American journalist David Shribman

“I have covered every presidential campaign since 1972,” veteran American journalist David Shribman told about 150 people in Mount Allison University’s Convocation Hall on Wednesday.

“In every single one of them, candidates have said, ‘This is the most important election of our time’…

“Most of the time that’s total bull. This time it might be true.”

Shribman, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his coverage of U.S. federal politics, has worked for several big American papers and now teaches at McGill University. He also writes a weekly syndicated column for papers in the U.S. and a biweekly one for the Globe and Mail.

Historic election

“I think people in this hall a century from now will know who won the 2024 election,” Shribman said after noting that the presidential election of 2016 that Donald Trump won and the one that he lost in 2020 were also historic elections.

But the one this year, he suggested, between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, may be even more memorable.

“Please don’t ask me who’s going to win. I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t know,” he said, noting that Canadians are surprisingly interested in the outcome on November 5th.

“Six years ago when my wife and I first started to come to Canada every fall to teach at McGill, we said, ‘This is going to be great because we don’t have to talk about Donald Trump.’

“In six years I have not had a single conversation with a single Canadian in which the words, Donald Trump, haven’t come up in the first 90 seconds,” he said as the audience laughed.

He also suggested that Canada has “plenty” to worry about if Trump is elected because it could affect the future of NATO, our borders with the U.S., as well as tariffs and trade.

Voter exhaustion

Official government photos of the two leading U.S. presidential candidates. Photos: Wikipedia

“Trump fatigue versus Harris inexperience. These are two powerful forces: their effect, completely unknown,” Shribman said.

He added that Kamala Harris spent more time attending Westmount High School in Montreal than she served in the U.S. Senate and less time as vice president than she spent as a student in Canada.

“Few nominees have been less well known than Kamala Harris,” he said.

“The card of Harris’s inexperience cheekily played by the only president in American history never to hold any political office or be in the military is matched by a card that the Harris campaign itself is playing,” Shribman added.

“That comes down to the notion that the American people are simply exhausted by the chaos and contention that seems to follow Donald Trump wherever he goes,” he said.

He added that in a survey more than a year ago, two out of three Americans said they were exhausted by politics.

“The question is whether the country’s voters are exhausted by inflation and immigration also. That would help Trump,” he said.

“Or by bedlam and upheaval, which would help Ms. Harris.”

‘Mind the gap’

Shribman warned his audience to “mind the gap” between what they see on TV and in social media which he called “the air game” versus behind-the-scenes efforts by the two main parties or “the ground game.”

“The ground game is what you don’t see,” he said.

“The efforts both campaigns are mounting to get their supporters to the polls and in some nefarious cases, to keep their rival’s supporters from going to the polls.”

He said there’s evidence the Trump campaign is lagging in its ground game because the Democrats are outspending Republicans on campaign advertising in several swing states.

“General rule of thumb I’m going to offer to you, what you see on television, isn’t what you’re going to get on election day.”

He also warned against predictions based on opinion polls.

Shribman noted that in 2016, polls predicted an overwhelming victory for Democrat Hilary Clinton who did garner nearly three million more votes than her Republican opponent.

But, Trump won more key states and therefore, more of the crucial electoral college votes that actually decide the election.

Survival of democracy

One of many books that warn of Trump’s threat to democracy

When asked if U.S. democratic values would be undermined if Trump wins the election, Shribman said:

“I have my own views on this which I’m not going to share. But I am going to say this:

“The people who support Trump feel just as strongly that this election is about the future of democracy as the people who support Harris, for far different reasons.

“People who support Harris feel it’s about the survival of democracy because they think that Trump is an unhinged maniac who is a dictator in waiting and is irrational also.

“The people who support Trump think that the elites and the so-called experts who screwed up everything, screwed up COVID, they screwed up nuclear safety…are themselves a threat to democracy because they want to shove down people’s throats LGBTQ rights and abortion and other things and that their control of the federal government under Biden and Obama has been basically a dictatorship of the liberals and elites.

“So this is an election about the survival of democracy between two sides that have a diametrically opposed view of what the threat is and who the threat is.”

Shribman added that with the exception of Fox News, the big media focus legitimately on the threat Trump poses, but have little to say about the threats that worry his supporters.

“This is my last plea to all of you,” he said.

“Read a lot of stuff you don’t like and read outlets that make you sick and try to understand why people who don’t agree with you, feel as strongly about the things they don’t agree with you about, as you do about the things you feel strongly about,” he added.

“As a liberally educated person, you cannot be the prisoner of what you already think and not be exposed to ideas that will challenge you,” he concluded, suggesting that paying attention to opposing ideas can lead to a better understanding of political realities.

To listen to David Shribman’s presentation and his answers to questions from the Mt. A. audience, click on the media player.