Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday can’t help but challenge long-held views on American values. Abraham Lincoln, often identified as the greatest of U.S. presidents, warned in the shadows of the Civil War that “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” There’s fear in many corners of the world that it may be doing just that.
Trump’s triumph wasn’t accidental. His defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 may have been a fluke, an expected Democratic victory fumbled away by hubris and bad campaigning, but this outcome was deliberate. Americans know exactly who and what Trump is based on years of experience, and they chose to hand him a clear win over Kamala Harris.
White males with limited educations may still be his firmest fans, but he couldn’t have won without making gains among ethnic voters, particularly Hispanics, and Black men who for whatever reason couldn’t be persuaded to support a Black candidate. Younger voters mostly backed Joe Biden in 2020; this time they voted for Trump. He even won many Arab-Americans upset about America’s role in Israel.
He didn’t succeed all on his own. A critical element of his remarkable comeback lies in the Democrats’ failure to deliver on the promises made four years ago to heal the country and narrow the divides that have been increasingly tearing at its core. Among the uncertainties rising from Tuesday’s result is a critical one for Democrats: will they finally get the message?
Donald Trump may be the epitome of someone unsuited to be president, yet Democrats have lost two of the last three elections to him. Since his appearance on the political scene, the internet has been jammed with videos attesting to his flaws — personal, moral, ethical, legal, marital — yet the only other party available as an option hasn’t convinced enough Americans that it’s a better bet, or at least a less-bad alternative.
In the frantic three months since she replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket, Harris set records for fundraising, collecting a war chest of more than US$1 billion (C$1.4 billion) in a matter of weeks, far more than Trump had on hand after four years of preparation.
Democrats were able to flood screens and airwaves with campaign ads, mount a frenzied cross-country travel schedule and make repeated stops in all the most crucial locales. Celebrities crowded stages on Harris’ behalf. Billionaire Bill Gates, who usually avoids publicly choosing sides, kicked in US$50 million to the cause.
The result was Tuesday’s unqualified defeat. The reasons for failure are numerous, but one has to be obvious: not enough Americans like what Democrats are selling. The sort of progress “progressives” champion doesn’t appeal to as many voters as its advocates feel it should. So who needs to shape up, the sellers or the buyers?
Again and again Democrats have been confronted by proof that the intrusive social agenda championed by the left — with its fixation on pronouns, bathrooms, identity, gender warfare, radical dogmatism and intolerance of alternatives — is out of step with much of America and an anchor that consistently encumbers the party from making inroads with moderate, mainstream voters who prefer politicians deal with practical, daily realities over the abstract, idealized notions of academics and activists.
Polls leading up to the election consistently identified voters’ preoccupation with the state of the economy, the high cost of groceries, the stagnation of wages, the disappearing hopes of home ownership and the other everyday challenges of achieving what’s still held out as the American dream.
They’re concerned about chaos at the southern border and a lack of progress on containing it. They may sympathize with the plight of Ukraine and hold a poor view of Russia and its leadership, but are more preoccupied with their own challenges and fears.
“All politics is local,” former House speaker Tip O’Neill is credited with saying. Trump’s people showed they understand that; Democrats didn’t. They’ve now had three opportunities to counter Trump’s relentless message of resentment, fear and anger with something more attractive, and failed.
Their determined pursuit of him through the courts and Congress even after his 2020 defeat only helped turn him into a martyr and resurrect his support among the MAGA crowds. Left alone, he might have faded into well-deserved obscurity; instead, he was able to position himself as the object of an orchestrated persecution by powerful and vindictive enemies.
Given time, Harris might have succeeded in fashioning a better and more detailed platform to attract disillusioned moderates and independent voters. But Biden stayed too long and left Harris with a legacy that couldn’t be either abandoned or replicated if she hoped to win. She had to distance herself from his record without discrediting it, since she’d been part of it. Given the circumstances, she opted for ambiguity, pushing a package of promises that was short on specifics. That prompted complaints that nobody knew where she stood.
She pledged to govern as a centrist but couldn’t escape past positions rooted in the party’s leftist extremes. Did she still approve of tough mandates for automakers, reparations for African-Americans, taxpayer funding for gender operations for detained immigrants and a US$10-trillion climate plan that included welcoming “refugees” displaced by climate change? She wouldn’t say.
Perhaps she’d meant what she said at the time. It’s equally possible that her past statements were merely a means of sidelining a limited but noisy wing of her party. Either way, in so close a race, it unquestionably cost her votes among Americans wary of the clout of a faction they view as too radical.
Given Tuesday’s results, will Democrats finally absorb the message? Harris was not a horrible candidate or an awful option. There were other potential nominees who might have done as well or better, and might still in 2028. The left, liberals, progressives … whatever: proponents of identity politics are paying a high price for the divisiveness, intolerance and intransigence generated by a well-intentioned idea gone badly awry.
It’s difficult to reconcile the America that twice elected a Black president on a wave of enthusiasm for a colour-free program of hope and change with the dark, crabbed, choking frame of mind that could see so noxious a character as Trump as a means of improvement. Canadians, as others, can only watch and wait, hoping that somewhere along the way the passions unleashed by MAGA fade in intensity and Americans rediscover what Lincoln termed in a similarly fraught moment as “the better angels of our nature.”
National Post