Today is an unusually fitting date to ask what will happen the day after America’s presidential election — the first anniversary of Hamas’s savage attack that killed approximately 1,200 Israelis.
In the year since, the Middle East has been in even greater turmoil. Israel has declared war against Hamas and has emasculated Hezbollah, decapitating much of its leadership, including Hassan Nasrallah.
How that conflict plays out is not the focus of this column. Rather, it is this: Will this election have as grave and profound consequences for America and Americans as Oct. 7 had for Israel and its region?
Will America have elected its next president by Nov. 6? Will the election be contested as it was in 2020, when Donald Trump denied losing, calling the vote “rigged?” Will it resemble 2000, when the election dispute over Florida’s vote went all the way to the Supreme Court, to be settled in mid-December? Will it be like the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, which wasn’t settled until March 2, three days before his inauguration, due to disputes over 20 electoral votes from Southern states?
Second, will there be violence? Will the Jan. 6 riots be repeated, possibly on a much larger scale, following the certification of electoral votes in the Capitol?
Third, if there is no clear winner on Nov. 6, will America have sufficient resilience and perseverance to cope with any outcome?
Finally, will foreign adversaries exploit any major irregularities in the vote to disrupt further the American political system?
Ominously, Nov. 5 is Guy Fawkes Day in Britain, the anniversary of the failed 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament. Because this election appears to be very close and likely to be decided by a handful of states and dozens of districts in the Electoral College, recounts seem inevitable.
Imagine the year 2000 on steroids. That year, there were major court cases in just one state, with Bush v. Gore being the principal one. But could America’s legal and political system resolve dozens of legal cases in multiple states, challenging the vote before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20?
In the case of a 269 to 269 tie, or some other scenario where no candidate gets to 270, the Electoral College vote would not be able to produce an outright winner. The House of Representatives would then elect the president and the Senate the vice president. Here, all sorts of mischief is possible, depending upon which party controls each House of Congress.
Under the procedure outlined in the Constitution, each state House delegation gets just a single vote. One vote each for Wyoming and Vermont, one each for Texas and California. States with evenly split delegations may be forced to abstain. One candidate could have won the national popular vote by a vast amount, yet lose under this arcane process.
And when the Senate chooses the vice president, there’s a chance the president-elect and vice president-elect will come from different parties. How would that work out in practice? Probably not well, given the frailties of divided government.
Should the process drag on past Jan. 20, the Speaker of the House would become the acting president. That would certainly test the system and make governing even more difficult, especially since the nation is so divided politically.
Would adversaries, particularly China and Russia, act to exploit such an outcome? There is no doubt they will and already have intervened to influence the outcome, much as the United States did in other places during the Cold War. That is to be expected.
Russia likely benefits most by laying off and letting the U.S. deal with the election chaos. But is it in Chinese or Russian interests to maximize American disruption? If both believe America is in decline, why not accelerate that decline? It is hard to identify exactly what either one could do to advance that disruption.
Finally, do Russia or China have a preference as to who should be president? Trump supporters argue that Trump will be tough on both, and that by default Kamala Harris is their favorite since she, like Joe Biden, will be weak on China and Russia.
But Chinese and Russian leaders may not agree. To them, Harris is inexperienced and untested. In a crisis, because of this inexperience, she may overreact to dispel any perceptions of weakness. That could be worrisome.
There is no single conclusion to be drawn other than that Nov. 6 may be a day of reckoning.
Harlan Ullman, Ph.D., is a senior adviser at the Atlantic Council and the prime author of the “shock and awe” military doctrine. His 12th book is “The Fifth Horseman and the New MAD: How Massive Attacks of Disruption Became the Looming Existential Danger to a Divided Nation and the World at Large.”