There will be no end of numbers to crunch after the darkest, most dramatic White House campaign of our lifetimes. But here’s one to focus on: 45%.
That’s the number of US voters nationwide who, in exit polls, said their family's financial situation was worse off today than it was four years ago.
It compares to only 20% who felt worse off after the 2020 election, following Donald Trump’s first term. Just 24% said they were better off today than after four years of Democratic rule under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, down from 41% in 2020.
No incumbent party has ever retained the White House in the face of such headwinds. Say what you like about Trump - and there’ll be plenty to say about his mendacious, racist and isolationist rhetoric in the four years ahead - but he exploited the mood of national pessimism ruthlessly.
For all Democrats’ heady optimism when Vice President Harris supplanted the increasingly doddery Biden at the top of the ticket, she was on a hiding to nothing after four years of stubbornly high inflation.
Could she have done more to distance herself from her old boss? Should she, as Left-wingers were urging her, prioritise a bolder economic offering rather than focussing on the “fascist” Trump’s oft-stated and increasingly doom-laden threats to democratic norms?
Perhaps. But in truth, her history-making candidacy probably limited Democratic losses. If Biden had stayed in the race, Trump would have won in a blowout.
The state of democracy, two years before the United States celebrates 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence from Britain, did emerge as the top exit poll concern for 35% of voters.
But with 31%, the economy was close behind. Some 14% named abortion and 11% said immigration.
And some of those worried about the state of democracy will include Republicans who bought into Trump’s lie that Democrats were giving votes to illegal aliens and stuffing the ballot elsewhere.
Some other numbers: 25% of black men in Pennsylvania went for Trump, compared to 10% in 2020. That tells you everything about the state of the economy in rust-belt America, after four years of pandemic and energy price shocks.
Was sexism also a factor against Harris in her bid to become America’s first woman president? Barack Obama certainly feared it was, when he urged black men to shed any inhibitions they might have about her.
She won the support of 54% of women but only 44% of men in the exit polls. The figures were exactly reversed for Trump.
Overall, black voters were overwhelmingly in favour of the mixed-race Harris (86% to 12%), but that was a smaller margin than built by Biden in 2020 and Obama in elections before that.
Her lead among Hispanic voters was far narrower (53% to 45%). In 2020, Biden won the Hispanic vote by 32 points.
That’s even after Trump’s vows of mass deportations for illegal immigrants, after his claims that Haitians were eating pets in Ohio, after one of his closing rallies saw a comedian call Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”.
Trump made inroads with the false claim that illegal immigrants were stealing the jobs of black and Hispanic voters. It’s not true, economists stress, but again: ruthlessly effective.
Harris lagged too among the sizeable bloc of Arab-American voters in Michigan. Biden’s support for Israel throughout the war in Gaza cost her, but so too did the economy in the nation’s car-making capital.
So what does Trump offer those disaffected voters? Tax cuts for the wealthy, those mass deportations, and an end (somehow, it’s not explained how) to the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. It looks like he’ll have a supportive Congress, with the Republicans retaking the Senate at least.
Untrammelled power beckons for Trump 2.0 if they keep control of the House of Representatives, on top of a compliant Supreme Court.
Then we’ll see if Harris’s warnings are borne out. In reality, Trump is probably too lazy, too unfocussed, too obsessed with winning power (rather than on what to do with it) to offer a genuine threat of dictatorship. His victory speech was typically meandering, packed with non-sequiturs and self-regard.
But he’s surrounded by smart and ruthless people who’ve learned from his chaotic first term. There’s a blueprint for a radical remaking of the country in the so-called Project 2025.
Watch for who he appoints to his administration: anonymous yes men and women, or effective operators. (His vow to put vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of making America healthy again doesn’t bode well.)
For now, the old adage coined by Bill Clinton’s strategist James Carville has proven true. What matters most? “The economy, stupid.”
