70 MILLION SOULS WITHOUT MESSIAH A DANGER FOR JOE

The battle might be over for Joe Biden but the war has only just begun. Now the struggle to save the soul of America rests in the hands of a man who struggles to remember the name of the man he’s fighting against.

The good news is that this is no longer a fight against Donald Trump but a fight for the hearts and minds of the 70 million Americans who turned out to vote for him. The bad news is that, unlike Trump, they are not going anywhere.

There will be a lot of armchair quarterbacking after this stunning US election. It is therefore important to record in this first draft of history the facts as they stand, before they are rewritten by the victors.

The first is that virtually all the mainstream polls and pundits got it wrong again. And not only did they get it wrong after getting it wrong the first time, but they got it even more wrong.

Four years of constant commentary about Trump’s record unpopularity, his accidental and undemocratic somersault into the White House, his illegal and illegitimate presidency, his murderous incompetence and his projected electoral wipeout once he sought a second term have all proved to be utterly, utterly wrong.

Yes, after days of nailbiting vote-counting where swing states have flickered red to blue on the slimmest of margins, it is impossible for Trump to win, assuming none of his conspiracy theories about voter fraud come true.

However, that does not erase the fact that he turned out a record number of votes for any Republican candidate in US history and came within a bee’s bollocks of winning a second term.

Democrats should thank their lucky stars that they preselected Biden as their candidate, a genial, familiar and moderate man who is as close to the embodiment of mainstream Middle America as the party has.

Only Biden was able to straddle an incredibly broad spectrum of voters that stretched from young Trump-hating socialists to urbane Trump-hating Republicans and the bare minimum of working-class white men in the Midwest.

The result was the highest vote for any presidential candidate in American history.

But the second-highest vote for any presidential candidate goes to Trump and now his voters are looking for a home.

It is clear now, as it was four years ago, that the political, media and academic establishment simply does not understand them and dismisses their hopes and fears as illegitimate – even “deplorable” you might say.

Whether by accident or design, Trump tapped into these hopes and fears and a new American Revolution was born. And so there are more than 70 million souls sitting there waiting for the next messiah to take them to the promised land.

Unless the Democrats think they can pull together a bigger coalition of communists and corporates at every election in the future, then they’d better start listening to them.

And the key word here is listen. These people are sick of being dictated to and told they have to squeeze into a preordained ideological template or be cast on the political scrap heap.

Working-class people are told they have to sacrifice their jobs for the sake of climate change, have to sacrifice their religious views for the sake of progress and have to sacrifice their language for the sake of tolerance.

And, quite frankly, they’re f--king over it.

Joe’s genial demeanour and big smile went a long way to reassuring those people that the party was listening again but it will have to do a lot more.

Democrats will rightly be breathing a massive sigh of relief after this election but they should not for a minute think that the struggle is over.

Joe Hildebrand is co-host of US politics podcast I’m Usually More Professional and Nights with John Stanley on Radio 2GB.