Trump's Landslide

And how to process what just happened.

Going by straw polls, most of my readers do not support Donald Trump – and this is in line with surveys of New Zealanders and Australians. Many readers may therefore be struggling to understand why Trump has caused an electoral landslide on such wide geographic and demographic fronts.

Trump has won the popular vote and the Electoral College. Even in the safely Democratic state of New York, Trump’s percentage of the vote rose from 37.7% in 2020 to 44.2%. Nationwide, he has 51% of the popular vote. Again, the pre-election opinion polls underestimated him, by about 4 percentage points nationwide. Pennsylvania was supposedly on a knife-edge, but was taken by Trump with a two-point margin. The pollsters may argue that that was within the margin of error, but similar gaps opened across other battleground states. Where were the polls going wrong?

There are more reasons for this shift than can be outlined in just one newsletter. Harris’s loss, and her weaknesses as a candidate, have to be accounted for too.

Trump’s come-back is a once-in-a-century achievement, looking back to Grover Cleveland, Pres. 1885–89, 1893–97.

The Trump “resurrection” (in the face of impeachments, indictments and convictions) is made all the more difficult for the Left to understand because the man does have a questionable record, he does say outrageous things, and mostly we’re fed a diet of negative messages – or edited “lowlights” – about him. But the majority of the American voters just weren’t buying it. They saw the side of Trump that had a down-to-earth conversation with Joe Rogan, rather than the “fascist” that Hillary Clinton warned them about.

The challenge for his opponents, then, is to understand why so many decent middle-of-the-road folk have ushered him back into the White House – and to learn from that.

If we believe that democracy itself was a vital election issue, then we have to be consistent with ourselves, accept the outcome of the election and respect the choices of the voters. That means understanding why so many Americans have made that choice, and why they’ve rejected elite liberal opinions. It means assuming that the voters are intelligent people who want the best for themselves and for their country.

Don’t think of Trump voters as “dupes”, but as people with healthy scepticism who refused to be duped. Respect their democratic choice, understand why they moved in that direction, and then try to do better next time. Defeated political parties gain nothing from blaming voters or accusing them of being led astray by misinformation or by the Kremlin’s info-ops.

The swing to Trump goes across demographic groups, including counties with large proportions of Blacks and Latinos. This shows there are limits to those glib versions of descriptive representation (or “identity” politics) that assume that a person who resembles a minority group will attract voters from that minority group. Identity and diversity (or “pigmentation” as one commentator put it) are less motivating than liberals have thought.

Counties that had an abortion measure on the ballot, including those that voted in favour of abortion rights, swung mainly towards Trump. Although there is a gender split across the parties, Harris didn’t mobilise a great surge of women voters.

People of all kinds are concerned about the economy. They want to be heeded, to be spoken to directly, and not talked down to. This American election was a rebuke to politicians who believe they know better than the people – the people who have to deal with life and make a living.

I’m not confident, however, that Democrats are ready to learn those lessons. Neither am I convinced that NZ Labour is ready to learn similar lessons from their defeat a year ago.

One outstanding irony is that it will now be Kamal Harris’s constitutional duty, as VP, to certify the Electoral College results before Congress. How will she carry this off? Or will she incite her followers to storm the Capitol in a bid to stop “fascism”?

[Update at 10.30 am: Harris has promised a peaceful transition of power and to uphold the Constitution.]

But Mr Trump faces some obstacles.

If Trump is serious about his campaign pledges, he’ll face legal and practical obstacles. It’s not at all clear, for instance, how he can pull off the “largest deportation operation in American history”. It would be simply unconstitutional to try to put an end to birthright citizenship. He can’t just sign an order that, as promised, would cut funding to schools that teach critical race and gender theory, as this would require congressional approval. He can’t stop transgender people from participating in women’s sports, if codes permit them to. And so on.

If you wish to learn more about politics and political theory, you can get in touch with me via Superprof.

My US Election Day diary notes

By 1 pm (NZ time), I’d done a bit of background reading and was preparing myself for some surprises, but had no predictions about the winner. Counselling my mind to be unconcerned either way, as it’s one of those things over which I have no control, and the consequences of which I cannot predict. And I’m sick of hearing people’s reckons. Time to go to the gym, then.

2:30 pm. What better book to have listened to while at the gym than Montefiore’s history of the Romanovs. I’m just up to July 1914 and the full mobilisation for WWI. And we think things are getting bad nowadays!

2:40 pm: With 90% counted in Florida, Trump is ahead by 56 vs 43%, compared with 51 vs 48% in 2020.

3:30pm: It looks like a Trump victory, possibly even flipping VA, GA and AZ.

4:00pm: Looking like a widespread swing towards Trump.

4:22 pm: Looking like a probable Trump win. So much for that poll that put Harris 3 point ahead in Ohio!

5:00 pm: Still a lot of votes to come in the swing states, but the trend is in Trump’s direction. Fox News sounding confident.

5:15 pm: Looking like a Senate majority for the GOP.

7:30 pm: Pennsylvania looking certain for Trump on 51%.

10:45 pm: I hadn’t expected that the result would be clear by tonight. I was expecting a couple of days of uncertainty as battleground states were finalised.