Wherever I went during the last days of the US election campaign, Donald Trump supporters told me the same thing. From Wisconsin to Pennsylvania, the level of message discipline would put many a government to shame, except these were ordinary citizens: some wearing Maga caps and cowboy hats, others smart jackets and beanie hats. Their objections were consistent: migrants, of course; inflation; and war. You might be forgiven for concluding they were a new brand of peacenik with an aversion to foreigners.
Of all the factors that catapulted Trump back into the White House, one looms large over others. Just a quarter of Americans are happy with the way things are going in their country. Kamala Harris was seen by many as simply continuity Joe Biden, a president who has long had a negative approval rating. When asked last month what she would have done differently from Biden, Harris answered: “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of – and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.”
There was no clear vision, no shared rage with the American people at the state of the country: if there was anything deeply wrong with the US, her campaign seemed to suggest, it was the existence of the Trumpist movement, and voting for Harris could finally turn the page on that.
Sure, hostility to migrants cannot simply be reduced to economic grievance. A chunk of the Trumpist movement fear what they see as an existential threat to white America, and believe that unless the Democrats are ejected, the US will reach a tipping point which will permanently subsume them demographically. For others, it isn’t simply blind racism, but misdirected anger caused by social discontent. At one rally, a former miner – and longtime union member – wistfully spoke of the death of his industry, and how it harmed the communities sustained by it. Others blamed migrants for their own poor wages or lack of work. Without a politician to offer a compelling alternative explanation, Trumpist scapegoating filled the vacuum.
The Democrats might point to inflation – which peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 – having declined to 2.4% as a positive. But that doesn’t mean prices have fallen back: it just means they are rising more slowly, after having surged higher. For the Democratic political elite and their media allies, the economy does feel fine: they have healthy salaries and comfortable homes, so when they point to the economy growing by 2.8% last quarter, that is a statistic which seems to reflect their own lives. Not so for ordinary citizens: according to one exit poll, two-thirds of Americans believe the condition of the nation’s economy is poor or not so good. Yes, real wages are up overall – but such a relatively small uptick after decades of stagnation will hardly quell the dissatisfaction.
In the conversations I had, it didn’t matter how much I countered that Trump was a very rich man with a record of, say, not paying workers overtime; his supporters defiantly told me he understood people like them. Why? Because he at least didn’t think that the country was basically fine, and just in need of minor tweaks.
Then there’s war. Trump supporters conveyed to me a sense that the world around them seemed to be falling apart, and they have a point. Sure, this was contradictory. One woman in a pink jumper inscribed “God, Guns & Trump” expressed her fear that the war in Ukraine would spark the third world war, before suggesting Russia would have avoided staging its invasion if Trump had been president on the grounds he was unpredictable and “nutty”.
But this bloody conflagration has dragged on with a Ukrainian victory seemingly increasingly implausible, while at the same time the Democratic administration has relentlessly shipped arms to Israel as it has been involved in a genocidal rampage, with no meaningful pressure to achieve a ceasefire. That’s not to say many Trumpists are sympathetic to Palestinians, but the US offering carte blanche to Benjamin Netanyahu to do as he wishes has cemented a sense of violent chaos defining the world under Biden’s tutelage – and indeed, about a third of the president-elect’s supporters do support an arms embargo.
Meanwhile, in Dearborn, Michigan, I heard from Muslim Americans who spoke bitterly of having been betrayed by a party they had always voted for: their refusal to vote for Kamala Harris over her complicity in genocide helped cost Democrats the state. Some, too, were seduced by Trump’s rhetoric – itself a damning indictment of the Democrats’ failure.
Harris’s team had clearly decided that continuity was “playing it safe”, but the US people wanted something different. What was missing was an economic agenda which recognised that large swathes of the American people are hurting. That veteran leftwing senator Bernie Sanders, one of the country’s most popular politicians, speaks to that: after all, economic populism is what he is known for above all else. Sanders shows such a message can reach audiences who otherwise find leftwingers culturally alien and offputting.
Instead, Harris made the preservation of democracy the key dividing line. For some voters, this was either too abstract or they simply didn’t care: they wanted politicians to solve their problems. The failure to satisfy those grievances will have costly consequences for the US and beyond. The Democratic establishment will undoubtedly blame others for this. But they did this – this is on them, and a reckoning surely beckons.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist