It was “a little strange to wake up this is election day,” American History professor Frank Cogliano said of the race between vice president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump.
He said the 2024 United States presidential campaign has been “very, very long and it does feel endless”.
Unlike the United Kingdom, there is no exact start date for a US presidential election as all the dates are set in four-year intervals. This has kept many sharply focused on what Cogliano describes as a “really unusual election”.
No stranger to covering elections, Cogliano was previously hosted on BBC Radio Scotland to analyse the election results in real-time in 2020.
As someone who has published extensively on American history, specifically on the American Revolution and the early United States, his belief that this election is “unusual” carries weight.
“To some extent, [the election] never really stopped after 2020 because of President Trump’s belief that he had been cheated out of the last election”, Cogliano said.
Since his loss to President Joe Biden in 2020, Trump has continued to promote falsehoods that the election was rigged against him and has laid the groundwork to do it again in 2024.
Cogliano believes Trump will declare victory around 22:00 EST (3:00 GMT) just as the results start coming in for states on the East Coast.
Harris does kind of have to run on the Biden record
Alongside the longevity of Trump’s presence since 2020, this election added the “unprecedented” dynamic of Kamala Harris’ candidacy, with her becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee “only 16 weeks ago”.
While “Harris does kind of have to run on the Biden record,” Cogliano said, she has tried to distance herself from some issues of the Biden presidency such as his unwavering support of Israel’s military invasion of Gaza.
Israel’s war in Gaza, which has resulted in upwards of 44,000 Palestinian deaths, has been decried by young and progressive voters as a genocide.
Cogliano highlighted the negative perceptions of the economy under Biden as another potential pitfall for Harris.
Instead, the Harris campaign has centred around reproductive rights as a key issue of this election in a bit to increase her support among female voters following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
As Americans across the country go to the ballot today, polling has shown an incredibly tight contest between Harris and Trump.
While Cogliano declined to give a prediction on who wins the election, he said the stakes of the election are “very, very high”, especially for Ukrainians and NATO if Trump wins.
The only poll that matters is the one that’s happening today.
Both halves of the US population have presented this election as a “mannequin struggle” on the fate of American democracy. Cogliano is “not unsympathetic to that view”, but also emphasized that “every election matters” and “is about the future”.
“The only poll that matters is the one that’s happening today.”
When asked what his plans for election night were, Cogliano said:
“I don’t intend to stay up all night, but I could imagine I will stay up all night”.
He would not be the only one up on election night as the Democrats Abroad will be attending an election watch party at Dropkick Murphys until 3:00.
Tomorrow morning is when Cogliano believes we will get “meaningful results” on the election and when he will be on BBC Scotland from 6:00 to 9:00 GMT to provide analysis as he did in 2020.
While Cogliano said waking up on election day was strange, the day after maybe even more unusual, especially without a good night’s sleep.
Image via Frank Cogliano