive than against risks in the near term. In 2020, it is the reverse. The price for insurance against volatility in the week after election day on 3 November has surged to all-time highs.
But there is another, no less serious risk. What if Biden does win the White House, but the GOP retains its grip on the Senate? When Obama came in, in the midst of the 2008-9 financial crisis, he had at least two years with a congressional majority. Given half a chance McConnell would strangle a Biden presidency in its cradle. The American economy, business and its working population would be the first victim.
There is also a third risk: an Obama rerun, in which the Democrats win majorities but pass a stimulus that addresses none of the fundamental issues in the economy, allowing outrageous inequalities to continue and failing to build the kind of constituency of lifelong Democrat voters that the New Deal was so effective at creating in the 1930s and 40s. This isn’t just a matter of suppressing the next wave of rightwing populism after Trump, but of widening and solidifying the Democratic bloc.
Nonetheless, assuming a Trump victory is now unlikely, the only safe outcome for the American economy, as well as the American constitution, is a Democrat clean sweep.
• Adam Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University More

Donald Trump has his last chance to move the dial in the fast-approaching US presidential election on Thursday night, when he addresses a large nationwide audience at the final televised presidential debate.
Trump will face his Democratic rival Joe Biden at 9pm ET at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. The candidates are expected to attract viewership in the tens of millions of Americans for their 90-minute encounter, giving the US president one last crack at shifting a race that has had him trailing the former vice-president for weeks.
NBC News and its moderator Kristen Welker will be hoping for a more civilized debate than the first, held three weeks ago, which collapsed into acrimony amid almost constant interruptions by Trump. In an attempt to prevent a repetition, the commission on presidential debates on Monday tweaked the format so that the candidates’ microphones are turned off while their opponent is speaking for the opening two minutes of each of six issue segments.
For the remainder of each of the 15-minute segments, discussion will be open between the two men.
Trump will be under pressure to soften his display compared with the first debate on 29 September, which was widely censured as bullying. Polls conducted after the debate suggested it damaged his already beleaguered standing in key battleground states such as Florida and Pennsylvania.
But there were few indications that Trump intends to change tack in the final hours leading up to the Nashville debate. On Monday he denigrated Welker as a “radical left Democrat”, while his campaign has accused the debate commission of being biased towards Biden and objected to the six policy subjects that NBC News has chosen.
They include three areas on which Trump’s record is especially vulnerable – race in America, Covid-19 and climate change – as well as national security, leadership and America’s families. Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, protested in a letter to the commission that this debate should have been on foreign policy, territory on which Trump thinks he can prevail following recent breakthrough agreements in the Middle East.
Trump has also been mired in his by now familiar angry denunciations of figures within his own administration and the media. Instead of making a closing argument to the American people, he has expended valuable political capital calling Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious diseases official, a “disaster” and “idiot”, and storming out of an interview with CBS News’ 60 Minutes.
The final debate falls at an increasingly anxious time for the Trump re-election campaign. National polls give Biden a steady and clear advantage, such as an 8.5% lead in the Real Clear Politics tracker.
National polls have limited value. More worrying for the Trump campaign is the fact that Biden has almost three times as much money to spend on the closing days as Trump, and is also showing an edge in key swing states.
An indication of the relevant concerns of each camp can be gleaned from where the candidates and their top surrogates will be travelling this week. Biden was hunkered down in Nashville for debate prep, suggesting that he sees the event as a chance for him to solidify his frontrunner status.
In support of Biden, Barack Obama travelled to Philadelphia on Wednesday making an appeal to African American residents to vote. Pennsylvania, which was central to Trump’s victory in 2016, is showing Biden ahead in the polls, but not enough for comfort.
Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, was in North Carolina on Wednesday, as was Trump himself. North Carolina, a traditional Republican stronghold, is seen as increasingly “purple” in that its changing demographics has put it up for grabs for either party.
Florida, which Trump must win if he is to have a solid chance at staying in the White House, is widely cast as too close to call.
Perhaps the most interesting campaign move was that of Vice-President Mike Pence, who was in Ohio. Trump took Ohio by eight percentage points over Hillary Clinton in 2016, but polls now suggest it is also too close to call.
The three scheduled presidential debates in 2020 have shaped up to be among the most volatile in US history. The second debate was cancelled after Trump contracted coronavirus and refused to stage the discussion through video links, resulting in dueling separate town hall meetings on different networks. More