Whatever the final US verdict, we're mourning the ‘blue wave' that never was
In the aftermath of the 2016 election in the US, there was a hope among Democrats that rose to the level of conviction: the results were devastating, yes, but they were also surely anomalous. Donald Trump had won, it would be a lousy four years, then his celebrity would wear off, he would do a terrible job, and the argument of his awfulness would make itself. For the first time in history, people would soberly examine the evidence, come to their senses and, without need of a crushing military defeat, admit they’d been horribly wrong.
Obviously that hasn’t happened. As the agonising creep towards a possible Joe Biden victory advances, the only certainty is that the “blue wave”, so anticipated on Tuesday night, hasn’t materialised. Not only have the Democrats failed to secure a resounding win, but in plenty of constituencies, support for Trump has actually increased. Early electoral data showed that in parts of Texas, for instance, while record numbers in the state voted – 6.6% more than in 2016 – in some rural communities, turnout for Trump more than doubled, and Biden lost counties won four years ago by Hillary Clinton. At the national level, whereas four years ago 35% of voters thought Trump had the temperament to govern well, exit polls this week indicated a rise in that figure to 44%.
All of which, frankly, is staggering. Weeks of parsing and processing the data will follow, but in the first instance, the only possible response to all this is to scream: “My God, what is wrong with these people?” What has to happen, if alleged tax evasion, a rape accusation and the small matter of 234,000 dead Americans doesn’t tip them off that this guy is bad news? What can be said to be wrong with the people of Florida, 5.6 million of whom – just over half of those who voted in that state – voted for Trump? What’s in the water in rural Pennsylvania? After the election in 2016, there was a rush to understand and empathise with Trump’s supporters with a view to understanding exactly how this had happened. This time, there is only disgust.
It isn’t purely emotional. (Although, three days after the election, it is still mostly emotional. A tweet put out by the Gap retail group this week featured a Gap sweater, half red and half blue, beneath the words “Together we can move forward”, inviting many spirited responses as to where precisely Gap and its sweater might be shoved.) But while it is dismal to feel such loathing towards large numbers of one’s countrymen, the deeper hit has been the dawning of what this election might mean. In 2016, Trump was a one-off, an aberration, a dumb novelty whose appeal would surely wane over time. You can’t say that any more. Trumpism – even to name it seems to give it a coherence it lacks – has taken seed, and if Biden wins, this election might still in some ways augur more doom than the last one.
Meanwhile, the Trump machine rolls on. As with everything the man does, even at his worst he appears darkly comic. When, on Wednesday, Trump randomly declared victory in states where he had already lost, it had the mad, manic tone of Basil Fawlty denying the reality of a rat in his dining room. On cable news, there was the newly slimmed-down and full of beans Chris Christie, saying with relish that the Democrats would lose because black people didn’t vote. There were similar efforts by Republicans to set white Democrats against Hispanic voters, who on the earliest evidence marginally increased their support for the president.
None of it made any sense beyond the knee-jerk Republican need to sow division. There may be small increases in the numbers of black and Hispanic voters for Trump, but those numbers are still dwarfed by support in what nobody calls the “white community”. In Florida in 2016, Trump won two out of 10 minority ethnic votes, a number that increased this week to three out of 10. But early polling data suggests that, as in 2016, Trump’s capture of the white vote held steady at six out of 10 – this in spite of practically every white person in power promising to “do the work”, stop being so racist, and log-jamming a bunch of books about antiracism on the bestseller list for most of the summer. So much for all that. On Wednesday, exit polls nationwide showed that while 55% of white women voted for Trump – up three percentage points from 2016 – some 58% of white men voted to reelect the president. Men suck. White people suck. Everything sucks.
So here we are, awaiting the final verdict, queasy with anxiety and mixed feelings. If, as looks increasingly likely (spit three times), Biden wins, we will celebrate, of course. There will be a huge collective sigh of relief. The country will start to correct and recover. But there remains a clenched sense that something has shifted, an argument has failed to be won, and that none of what has happened over the past four years is going away any time soon.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist