Weird won. So, get over it. When Tim Walz called Trump and Vance “weird” we laughed as it keyed into something that we already thought. These weird, creepy men with no respect for women, Trump found liable for sexual assault, who would vote for them? Fascists? Sexists? Racists?
I mean why would you when the alternative was a woman always laughing in a smart trouser suit, a woman who talked about joy but little about policy.
Obviously, I wanted Harris to win and even had money on it but as sick as I feel today, it is no mystery to me why she lost. She was part of the cover up of Biden’s clear cognitive decline. She surrounded herself with exactly the kind of celebrities we all expected from Beyonce to Oprah. There was an assumption that a woman of colour could somehow haul in “the black vote”, “the Hispanic vote” and “the young”.
What we saw were key realignments from Latino voters and black voters, especially in the swing state. Democrats have taken these voters for granted, but no more. Despite his hardline anti-immigrant rhetoric, Trump has widened his base way beyond white non-college educated voters.
Yet for all her smiling and hugging, Kamala could never answer the basic questions
If anything, this election shows us we have got to stop thinking about swathes of people in this stupid, reductionist way. Identity politics is not electoral politics. Trump garnered votes from all the groups that were assumed by the Democrats to have a natural aversion to him. Well. they didn’t.
How people vote is not a simple gender/class/ethnicity read-through. This is a huge failure of the liberal imagination that fails to understand its own countrymen. And women.
The pollsters were wrong and so were the pundits, so mired are they in patronising groupthink that sees voters both as inherently thick and also as consumers of the same kinds of media that they are.
“Fascist” rallies at Madison Square Gardens, terrible jokes about Puerto Rico, Trump’s threat to protect women whether they like it or not...this didn’t matter. The media now talks amongst itself while Musk buys up X and Bezos muzzles The Washington Post.
Yet for all her smiling and hugging, Kamala could never answer the basic questions: what would you do that is different to Biden? What do you actually stand for?
I don’t believe any of these tech bro guys could accept a woman president. America is a wild country where progress for women has not simply stalled but has gone backwards.
Reproductive rights will be rolled back. Since Dobbs in 2022 stripped women of bodily autonomy , 13 states have a near total ban on abortion. Trump will now go after medical abortion (pills) and then buoyed by the Christian right , contraception itself Some states, did last night, vote for an amendment to restore abortion rights Arizona, Maryland, Colorado and New York but not Florida.
Kamala didn’t have one big policy idea beyond everything being nicer while Trump was speaking about the border, the price of gas and disentangling America from foreign wars.
Though all this makes me sick to my stomach, the fear of a second Trump presidency is a global fear
The fight is on. It is always on and it is always strange to be lectured by American feminists on gender ideology when American women don’t even have maternity pay. But though all this makes me sick to my stomach, the fear of a second Trump presidency is a global fear. What will happen in Ukraine ? How much will he cosy up to Putin?
The UK now resembles a sad divorcée that talks about her once wonderful marriage. It’s over, the special relationship. We need to understand as Macron does that we must build our defence and ally with Europe. There will be more wars, more migration and more climate change and if we think America is going to come to our aid, we are deluding ourselves.
These right-wing populists are petty, nationalist protectionists who use the grievances of the poor to shore up the rich. In this Trump provides a masterclass outsourcing every grievance to immigrants, uppity women, the “others”, always conjuring a dark chaos in our peripheral vision. ‘Do you feel you should have more in life than you do? ‘he essentially asks crowds of people who are sick of being told the economy is doing better when food prices are going up, when they don’t feel it. Keep your trusted guns because the institutions do not work for you, is the message.
For all the Democrats’ “I feel your pain” empathy, much seems manufactured. Trump, much to my chagrin taps into something authentic and primal: resentment, exclusion, loss. That is hard to counter especially if we continue to see half of Americans as basically stupid. I am not convinced this is a way to bring them over to a more optimistic view of society.
When you listen to Trump voters, they know what he is and they vote for him anyway. This is called compartmentalisation. And though today like many, I am utterly depressed by this result, I too am compartmentalising. My disgust is real but already we need a new set of strategies to deal with the ever-changing world.
America is diminished by voting in this felon, but it is still a power to be reckoned with.
Who now will do the reckoning? That is the question that all of us must ask ourselves.
Suzanne Moore is a writer and columnist
