As the dust slowly settles after the whirlwind night of US presidential elections, America and the world starts to focus on the ‘what next’?
The Republicans have it easier: with Trump back and both the Senate and the House safely in their hands, they can set out to realize all their electoral promises.
In the Democratic camp, probably the alarmists are the loudest: burying democracy, or at least fearing that it would be “put to the test” or “under enormous stress”, and visualising the end of the “Global Democratic Momentum” with Trump in the presidential seat for the next four years.
Then, of course, there are those, who blame President Joe Biden and/or Kamala Harris and their weak performance for the loss, along with Russian, Chinese, Iranian – or whatever else enemy seemed capable of interfering with American elections – manipulations.
Back during the Cold War, Soviet propagandists faced a sort-of Gordian-knot: their task was to present the West and Capitalists as equally cunning (to be able to claim that it was a dangerous enemy) and stupid (to be able to claim that they were running to their inevitable demise, while the Soviet way was the only way).
The Democratic media (and political spectrum) faced a similar challenge: they wanted to portrait Trump as an “aberration”, a “fluke”, a “complete idiot” or worse, an enemy and danger for democracy, while trying to ignore that he represented the views and expectations of millions of American citizens, and not that of Moscow, Beijing or Tehran.
The elections saw massive voter turnout.
Well, not simply a massive voter turnout – not a Republican landslide, but a strong authorization for Trump’s policies.
One thing that helped Trump was that white voters went up as a share of the electorate, in spite of their diminishing demographic percentage. Now, 71 percent of voters were white – compared to the previous elections, when they showed up in ever-diminishing numbers.
The election saw crushing defeat for the Democrats even in states that were considered “blue bastions” or what were, after the 2020 elections, thought to be turning their backs on the Republicans and were expected to become Democratic strongholds due to shifting demographics – like Texas.
Yet, the “Blue Wall” crumbled and “the Sun Belt vanished”: even in surprising places, like Starr County, Texas, where the 97 percent Hispanic population hasn’t voted for a Republican for a century. Now, they did – Texas moved 10 points in favour of Republicans, and in Starr County, Trump won by 16 points.
The same happened in Apache County, with its 72 percent Native American population.
For one reason or another, much of rural America rushed to embrace Trump. So did Latino men, who, just four years ago went for Biden over Trump by a 23 point margin.
Even women or young voters, who were expected to vote for Harris, voted for Trump in higher numbers than expected. The exception were college-educated women.
And a large swath of them expressed their dissatisfaction with the current, Democrat-determined course of events, let it be foreign policy commitments around the world (especially the war in Ukraine) or domestic issues (think economy, inflation or identity politics), much like it happened all around Europe in this year of elections.
The soul-searching has already started.
The easy answer would be to blame the voters for being short-sighted or narrow-minded, not seeing all the good things the Biden-administration delivered to Americans, for having decided to “burn it all to the ground”, or, as Elie Mystal put it, the country had proved itself “to be a fetid, violent people” – equalling Trump-voters to fascists, authoritarianists, racists and bigots.
An argument, that, besides clearly showing the arrogance and superiority-complex of the Democratic leadership, misses the point completely and fails to explain how Latinos, Blacks and Natives chose to vote for Trump and his “unchecked white rule”.
Some, like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, point at the party’s mistaken aim, slamming Democrats for having “abandoned working class people”, a group that was once solidly in their camps.
Others say that the party lost contact with “people on the ground” – that the issues Washington and New York elites find important (think identity issues) fail to resonate with many voters. That the leftist ideas of college professors or high-ranking officials don’t necessarily meet the ideas and expectations of poor or struggling people.
The very same explanations as given in various European countries that showed a massive shift to the right.
The “surprise” voters for Trump – white women, young people, Latinos and Blacks – all proved that there was a line that shouldn’t have been crossed. That they won’t vote for certain issues (think tax-funded gender-affirmation surgeries for prison inmates) just to get rid of Trump.
If anything, they reject hyper-political correctness and cancellation – that the current focus on transgender and other issues not only failed to resonate with them, but has, in fact, alienated them from Democrats, who seemed to have ignored other, more important issues, like cost-of-living and housing, or religion (in a country where about three in four people identify with a specific religious faith, among them 68 percent Christians).
That even the overturning of Roe v Wade couldn’t convince masses of women to vote for Harris: in fact, she won the support of 54 percent of women, compared to the 57 percent that supported Biden in 2020.
The results should serve as a wake-up call: if they continue doing what they did so far, Democrats will continue losing. It is high time to focus on the problems that matter for voters.
