Biden is a calamity for the world, but Trump isn’t the man to beat him

Now it is clear that the ex-president repels more voters than he attracts, the future belongs to Desantis

What is wrong with conservative politics? It’s not just in Britain that the centre-right is in disarray, consumed by a debilitating drive to tax its core supporters into oblivion: in America, the Republicans have just suffered a devastating setback of their own.

Encouraged by pathetically flawed polls, they were hoping to pull off a historic victory in the midterms by capitalising on Joe Biden’s increasingly fragile grip on reality, his hard-left drift, his blundering foreign and domestic policy and the devastating impact of inflation on living standards.

Scenting a landslide, Donald Trump, ever the narcissist, overshadowed the last day of campaigning by promising to make “a very big announcement on Tuesday” at Mar-a-lago, a not-so-subtle hint that he would be announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.

Yet the much-hyped Republican “red wave” never materialised, and the party must now face up to the reality that Trump poses an existential threat to its conservative vision for America. Far from providing The Donald with a launchpad, these elections mark the end of the Trump era. He is finished, even if he is too egotistical to admit it, and will take the Republicans down with him if they allow him to.

The party’s greatest defeats were of the Trump-backed candidates, those closest to him in terms of style and rhetoric, and who, abominably, deny the validity of the 2020 election. Mehmet Oz was defeated in Pennsylvania, Tudor Dixon and Kristina Karamo were beaten in Michigan and it is looking grim for Kari Lake and Blake Masters in Arizona. In Georgia, the mainstream Republican was elected governor, but Herschel Walker, the Maga senate candidate, is trailing.

Trump would almost certainly be routed by any semi-competent Democrat, and could even be defeated by Biden, himself an appalling farce of a president who is wreaking untold damage on America and the world. Yet Trump may be too selfish to care: politics for him is a form of selfaggrandisement, a substitute for showbusiness.

This was an election the Republicans couldn’t afford not to win. Democratic mayors and governors have failed to control crime in urban centres and there is widespread anger at how Left-wing elites treated children during Covid, and are seeking to turn schools into woke indoctrination centres.

Biden has pushed through higher taxes, a bailout for wealthy graduates (paid for by taxing non-graduates) and unpopular social justice policies, but the best the Republicans could do was to eke out a “red ripple” in the House. The Senate may well remain under Democratic control, and they suffered a string of other disappointments.

The repeal of Roe v Wade was always going to hurt the Republicans, but this rebuff was something else: the electorate is sick and tired of the Left, but it doesn’t trust the Right either, and the biggest single reason for this is that

Trump remains the Republicans’ de facto leader. At first, he was brilliant at tapping into popular discontent and working-class votes, but Trump never won a popular majority, lost the House and Senate in 2018 and the White House in 2020 and now repels far more voters than he attracts.

He achieved little during his chaotic, volatile time in office: he preferred to shout and scream and “own the libs” rather than push through real, sustainable change. His despicable behaviour after the 2020 elections was the final straw: millions of social or fiscal conservatives would rather stay at home than vote for him.

All is not lost for the Republicans, however: there is now an alternative candidate on the Right who does know how to build a majority and make change happen. In Florida, Ron Desantis, best known for taking on Disney and opposing lockdowns, triumphed against his Democratic opponent, delivering the best ever gubernatorial result for the Republicans in the Sunshine State.

Voters knew that Trump hated the man he dubbed Ron Desanctimonious, which did the latter no harm. In 2018, Desantis scraped through with under half the vote in a state that is just 51.5 per cent non-hispanic white, and that has attracted educated tech and finance workers from California and New York. Yes, there are plenty of retired conservatives in Florida, but for years now the Left had hoped to snatch the state back from the Right.

It was not to be. Desantis won a majority of female voters, suburbanites and independents, according to an Edison exit poll. He built a seminal, multi-ethnic coalition, giving us a glimpse of how glorious a modernised, post-trump Republican majority would look. His greatest achievement was to convince Hispanics, natural conservatives who have always been wedded to the Democrats, to back him, while refusing to dilute his strong anti-immigration stance.

The results were remarkable, proving that demographic change doesn’t equate to Left-wing destiny. Hispanics voted for Desantis by 57-42 per cent, a 15-point lead and a massive swing, according to an ABC exit poll. Non-cuban Hispanics switched for the first time: almost two-thirds of them voted Democratic in 2018, a seemingly impregnable 30-point lead; this week, they voted 52-47 per cent for Desantis.

Crucially, this swing didn’t happen everywhere in America: it was driven by Desantis’s campaigning and record. In Texas, Republicans largely maintained their overall share of the vote but saw their dreams of seizing Hispanic counties along the Rio Grande dashed. An NBC exit poll found that 60 per cent of Latino voters nationally voted Democratic: had Desantis’s achievements been replicated nationwide, the Republicans would have enjoyed their landslide.

So what did Desantis do right? Like Trump, he is a populist; unlike Trump, he is effective and focused, ideological but not a fact-free demagogue, marrying free-market economics with a desire to use the state to crack down on the woke nomenklatura that has captured US elites.

Desantis has been careful not to deny the result of the 2020 election. He forced the reopening of schools after Covid, supports tax cuts, is tough on crime, and Florida is sucking in capital from Left-wing states. He, rather than Trump, is the future of the Republican Party. Will primary voters understand this, or do US Republicans want to tread the path of the British Tories, and sleepwalk into political oblivion?

Desantis’s results were remarkable, proving that demographic change doesn’t equate to Left-wing destiny