The Left misjudged Trump’s appeal

The polls were wrong, again. The assumptions of progressive opinionformers were wrong, again. Even if he is eventually pipped at the post when all the votes are counted, Donald Trump has confounded the detractors who imagined his four-year presidency was a nightmarish aberration from which the American people must assuredly awake.

The closeness of a race that the pollsters said would be a walkover for Joe Biden, the Democratic challenger, has inevitably caused consternation. It reinforces the deep divide within the world’s leading democracy and provoked Mr Trump into an angry and premature attack on the legitimacy of the process.

At one point during a dramatic night, he proposed that the counting of postal ballots should stop, specifying that fraud might have taken place. This triggered a backlash against the president for declaring victory, though challenging the result was not the most obvious reaction of someone who thought he had won. But at least his suggestion that the Supreme Court should intervene has the merit of being a constitutional approach. If there is evidence of fraud – and one precinct in Florida reported a turnout above 100 per cent – then this should be investigated.

For all the overblown talk of civil war and the collapse of democracy, however, the strong likelihood must still be that when one candidate has surpassed the 270 electoral college votes required for victory, they will duly be elected president. If that doesn’t turn out to be Mr Trump, he will doubtless still claim a moral triumph given the opprobrium heaped upon him. The Democrats, who strive to be the party of the working people, have instead become the political vehicle of the well-educated middle-class. Mr Biden performed woefully among white working-class, Hispanic, black and Asian voters.

The election challenges the narrative from 2016 that Mr Trump only won because his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was laden with toxic baggage. The president’s handling of the pandemic crisis was also supposed to count against him. Yet it seems that his defiance in the face of the virus, denounced by many as reckless, might have resonated with voters who cannot afford lockdowns, with their impact on jobs, businesses and livelihoods. European leaders, inextricably wedded to such a strategy, should take note.