U.S. president-elect Donald Trump won a historic victory Tuesday night, decisively defeating Democratic opponent Kamala Harris and helping Republicans win the Senate, and possibly hold onto the House. While much credit should be given to the former president for building a coalition that allowed him to retake the White House after his own party turned on him following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, blame must also be placed on the Democrats for utterly failing at everything they set out to do.
This was a campaign that rightly should have been a slam dunk for the blue team. They were facing an opponent with a proven track record of lies and erratic behaviour. A man who helped bring the abortion issue back to the top of the political agenda. A convicted felon who tried to overturn the results of a democratic election. All the Democrats had to do was present themselves as the adults in the room — as a party capable of defending American democracy and governing from the centre. But this was too much to ask.
The Dems had four years to uphold the rule of law — the principle that no one, including the president, is above the law — but they ran out the clock on the four criminal cases brought against Trump, virtually ensuring that they will all be made to quietly go away. The message this sends to future budding autocrats is stark: the president is virtually immune from prosecution, even if he attempts to undermine the very foundation of American democracy.
It would be hard to blame anyone for concluding that if the Democrats weren’t even up to the task of protecting the rule of law and the sanctity of American democracy, they surely couldn’t be trusted to run the country for another four years.
One of the more interesting nuggets gleaned from preliminary exit polls on Tuesday was that the state of American democracy was the top issue for most voters, with around three-quarters saying that democracy was under threat. They nevertheless voted in overwhelming numbers for a man who refused to concede the 2020 election — going as far as asking Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” him 11,780 votes and sitting back as his supporters stormed the Capitol building in an attempt to prevent the certification of the election results — and openly jokes about journalists being killed and jailing his political opponents.
As more data comes in over the coming weeks about how Americans voted and why, we will start to get a clearer picture of the factors that led to Trump’s victory. But one of the themes of the election night coverage was the role that the youth vote appeared to play, particularly the trend of young men coming out for Trump.
Reporting on election day from Arizona State University, NBC journalist Gadi Schwartz noted that the campus was awash in MAGA hats and that many young men said they were swayed by Trump’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast. One voter even told Schwartz that he decided to vote for Trump based on Harris’ apparent unwillingness to sit down with Rogan herself.
This evidence is all anecdotal so far, at best representing the mood at one university in a Republican-leaning state. But it would be foolish to underestimate the impact of Trump’s three-hour interview with Rogan, which has over 45-million views on YouTube, and the podcaster’s late endorsement of the Republican candidate.
It’s quite astounding that the 78-year-old Republican, who will be the oldest person ever inaugurated president of the United States come Jan. 20, was seen as cooler and was better able to leverage new media than his 60-year-old Black female opponent. It speaks not only to Harris’ failings — like Trump, her off-the-cuff remarks often make little sense, but she lacks the humour that makes her opponent’s riffs seem more like stand-up comedy routines — but also the very legitimate fear that Democrats have yet to fully shed their woke baggage.
According to NBC News exit polls, Trump won male voters by a margin 54-44 per cent. He won first-time voters by a similar margin (54-45 per cent). Even those who said they disliked both candidates overwhelmingly cast a ballot for the Republican.
And who can blame them? For years, white men, in particular, have been treated with disdain and forced to suffer for the sins of their ancestors. Those looking to go to college face an education system that’s rigged against them. In an era in which one wrong glance, or a hand brushing against a knee, can bring unfounded allegations of “sexual assault,” it makes some sense that voters would cast a ballot for a man who’s been caught bragging about actual sexual assaults.
Much of Trump’s appeal comes down to what Latino voters — who Trump appears to have won by a remarkable 13 percentage points — might call “cajones.” Trump is undoubtedly the most thin-skinned man to ever grace the Oval Office, but he has shown a profound willingness to stand up to the powers that be.
During the 1990s, he was commonly seen sitting ringside at boxing matches taking place in his Atlantic City hotels. His acceptance speech in the early hours of Wednesday morning featured a guest appearance by UFC boss Dana White and numerous shout-outs to Elon Musk, the self-made billionaire who’s turning every little boy’s dream of travelling to space into a reality. That’s a lot of machismo to cap a campaign in which policy often took a back seat to manly vibes, as a counterpoint to Democrats sheepishly caving to the hyper-sensitive woke mob and the feminization of western society.
Trump went on to call this win a “historic realignment uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense,” while portraying Republicans as “the party of common sense.” This may not initially make sense to Democrats who remember the daily gaffes and falsehoods that dominated the news cycle during Trump’s first term. But it says a lot about the Democratic party that a huge swath of Americans see the party of Trump as having more common sense than those who embrace modern progressivism.
No one really knows what the next four years will look like. Trump is unique among politicians in that most of his supporters don’t try to hold him accountable for his campaign promises, but instead defend him by arguing that he probably won’t do many of the crazy things he says he will. The big question this time around is whether there will be anyone in government willing to stand up to his excesses. Yet as hard as Democrats may find the next four years, they will have no one to blame but themselves.
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