Harold Wilson called it the pound in your pocket. Clinton’s advisor, James Carville, expressed the same sentiment in the immortal phrase: “it’s the economy, stupid.”
Trump merely asked America a question and kept on asking it: ‘are you better off than you were four years ago?’
When people are feeling safe and secure or even safe-ish and secure-ish they don’t upset the status quo, but hit them with inflation and they actively look for change.
It is a very basic fact of political life, yet it seems to have passed Kamala Harris by.
Along with the economy, migration worries America and that means American women as well as American men.
Women shop and use public transport and if costs are rocketing, they are more prone to feel the impact than they are the impact of “women’s issues” such as abortion, which may have no immediate personal relevance at all. Yet Harris appeared to have little appreciation of that too.
Trump knew not only what to talk about but also whom he was after, fighting for votes among young men and Latinos.
By contrast Harris appeared to take too much for granted and to laugh off (literally) any possibility that the migrant and female vote might not be hers for the asking. Complacency was never yet an election winner.
Trump is, to put it at its mildest, a divisive figure but when things feel as if they are going wrong people will not trust a lightweight.
They want somebody who will do things differently. It did not help that Harris offered nothing different, saying almost in terms that she could not think of anything she might do that differently, while Trump promised the earth.
Being a woman and a person of colour may make for interesting conversation but on their own they don’t add up to a change of anything but image.
Then there was the Biden legacy.
The world has been very polite about it but the USA has been run by somebody patently senile and growing more so. In that circumstance one might have expected a lot more from a vice-president, but Harris made virtually no impact at all.
For the last three elections America has been offered poor choices. For the world’s biggest democracy, there has been a dearth of impressive contenders.
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David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, called Trump a neo-Nazi sociopath which probably won’t do much for the so-called special relationship.
This isn’t helped by a charisma-free Starmer who has no answer to the migrant problem that, in different forms, plagues both countries.
Trump gave solid support to Brexit and will probably blink in disbelief at any leader who wishes his country were not sovereign. If only Reform could have been the government what a difference it could have made!
Trump believes he can end the Ukraine war and restore peace to the Middle East, which might stretch credulity but at least promises energy and a USA looking outward rather than inward.
It also offers something more positive than a meek return of Afghanistan, in whose cause so many US servicemen died, to the Taliban. Three years on we forget the anger that caused at the time.
In short, Trump stood for change and Harris for more of the same and the voters did not want the second option.
They wanted hope and upbeat rhetoric. And there was another factor: if Trump has too controversial a personality, Kamala Harris has an irritating one.
Not for nothing has she been called Cackling Kamala. To overcome that she needed policies and big vision but offered little more than smiles.
Trump’s is no mean achievement. Rejected four years ago, he has managed to accumulate court cases and even a conviction. But still he forged on. His will not be a presidency we are likely to forget.