Unlike 2016, he also won the popular vote. And it hasn’t happened to a Republican candidate since 2004. The second victory of Donald Trump, 78 years old, is overwhelming twice, also because you have once again canceled out the “woman effect” on American elections with his machismo. There was not the trust that Kamala Harris hoped to have gained by invoking dignity, humanity, common sense. Donald Trump won, Elon Musk won and in fact he was the first to rejoice on his social toy X, the former Twitter.
We talked about it with Guido Caldiron, a journalist from Manifesto who has been studying the new right and the Trump “phenomenon” for years, topics to which he has dedicated investigations and essays. Including WASPpublished by Fandango libri in the aftermath of the first – and until this morning only – success of the New York billionaire.
Guido Caldiron.
Have the insults, the conspiracies and the desire of the States to isolate themselves from the rest of the world, to think only of its interests, prevail? Or did he lose Kamala Harris’ left-wing and progressive proposal?
The minorities who did not mobilize lost. Harris lost the battle for rights, which did not touch Americans as much as the hope given by Trump. That of having more money, more security, or perhaps the illusion of being able to have it has won. Everyone saw the misogyny and racism in the Trump campaign, but women and minorities who should have, by origin, sided with Harris did not.
This is a historic betrayal if we think of the 2020 elections, when an almost eighty-year-old white man ran for the Democrats, but also of the last decades…
Certain. It is the most evident thing about this electoral result. The traditional representation of voting by social groups, by “racial” communities, as they say in the United States, is no longer what it was 60 years ago, when after the approval of the laws in favor of African Americans, Lyndon Johnson held a plebiscite of votes from the African American communities. On the eve of the vote in Philadelphia, looking at the polls that said 20% of black males would vote Republican, he made a very explicit call to vote for Harris. And we saw that was not listened to.
This is a topic that involves even more the population of South American origin, who were already looking to Trump in 2020. And who appreciate his security turn on new immigrants…
If the African-American population is around 12%, the Hispanic population reaches 20. And for some time this social group has regarded the phenomenon of new immigration in the country that welcomed them or hosted their parents and grandparents, with suspicion. When not with fear.
This is why Trump’s campaign convinced them because they feel their conquests are at risk, and they are aware of the issue of urban security, of the presumed incivility of new migrants, of the fear of changing the status quo, of drugs. For this reason, I would like to point out that in California, where the Democrats maintained their majority, one of the referendums on the criminalization of drug possession passed. An instrument that tends to tighten the rules of legislation regarding petty crime linked for example to drug use.
Yet Kamala Harris has a past as a hard-fisted prosecutor against crime in Oakland, California, one of the cities with the highest rate of gangs and drug dealing in the States.
Yes, it’s true, Harris has an important history as attorney general. Let us remember that in America it is an electoral office, therefore political in the purest sense. And his is the story of those who say “we don’t give discounts to our community”. But here we return to the beginning of our discussion: there were many who did not accept the fact that she is a woman and with black skin, even if she grew up in a ghetto. This made all the difference in the world.
And the young people, have they remained with the Democrats, after the broad support for Biden 4 years ago?
Kamala Harris probably discounted the support in arms that the Biden government gave to Israel for the war against Hamas and Palestine. The international issue has weighed on this electorate, which is very sensitive to the issue, and there Harris should have lost part of the youth vote, which traditionally goes to the Democratic Party. Furthermore, as always, many voters in their 20s and 30s did not go to the polls.
Added to this discussion is the fact that Americans no longer feel like the leaders of the world, much less the gendarme. Did this also have an impact on Harris’ result?
For some years now, already with the first Obama administration, Americans have believed that important things are done at home. Whether it is Ukraine, Europe under NATO, but also China or Taiwan, these are no longer the priorities for them. And the international gaze of the Democrats conflicted with this sentiment, causing Harris to lose votes.
After the result of today’s polls marks the death of the so-called politically correct, sexism, insults, racial taunts, conspiracies fueled on X – and not only – by Trump’s millionaire Elon Musk have won. Has he lost the opposite vision to this narrative by Harris, that is, of a society more complex than the reduction proposed by Netflix?
Let’s say that from this point of view the Trumpian narrative machine has refined the technique, after the first mandate (2016 ed.) with the millions of messages posted on Twitter and with a still very “gut” use of social media tools. Tools which however gave a very important result. With the alliance with Elon Musk in this election campaign we are faced with a sort of elevation of that model. With the role of the multi-billionaire entrepreneur who gave his media and technological apparatus, an enormous power that acted as a cash register for the new president’s misogynistic and racist messages.
