Trump: how on earth did he win?
“Most pundits said they wouldn’t do it; most pollsters said they couldn’t do it”; everyone from Beyoncé to shock-jock DJ Howard Stern said they shouldn’t do it, said Gary Younge in The Guardian. Yet last Tuesday, millions of Americans did it: they chose as their 45th president a snarling billionaire property developer and “self-confessed sexual predator” who – over the past year – has “laid waste to the democratic traditions of an ostensibly mature political culture”. He may be striking a conciliatory note now, but this is a man who, from the start of his campaign, denigrated every minority; advocated violence at his own rallies; branded journalists as “scum”; made up countless “facts”; and indicated that if he lost to the “nasty woman” running against him, he’d refuse to accept the result.
How did it come to this, wondered Hadley Freeman, in the same paper. How could the country that voted in America’s first black president, only eight years ago, now have as its president-elect a man endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan? And how could a phrase that should have destroyed Trump’s presidential hopes – “grab them by the pussy” – have seemingly become a vote winner? There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the “whitelash” – the backlash of the white working class. “The election of Trump, this narrative goes, proves how these people feel ignored by the elite politicians and metropolitan media.” But what we’re seeing is a result that was won by appealing to racism and misogyny; Trump’s big promise was to turn the clock back to a time when white men were in the ascendancy. Yes, across the West, the white working classes have suffered in the post-industrial era, but so have other groups. It’s time to stop “indulging” them.
Hillary Clinton thought she could safely ignore the working-class voters who used to make up the Left’s natural constituency – and it cost her. Her husband had urged her to focus on “angry whites”, said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. She decided they were becoming an irrelevance owing to the US’S shifting demographics, and focused instead on rallying young, black and Hispanic voters. But in the end, these groups weren’t sufficiently enthused by her campaign to vote in large enough numbers (total turnout was only 58.1%). Meanwhile, Trump jumped into the void, taking his raucous rallies not only to the Republican heartlands, but also to Democrat states where times were now tough, and where many voters felt that the party’s elite had become obsessed by cultural issues, and in eight years had done little or nothing to address the issues that mattered to them: millions of Americans don’t want transgender toilets, or don’t care about them – not when their jobs are going abroad and their towns are dying.
By contrast, Trump tapped directly into their concerns, said Freddy Gray in The Spectator. He talked tough not only about immigration, but also about crime, stagnating wages, free trade. Yes, he said some outrageous things along the way, but that only made him seem more real, and less like Clinton, with her multimillion-dollar Clinton Foundation and nice friends at Goldman Sachs. Trump won votes even among people who didn’t like him. He is probably a “bad man”, one Trump supporter told me, but you need a thug to “smash through the dysfunction in Washington”. And his aggressively anti-establishment rhetoric didn’t just appeal to whites: almost a third of Hispanic voters opted for Trump, as did one in 12 African Americans. In fact, Trump won more of the black and Hispanic vote than Mitt Romney did in 2012.
Yet to say that “Trump rode this wave to the White House oversimplifies things”, said Ed Conway in The Times. “Many of his votes came from wealthy Americans who have benefited from the globalised world”, as he has. “Moreover, this was hardly a landslide.” The swing to Trump was 2%; the average swing after a two-term presidency this century has been 5%. And Clinton won more votes overall, they were just in the wrong places: she needed fewer in the globalised cities, and more in rural areas. Even so, we are seeing a “seismic change” as the “age of liberal internationalist capitalism comes to an end”, said Jenni Russell in the same paper. Millions of people – and not just the lowest paid – are no longer willing to accept the “radical” inequality in US society: in the past 40 years, worker pay has increased just 11% in real terms, while that of CEOS has risen almost 1,000%. Clinton had nothing to say about this, which is why she lost. Trump promised to fix it – but does this “arch capitalist” have a clue how to? He better have: he “owns the whole train set now”; he has no excuse not to deliver.
“Yes, Trump said some outrageous things along the way, but that only made him seem more real”