'It's a crazy ride': UWindsor professor on drama unfolding in U.S. presidential election campaign

It's been eye-opening headline after eye-opening headline in the United States recently.

First, President Joe Biden's competency in the role was brought into question after making mistakes in debates and public addresses. Then it was the assassination attempt against Donald Trump. 

On Sunday, Biden stepped aside from the November election with Vice President Kamala Harris poised to run for the Democrats instead. 

In Canada, the left versus right is also front and centre, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberals up against Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives in an election just over a year away.

Windsor Morning7:35Could the dramatic American presidential race play a role in Canada’s next federal election?

Political science professor at the University of Windsor, Lydia Miljan, spoke with Peter Duck on Windsor Morning about if one could possibly have anything to do with the other.

For someone who follows politics for a living, what do you make of all this we've been seeing in the US recently? 

Get out the popcorn! It has been quite the drama unfolding, it's better than any reality TV I've ever seen. It's just one thing after the other. I think that the American side has really been quite dramatic ever since the debates. I don't usually follow American politics that closely, but I did watch the debates and it was shocking how bad Joe Biden had done it. I think that really started this whole call for him to step down. 

So, you have that sort of normal kind of conversation about the competency of a sitting president, and then compounded on that, you have that assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and then they had the Republican convention, which was just a cult of personality. I can't think of any other way about how the party faithful not only rallied around him, but then it's almost in biblical terms that God saved him and it was really a love fest.

Compounded to that with Joe Biden stepping away and Kamala Harris now the presumptive nominee — every day there's a new revelation. So, I would just say be prepared for a very interesting next four months. 

Around a border city such as Windsor, do you think Canadians pay closer attention to what's going on with American politics and are potentially influenced? 

I think in general I have noticed living here that we're much more influenced by the Americans in some ways. We do get the local news. Even to the little things that this is the only place I've lived in Canada where people still cite the temperature in Fahrenheit. Everywhere else, everyone's sort of gotten into the Celsius, but this area is very much Fahrenheit. So, that tells me that they're listening to a lot of American signals, and I think that they're more likely to be following the American side just because we are so close to the border and we're impacted every day. 

But even if you weren't living in Windsor this year, I think you're following that American election just because it's a crazy ride. 

When we look at the political climate on the federal level in Canada, federal Conservatives seem to be gaining momentum. Do you think a Trump Republican win this November, if it happens, would help their cause going into the 2025 Canadian election?

I think in theory it would. There are a couple reasons. One is that the Trump campaign team is very focused on oil and gas and they're anti the green wave and they call it the green scam. They're chanting drill baby drill. So, obviously oil and gas would make it a lot easier for the western provinces to sell our product to market. They would bring back probably the Excel pipeline and so in that respect, I think that it would be easier for a Conservative government to make deals with the Americans. 

I think it would be a bit more problematic if you had another Liberal government under Justin Trudeau. I think that that relationship has kind of soured, especially considering how critical the Liberal government has been of former President Donald Trump. So, that's a risk. And then there's this other interesting sideline that J.D. Vance, who is Donald Trump's vice presidential pick, was in fact roommates with a newly elected Conservative, Jamil Jivani, who is an African American descent conservative. And so they're good friends and that would certainly increase his star within the Conservative government if they were to form government because you can see him having a really key insight and entryway into the White House. 

How do you see the next several months playing out in the United States with, presumably, Kamala Harris carrying the banner for the Democrats into November?

It's certainly going to shift gears. The conversation about the competency of Joe Biden is going to go away. And I noticed yesterday that the Democrats were really attacking Donald Trump now as being the oldest candidate ever to run in an election campaign. And so age and competency is going to be turned on his head back to Donald Trump. That's a bit risky for Democrats given that he was able to literally dodge a bullet. So, I think that that's going to die down and then you're going to see the relentless attacks on both sides — a lot of character attacks, a lot of re-litigating the last election. At this point, anything can happen. This is given what we've seen so far, it is one to watch. 

Here in Canada, we do have about 14-15 months until our federal election. How do you see that showdown between Trudeau and Poilievre continuing to develop? 

I think that there are going to be increasing personal attacks, especially from the Liberals toward the Conservatives. And I've seen a lot of that lately on social media with them putting out another sort of ad campaign or attacks on Poilievre, saying he's been here for 20 years as an MP and he's not worth it. So they're trying to change the narrative. We'll see to what extent that holds. 

I think the biggest problem that the Liberals have is, quite frankly, Justin Trudeau. They might want to take a page out of the Democrats book and think about changing what's at the top of the ticket, who is who is the leader of the government. People are tired of Justin Trudeau. He has a government that's been really marred by lots of different scandals and, in theory, maybe if they switched the leaders, they could have a reset. 

Right now everything they've done to do reset from pausing home heating oil to making promises about housing, to childcare department, the carbon tax, on top of that the capital gains tax —  nothing has really changed the needle for them. And so it seems to me that it's leadership that they've got to deal with. So that might impact what happens in the next 15 months as well.