Are Americans more attracted to anger or hope? Don Watson reports from the US election trail

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

79% : In 2016, Don Watson wrote a remarkable Quarterly Essay predicting the success of Trump, when political commentators were largely united in their belief that Hillary Clinton would win the election.
62% : Trump is almost unique in winning (and then losing) by speaking of anger and decline.
46% : A recent poll shows Harris leading Trump by 13 points among women.
45% : Trump, Harris and America on the Brink (Black Inc.) is published Monday 16 September.
41% : Capitalism trumps democracy The overriding question Watson poses is: how can a country that believes itself to be a democracy, the leader of "the Free World", possibly elect a demagogue like Trump?
39% : And no discussion of abortion or attacks on woke ideologies (gender, critical race theory), which have become staples of the MAGA language and help cement the white evangelical vote for Trump.
37% : That said, it is strange Watson has so little to say about Biden's success four years ago, when he won back some of those voters who had opted for Trump.
32% : He writes that Trump has turned politics into "the wildly adversarial and addictive world" of TV wrestling.
31% : He writes: "Once the Democrats allow themselves to be defined by their opposition to Trump, the fight is as good as lost." Until Harris became the candidate, it seemed as if this was the only strategy the Democrats had to fall back upon.
30% : But he fails to explain the almost total defeat of the Republican establishment, which has so jettisoned its own past that no senior member of any Republican administration before Trump could be found to speak at their convention.
29% : I wish Watson had held off finishing this essay long enough to see whether the Harris campaign's instinctive sense of how to defeat Trump through positivity over anger, stressing his egoism against her desire to unify the country, pays off.
26% : In Tuesday's presidential debate, Trump equivocated on abortion, making unsubstantiated claims for postpartum terminations while claiming he's "great for women and their reproductive rights".
25% : Trump claims he can end the war in Ukraine, but gives no answer as to how he would do this.
24% : Former vice president Dick Cheney (under George W. Bush) is among the establishment Republicans who've recently announced their support for Harris, hardly surprising as his daughter, Liz Cheney, lost her position in Congress due to her antipathy to Trump.
24% : In today's debate, Trump called Orban "one of the most respected men, they call him a strong man" and quoted him as saying "you need Trump back as president".
24% : Her performance in the debate suggests Harris is both willing to attack Trump and to promise a rather different path forward, stressing the need for generational change.
18% : Against Sanders, Trump would have portrayed himself as the defender of American values in ways he could not four years later against Biden.
18% : As Watson suggests, Trump has created "a fictional setting for his fictions" where "he can be as abusive and as untruthful as he likes" - and where "boasting, posturing and abusing" are expected.
17% : Why do we care so much? Is Trump a fascist?
16% : Abortion is for Trump what Gaza is for Harris: an issue that arouses great passions that are impossible to reconcile among people they could normally take for granted.
10% : Neither Trump nor Harris have any obvious solution for the war in Gaza, although Trump claims she would be responsible for the destruction of Israel, again with no clear explanation for this.
9% : Trump further claimed China and North Korea are "afraid" of him.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.