Reflections on Trump’s Re-Election

Donald Trump has been re-elected, in part, because he understands that there is a flawed vision of America. Barack Obama famously said, ‘there’s no red states, or blue states, just the United States.’ This is great rhetoric, but it is demonstrably false. In fact, there are red (Republican) states and there are blue (Democratic) cities. Donald Trump appeals to those rural voters where Republicans traditionally dwell, but he also managed to win the suburban vote and therefore off-set Harris’ appeal to urban voters.

If you travel around the United States, you see the same story repeated in state after state: A flawed, crumbling infrastructure, a rampant fentanyl crisis that is ravaging the land, extensive retail closures that are devastating High Streets in cities, inflation, and concerns over illegal immigration.  None of these are a secret and are immediately apparent to anyone willing to look, yet the Democrats simply refused to address any of these factors in a serious manner and focused on what many would consider to be peripheral, cultural issues that are far removed from the everyday concerns of most Americans.

Donald Trump ran an unusually disciplined campaign, but the Democrats handed it to him in the final stages as they were hindered by an unloved candidate and by a series of errors committed by Joe Biden that Donald Trump was able to turn to his advantage. Had Joe Biden stepped aside and not sought re-election, the result may have been different, but not necessarily. Certainly, this message is likely to emerge in the coming days, stressing that Biden has been the only individual, the only man to have beaten Trump in a presidential race. The flip side of that argument is that had Biden announced in 2023 that he did not intend to seek re-election then the party could have held a normal primary process. This would have included the governor of Michigan, the governor of California, as well as the vice president and enabled the party to pick a candidate that had a better chance of beating Donald Trump.

Joe Biden spoke at the JFK Library here in Boston in 2021 and it was clear then that he was frail and got lost leaving the stage. There are clearly going to be recriminations in a host of memoirs detailing the state that Joe Biden was in, and the way he was forced from the ticket. Team Kamala will doubtless argue that if she had more time she could have prevailed. In fact, she may have done better had she had less time, since her polling figures were far better 6-8 weeks ago. Instead, she blew $1 billion on a losing campaign, gaining less support than Hillary Clinton 8 years ago and failing to improve upon Biden’s vote in a single country nationwide. 

Kamala Harris received fewer female votes than Joe Biden, reflecting the fact that every time people talk about Trump apparently alienating a group of voters they appear to flock to his defense. His vote number with women was up two points on four years ago, up with the black vote by 16%, up with Hispanics, and even college educated white voters many believe don’t vote for Trump. This was not an elite electorate electing Donald Trump by any stretch of the imagination, but rather a national sweep, winning not only the Electoral College, but also the popular vote which, as I forecast back in September, is the first time for a Republican since George W Bush achieved this feat in 2004. 

Just as in the UK general election of 2019, when Boris Johnson put together a coalition of working-class voters, so Trump has prevailed by being a candidate who the left just couldn’t understand and whom the right were able to coalesce around. Neither man is a career politician, both were able to transcend politics and speak to normal people in a direct and accessible manner at a time when so many have been turned off by politics.

If you get outside the major cities, in both countries, but certainly here in the United States, what’s happening in Washington seems 1,000,000 miles from the problems that face normal Americans. They have faced huge challenges over the last four years, especially with inflation, which is something that has been misreported or deliberately misunderstood in certain circles, who suggest that inflation isn’t a problem anymore because it’s down to relatively low figures. This, however, completely ignores the fact that it rose to crippling levels for Americans over the last four years and that those figures are now baked in, because they haven’t been joined by any increases in salaries.

Ultimately, therefore, this was the classic, flawed campaign that Democrats run every four years, using the same tired playbook that they’ve been running since Truman beat Dewey in 1948, accusing the Republican candidate of being a fascist, Hitler-esque figure. Clearly, most people in America don’t buy it, and just want to get on with their lives, free of fentanyl, free of illegal immigration, and free of inflation.