Garbage litters the ground after Democratic presidential nominee U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris' election night rally in Washington on Nov. 6. Polls prior to the election showed the economy was the most important consideration for voters, the majority of whom saw Mr. Trump as a more capable caretaker of the country’s financial future.Kevin Mohatt/Reuters
Donald Trump did not eke out a win this week. He staged a historic White House comeback, a national rebuke of the Democratic presidential campaign.
Kamala Harris raised more than US$1-billion and spent much of it on political ads. Yet national vote tallies show Mr. Trump ahead by millions of votes. Ms. Harris has not won a single one of the seven battleground states, where Democrats thought they stood a chance.
From rust belt to sun belt, Americans of all types joined in a loss of faith in the Democratic Party. Even in liberal strongholds such as New York, large new numbers of voters looked at their options and chose Mr. Trump.
It was a nationwide revolt by an unhappy electorate, the Democratic bleeding so extensive that in the aftermath some began to wonder if anyone could have stood against Mr. Trump.
“I don’t even think if you slotted in Barack Obama right now that we would have won this election,” said Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist and fundraiser who was a co-organizer of White Dudes for Harris.
“People are not buying what we’re selling.”
For voters every trip during the months-long election campaign – to a grocery store, to vacation, to work – brought a fresh reminder of the cost of living. A young girl holds a 'Black Voters for Harris-Walz' sign outside of Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris' election night watch party at Howard University, Nov. 5.Terrance Williams/The Associated Press
Maybe, some Democrats have said, President Joe Biden doomed his party by remaining in office long past the moment when Americans began to question his fitness. Maybe the country remains too stained by misogyny to countenance a female president. Maybe Ms. Harris should have run a less conventional campaign. Maybe Democrats should have courted Elon Musk, the billionaire who spent more than US$118-million trying to get Mr. Trump elected.
For voters, though, a more mundane set of considerations seems to have proved far more persuasive. When Mr. Trump was president, milk was nearly 25 per cent cheaper than today. White bread sold for a third less. Gasoline was priced 20 per cent lower. Every trip during the months-long election campaign – to a grocery store, to vacation, to work – brought a fresh reminder.
In other words: Maybe it’s the inflation, stupid.
“It’s been an awful four years,” said Matt Mcgee, 54, a small-business owner in Georgia. Everyone, he said, has grown sick of “the high prices on everything. The future did not look bright for the rest of us, to be honest.”
Polls in the weeks prior to the election showed that the economy outranked other issues as the most important consideration for voters, the majority of whom saw Mr. Trump as a more capable caretaker of the country’s financial future.
“In an economic crisis, the party in power gets blamed for it, even if it’s not their fault,” Mr. Nellis said. Incumbents around the world, he added, “are getting brutalized because people are upset about a global inflationary crisis that really is a consequence of the pandemic.”
In democracies around the world, this electoral rout has paid little heed to political stripe. In Britain, the governing Conservatives were trounced by Labour. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance lost considerable ground to other coalitions. Japan’s ruling Liberal Democrats forfeited its coalition majority. India’s nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, too, was reduced to a parliamentary minority.
Across the U.S., meanwhile, restive voters marked ballots in ways that defy easy partisan explanation. Montanans, as just one example, chose to codify abortion access while also voting in overwhelming numbers for Mr. Trump, whose Supreme Court nominees were responsible for ending abortion access for many Americans.
The election gave room for deep wells of grievance and displeasure to churn to the surface. Large numbers of Arab Americans voted against Democrats as a show of opposition to the party’s support for Israel. Elsewhere, voters acted in condemnation of the millions of migrants who entered the country illegally while Ms. Harris was Vice-President. Racial questions, too, once again rose to the fore with a Black woman running for president.
But the shifting allegiances that swung the election were also shaped by public miseries, economic and otherwise, that cut across traditional demarcations of ethnicity and identity. Ms. Harris performed best among households whose income exceeds US$100,000, sweeping up an even greater percentage of votes than Mr. Biden in 2020, according to voter surveys conducted by the Associated Press.
Among middle-income Americans, however, she lost several points, which accrued to Mr. Trump.
And among the poorest households, Ms. Harris lost fully six points of the vote that only four years ago went Democratic.
Mr. Trump was lifted to victory by the strength of the country’s financially weakest. His support came not just from those who stand outside the degree-holding and share-holding classes, but those who suffered the most from the past four years.
The poorest Americans experienced the highest coronavirus death rates. Rising prices visited the greatest indignity on those with the least capacity to cope.
“Inflation is poisonous for everybody. But it’s especially poisonous for lower-income folks,” said Fred Bergsten, the founding director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Disadvantaged Americans had already felt “really rejected in economic terms, leading to a broader alienation from society and therefore desire to kick the rascals out.”
The most basic measures of U.S. life have long been governed by profound disparities. The poorest Americans can expect to live nearly 15 fewer years than the wealthiest.
Mr. Trump promised to end the 'inflation nightmare,' offering migrants as a scapegoat and himself as a solution. Supporters wearing garbage bags, arrive for a campaign rally for Mr. Trump, Nov. 2, in Greensboro, N.C.Alex Brandon/The Associated Press
Then came COVID-19, which killed 1.2 million Americans – nearly double the number dead in battle across the country’s entire history – and dealt a deep wound to the national psyche.
“There’s this grief that people feel but can’t deal with, and you don’t know who to blame,” said Shana Kushner Gadarian, a political psychologist at Syracuse University and author of Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID.
As the virus abated, prices soared.
It was not merely financially painful. It was a bad omen. People might not have understood the reasons, but they sensed “that if things were under control, we probably wouldn’t have inflation. So something has gone wrong,” said Carola Binder, a University of Texas at Austin economist who wrote the book Shock Values: Prices and Inflation in American Democracy.
The feeling lingered into the ballot booth.
“We had this really memorable bad experience. And that just left a mark on people,” she said.
More than any other candidate, Mr. Trump saw opportunity. He promised to end the “inflation nightmare,” offering migrants as a scapegoat and himself as a solution. His pledges to end taxes on tips and overtime appealed to service and hourly workers. Profane and irreverent, he also embodied rejection of an establishment that Americans held responsible for the ugliness of recent years.
What Ms. Harris offered, by contrast, was “lip service,” said Jai Chabria, a Republican political strategist who is close to vice-president-elect JD Vance. “The Democrats gave check-the-box, paint-by-numbers answers, rather than actual empathy and solutions for the issues.”
The Harris campaign and its allies, Mr. Chabria argued, failed by dwelling on Mr. Trump’s demagogic tendencies and provocative comments at his rallies. It’s about “language and the way in which you talk to people. They were fixed on issues that people don’t care about,” he said.
“The Democrats have become the party of the elite. Republicans have become the party of the working class and the middle class. That is absolutely a shift.”
At the same time, those who cast votes for Mr. Trump did so at a time when things are, by many measures, actually going very well.
The U.S. economy is roaring. Inflation has been tamed. Wages aren’t merely rising, they have beat inflation for nearly two years – and the lowest-paid workers are seeing raises twice as big, in percentage terms, as those making the most.
And Ms. Harris, rather than being insensitive to American malaise, promised additional relief, saying she would cut taxes for those who aren’t millionaires, provide cash to first-time homebuyers and battle price gouging.
The notion that pocketbook issues might have driven voters away from the Democratic Party beggars the belief of some on the American left.
Had a white man run as a Democrat, would voters have been more receptive to his message that the economy was improving? “For me, that is ultimately the question,” said Gwendolyn Wright, who helped to establish the Samuel Dubois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University.
Any answer is complicated by the fact that Mr. Biden was the Democratic candidate for much of the campaign, and by evidence that many Black, Hispanic and Asian voters shifted toward Mr. Trump.
William Darity, a Duke University scholar of racial inequality, dismissed that as irrelevant. Many Hispanics, for example, either identify as white “or, at a minimum, aspire to whiteness,” he said.
The predominant vote for Mr. Trump “has been from white men and white women” – which he sees as an indication that race is fundamental to why a Black woman was trounced by a convicted white criminal.
Those who cast votes for Mr. Trump did so at a time when the economy is roaring. A supporter of Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. president Donald Trump reacts following early election results in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Nov. 6.Carlos Barria/Reuters
“This election reveals what America has long been.”
Its aftermath has exposed ugly sentiment – in Ohio, Black students have received anonymous text messages saying they have “been selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation” – and bred a new sense of vulnerability. Karen Race, a federal employee, e-mailed human resources this week asking if it would be wise to retire before Mr. Trump takes office, knowing he has pledged to fire large numbers of bureaucrats. Ms. Race, 62, is gay and worries that the coming cull will search out people like her.
“I’m devastated,” she said. “I’m really seriously thinking about leaving the country. That is how scared I am.”
Others are celebrating a president-elect they believe will salve the stings of the recent past. Roberto Gonzalez, 52, points to the groceries he purchased this week in Atlanta: a quick run to grab lemons, oranges, cucumbers and a few slabs of a cheap cut of beef. “And this is $75,” he said.
“This inflation, it’s just insane.”
Economists have evaluated Mr. Trump’s plans and concluded that they are more likely to stoke inflation than what Ms. Harris put forward.
But Mr. Gonzalez, who immigrated to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic 30 years ago, voted out of confidence that a businessman like Mr. Trump – even one with a rich history of bankruptcy – will steer the country toward greater safety and prosperity.
“That’s my hope,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “That he’s going to do better for the nation.”