On Tuesday night, America had its Brexit moment.
Two weeks earlier, I’d met Tevin Veal, a 32 year-old barber in Georgia.
“What celebrities say don’t matter a damn thing to me,” Tevin told me, in the barbershop where he works.
“How are they going to help me feed my two year-old daughter? They know nothing about my life.”
It was the day after Usher - one of the biggest recording artists of all time - had stood alongside Kamala Harris on her rally stage in Atlanta and told other black men to vote for her. Especially young black men, like Tevin.
For me, his words nail the US presidential election result in a nutshell.
Tevin was one of millions of black men who defied all historical precedent and voted for Donald Trump.
As did millions of Hispanic voters, men and women, and millions of blue collar union members.
All of them, traditionally strong demographics that the Democrats could always rely on. So they thought.
The Trump revolution began eight years ago when he first won the White House in 2016, a result that shocked even Trump himself. Yet those who switched sides to back Trump this week delivered a moment more revolutionary than that: an extraordinary realignment in America, the biggest in 60 years since the civil rights movement, and one that has turned US politics on its head.
Almost a carbon copy, in fact, of what happened in Britain after the Brexit vote. The revolution culminated in Boris Johnson’s landslide election victory in 2019 thanks to disillusioned and lower income Labour voters switching sides.
Just like the Tories, for decades the Republicans were the party of white people and the better off.
But on Tuesday, Trump won the category of voters with a total family income of less than $50,000 a year by 3 points. In 2020, Joe Biden had won them by 11 points.
Trump also won among those without a college degree by 14 points. And he was also the first Republican presidential candidate ever to win Hispanic men, the poorest demographic in American society, and easily - by 55% to 43%.
It wasn’t hard to see the social split at the two candidates’ rallies throughout the campaign. Trump’s attendees were often loud, sometimes bawdy, and delighted in wearing T-shirts with X-rated slogans (like “Joe and the Hoe Gotta Go”, or more simply “F*** Biden”).
Those at Harris’s wore expensive clothes and designer sun glasses, and for some reason almost all the ones I spoke to there worked as creative designers.
Neither was the revolution just in the swing states.
Traditionally, New York City is as Democrat as it gets. But Trump’s vote share in its more blue collar boroughs rocketed — in Queens, from 21% in 2016 to 38%, and in the Bronx from 10% to 27%.
And in neighbouring blue collar New Jersey, Harris won the state by just six points which Biden had won by 15 in 2020.
The reasons why Trump won and Harris lost are multiple. Elections are almost always about many things. Joe Biden’s decline and the conspiracy that hid it, Harris only having 107 days to put her case and the fact she did it at times with unconvincing insincerity being but three.
There is one though that voters consistently named as their top concern, and you’d hear time and time again whoever you talked to.
Legendary Democratic strategist James Carville defined it in 1992 as “the economy, stupid”. In 2024, that meant affordability and the crippling effect that four years of sky high inflation had on average Americans’ pockets.
On the days when he felt like being on message, Trump would begin his rallies with Ronald Reagan’s famous question to the nation in 1980: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
The pollsters Gallup have asked that question in every election since when an incumbent was standing.
Last month, a whopping 52 per cent of Americans said no, they are not now better off. It’s the largest financial dissatisfaction rating Gallup have ever recorded.
Another cast iron rule of politics is in the bad times, voters blame the people in charge whether it’s fair to or not.
In this massive year for elections, they’ve done it all over the world and incumbents have been slung out of office everywhere. Across the globe as in America: the less well off they are, the more they’ve struggled, the angrier they’ve been and the more they’ve revolted.
Hence Tevin’s anger with what he saw as condescending multi-millionaire celebrities who now live in Hollywood telling him what to do. And how hideously ill-pitched it was by the Harris campaign to put them up with her night after night as November 5 closed in.
Trump could break through to these struggling groups. Like him or loathe him, he is an extraordinary communicator — even if what he was communicating to them were patently pie in the sky solutions. He could articulate their anger, as Boris Johnson also managed to with Britain’s red wall in 2019, despite both men’s privileged backgrounds. They spoke normal people’s language.
When Trump simulated oral sex on his podium microphone at a rally in Wisconsin five days before polling day, the chattering classes were horrified. A lot of normal Americans saw the clip and smiled.
There is a lesson though for American politics from Britain’s great realignment, and it’s a key lesson for Trump too.
The realignment only lasted only five years. In our general election on July 5, many working class voters drifted back to Labour after they decided the Tories (and for many, Brexit too) had failed to make their lives any better at all.
Donald Trump made some vast promises in this election campaign. Deporting 15 million illegal immigrants, bringing back a wave of new manufacturing jobs, bringing down high prices and ending the Middle East and Ukraine wars.
Will Tevin vote Republican again? Only if Trump and his MAGA movement deliver. If they don’t, in 2028 they'll go the same way as the Tories.
Tom Newton Dunn is a broadcaster and political journalist
