2 weeks Ago By Ben Lowry
Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Belfast News Letter, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. A bit of a surprise, for sure – he significantly out-performed the polls. But for anyone who cared to look, there was easily found data that showed a clear Trump win was distinctly possible.
Advertisement Advertisement At the risk of Trump-like boasting (!) I did write as much in an analysis on October 19 and then again in an updated piece this Monday , based on Kamala Harris having been mostly 1-3% ahead in opinion polls over the last month. Expert pollsters do their own poll ‘aggregates’, based on certain polls. I do not have their expertise in which polls are best, so applied my own simple method of averaging the most recent 20 polls.
Then I did another obvious thing: looked at how Mr Trump was under-estimated in 2016 and 2020, 1% and 3% respectively, and wondered what would happen if that was repeated. If she was at the lower end of her polling lead, and if the under-estimate of him was at the upper end of past under-estimates, then he was going to win not just the electoral college, but the US popular vote – as he did. It was not the most likely outcome, just a very possible one.
Advertisement Advertisement On this trip I have talked to many Americans as well as discussing the race daily with friends and contacts back home, by phone and web. With the former, I tried, as an outsider, not to say too much about what I thought might happen. But on both sides of the Atlantic I noticed that if I merely said that Mrs Harris did not seem far enough in the polls, it was often rejected at once by people hostile to Mr Trump.
The country was fed up with him, they said, she was ahead in swing states, etc. Confirmation bias is natural, yet something else was going on with many Harris supporters, that helps explain why such an underwhelming candidate was put up against a man so brilliant at connecting with American instincts. They just dismissed Mr Trump and his supporters, without engaging with his appeal.
A Trump White House was an appalling prospect that wouldn’t happen. I don’t even think that Mr Biden’s gaffe about Trump supporters being ‘garbage’ was the decisive factor in this contest: there was a deeper and longer dismissal of such American voters’ staunch patriotism and values. A dismissal of their concerns on immigration, religion, abortion, trans rights and drilling for US oil independence (contrast it with the UK under Labour effectively shutting down North Sea oil, so that we will be increasingly dependent on nations that don’t give a fig about climate change).
Advertisement Advertisement But if Mr Trump had shown in 2016 and 2020 that he could easily muster 46-47% of the US vote, then there was no concrete ceiling that meant he could never pass 50%. As he has now done. There were of course intelligent Kamala Harris supporters who knew she might lose, and worked hard to prevent it.
But others were inclined to wish fulfilment. And there was an almost class dismissal of Trump and sneering at his fans (NI unionists will recognise being the subject of such sneering). This was all the more disagreeable given that Harris supporters are often much more affluent than Trump ones.
Advertisement Advertisement The richest voters in America were once leant heavily towards the low-tax Republican Party. The highest income group in the 1984 election broke 69-31 for Ronald Reagan. Now the top income group is closer to 55-45 for Donald Trump over the Democratic Party.
He draws less of his support from the affluent classes than his predecessors did and more of them from blue collar groups. His multi-racial coalition includes modestly paid bluer collar workers or even disadvantaged folk who helped him win all the ‘Blue Wall’ states like Michigan where Democrats once drew large such support. President Regan began to build this coalition of ‘Reagan Democrats’ – working-class voters with traditional American values and firm views on law and order who backed him.
The Democrats saw their error and later chose a moderate, white, southern man, Bill Clinton, to win such voters back. As he did. Advertisement Advertisement This time however they turned to a woman who was chosen as Joe Biden’s vice president because as a woman of colour she made the 2020 Democratic Party ticket more diverse.
She never distinguished herself in that role and during the election campaign struggled to articulate her world view or answer the few difficult questions she was asked. Faced with that choice, Donald Trump seemed both more authentic and more understanding of public concerns. • Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor.
