Now he’s even more likely to get re-elected

ONE clear message seems to have emerged from the mid-term elections in the United States: the under-estimation of the political powers of Donald Trump by his opponents is going to have to stop.

The idea that he is little more than a racist; the notion that his supporters are Neanderthals; or that his economic boom is a mirage that makes little difference to ordinary people – all of this is blown apart by results that underline across America the political appeal of this President.

Like it or not, he is here to stay. And assuming he chooses to run in 2020, his chances have been enhanced, not diminished, by what happened this week.

The official odds on him being in the White House until 2024 have already shortened.

His opponents, the Democratic Party, fired up their voter base as much as they could.

They threw absolutely everything they had into this set of races for Congressional seats across America, and in races for state governor mansions, too.

They called for this to be a ‘wave election’ – in which a Democratic blue wave would sweep the polls and the nation would give a huge thumbs down to the President.

They wanted this to be the kind of election that goes down in history as the moment when a whole nation looked at itself in the mirror and changed course, changed mood.

Well, unfortunately for them, that did not happen.

It’s undoubtedly true that the Democrats had some real successes in the mid-terms.

They took back control of the House of Representatives and managed to get some people elected who will energise their supporters in the future: the first native American woman elected to Congress; Muslim women, too, and, at just 29 years old, the youngest woman in history to achieve this feat, the very mediafriendly, fresh-faced Congresswoman elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Expect to hear plenty from her in the years to come.

The Democrats promised that this would be a women’s election, and in that I reckon they can certainly say ‘job done’.

Women – particularly bettereducated women living in the suburbs of the big cities – voted overwhelmingly for the candidates the Democrats put up, and many more women were actually elected.

Powered in part by a strong distaste for Donald Trump, women on the left of America’s political divide have stood up to be counted. They are in the fight.

THE Democrats now also – at long last – have an issue they can take to the American people and persuade them to back. That issue is healthcare, and whether or not people with preexisting conditions can be guaranteed insurance in the future.

As one left-wing comedian put it, speaking directly to Trump supporters: ‘Long after the fuss about immigration is over and found to be nonsense, you will still have your Type 2 diabetes.’

That hit home. Expect healthcare to dominate American politics and – for all its faults – a system like that in Britain, an NHS of sorts, to be on the agenda at the next presidential election.

Add to that the Democrats’ recapture of the House of Representatives, which will have real impact. They will have an effective veto over any bill that Donald Trump wants to pass. Does he want to cut taxes? He’ll have to get it past the Democrats. Does he want to build the wall on the Mexican border? The Democrats can say yes or no.

Crucially, they can also investigate him. That may sound like a hollow threat after what he’s already shrugged off in the past two years, but investigations in the US Congress can have real consequences. Say they decide to look at his tax

affairs or his business dealings before he was president. They can tie him and his people in knots with penetrating questions under oath until they perjure themselves. Hassle them. So, the Democrats can hold their heads high after this election and talk the talk of progress, of effective opposition to Donald Trump.

This was not a disaster for them. Sure, but it wasn’t a triumph either. When Nancy Pelosi, their leader in the House of Representatives, says ‘tomorrow will be a new day in America’, we are entitled to ask: why?

We should not forget that it’s pretty much the norm for a sitting president to take a pasting and lose seats in both houses of Congress in the mid-terms. It happened to bushy-tailed Democrats such as Bill Clinton (in his first term) and Barack Obama (in both his administrations). Trump, of course, has gained seats in the Senate. So has anything really changed? The fact is that in race after race in states where Donald Trump is popular and campaigned hard, the candidates he supported won. That’s why the majority for the Republicans in the Senate (effectively America’s upper house) has actually gone up, which is highly unusual in a mid-term election.

And the left-wing candidates who ran in state-wide elections for the Democrats almost all bit the dust. Their much-publicised effort to win a Senate seat in Texas came to nothing. So did the governor races in Ohio and Florida. And let me underline the importance of those last two losses: governors have a big influence on presidential elections, and the local enthusiasm and organisation that a candidate can use. Which two states are absolutely key to winning any presidential election? You got it, as Americans say: Florida and Ohio.

The depressing fact for oppoa nents of Donald Trump is that his madcap maelstrom approach to governing does not put people off nearly as much as they might have hoped. Remember: in the days before the election he told outright lies.

He said, for instance, that America was ‘the only country in the world’ that had birthright citizenship where any baby born on its soil was automatically granted full rights. Not true: Canada and Mexico, America’s closest neighbours, also have it.

Even worse, according to many Americans, was the recent racism that saw a so-called ‘migrant caravan’ heading towards the southern border of the US treated by the president as a kind of national security threat, rather than simply a group of poor people trying to get to America.

Extraordinarily, a Trump-supporting TV advert on the subject was banned by the main networks for being racist. Even Fox News – the president’s favourite network and the one he watches every morning – took the advert off air.

But it works, that kind of campaigning. It wins some votes. And – crucially – it doesn’t put off Trump supporters who are more interested in other issues. When I was in western Pennsylvania – prime Trump country – in the runup to the election, I lost count of the number of nice, decent, amiable Trump supporters who, when I asked: ‘But surely he’s a nightmare as a person?’ would grin and shrug and say: ‘Oh sure, he’s a jerk. But we’re backing him.’

It put me in mind of the wonderful quote from the great American president Franklin Roosevelt, when he was asked how he could possibly back some central American dictator. ‘He may be a son of bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch,’ he said. This is often the way Trump supporters see their man. And the problem for the Democrats is that no end of dreary talk about policies, or vague talk of human rights and dignity, is going to erase that gut feeling in millions of voters.

So the question remains after these mid-term elections, to misquote The Sound Of Music: ‘How do you solve a problem like Donald?’ The Democrats are still a long way from finding an answer, or a candidate, who looks up to the task.