Contrary to almost every headline, Donald Trump did not achieve his second coming by a landslide, at least not by Australian measures of what makes a landslide. Michael Pascoe comments while mentally preparing for a month in Trumpistan.
Yes, Donald J. Trump won the US Electoral College by 312 to Kamala Harris’ 226 and the official popular vote by 76.8 million to 74.3 million, but that doesn’t count as a “landslide” for any rational Australian.
The reality is that only 31.3% of eligible Americans voted for Trump, just a single percentage point more than the 30.3% who voted for Harris.
That’s very reassuring for someone taking off to spend a month or so travelling around the US. It means the odds are better than two-to-one that any American I bump into won’t have been crazy, ignorant, deluded, nasty or greedy enough to have gone the full MAGA and voted for the crazy, ignorant, deluded, nasty and greedy toddler king.
One lousy percentage point over Harris means it’s extremely rich for the Trump party animals to believe they have the mandate they imagine to massively change the United States, to upend everything from the Department of Justice to health and education.
When 64.8% of eligible voters did not vote to make America safe for measles again, you’d have been MAGA mad to believe the country really wants to make America safe for measles again. But the Trump party is MAGA mad, and 31.3% of eligible American voters have given it the keys to the White House, buying tickets to a circus that is already in full swing.
Remember Brexit?
The next most ridiculous mandate for radical and disastrous change was Britain’s 2016 Brexit effort. Of 46.5 million registered voters, 17.4 million, 37%, were able to kick a massive own goal, diminishing Britain for decades. And that was after a 72% voter turnout, high by UK standards. The 2024 US voter turnout was just under 64.
As we often smugly tell ourselves, making it compulsory and easy to attend a polling booth tends to save Australia from doing anything especially stupid, or especially stupid for very long.
Would compulsory voting have stopped Trump? It’s a fair bet it would have stopped Brexit, the “no” vote being ahead in the polls, seeming to make it safe for the lazy to stay abed.
Voting for Brexit or Trump required conviction, a degree of belief and purpose, however deluded, that’s likely to be more lacking than present in the uncommitted. It’s entirely hypothetical and spilt milk under the bridge, but I’d bet a proper Australian Electoral Commission-standard election could well have had a different result.
Instead, what happened on November 5? The Democrats, specifically Biden/Harris, more lost the election than Trump won it.
Trump picked up 2.6 million more votes than he did in 2020 but Harris dropped 7 million from Biden’s 2020 score, though she still won 8.6 million more votes than Hillary Clinton managed in 2016. As suggested here before the votes were counted, whichever party lost would only have itself to blame – both had better candidates available to them.
The end of the American century?
Back in May this year, The Economist opined that “In Beijing, it is said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine united the West, but Israel’s conflict with Hamas is dividing it again. It is predicted that if Donald Trump is re-elected, his allies will learn, once again, that this is a friendless world and that ‘America First’ means what it says.”
Not that the American electorate remotely cares what the rest of the world thinks. The vibe of exceptionalism runs deeper than knowing what it has come to mean, never mind the assumption of heavenly guidance, the Divine Right of Kings reborn.
All that matters is Trump’s pledge to make everything within the USA better, to fix everything and fix it quickly, to make everyone feel happier.
It’s a pledge he obviously can’t keep. Nobody could.
But he does look like keeping his promise to unleash a level of chaos.
During that, his faithful followers, that 31.3% who believed enough to vote for him, will mostly keep their faith. Trump will be able to get away with blaming the previous administration and the faithful will believe him. He will be able to get away with promising sunny skies beyond the storm and the faithful will believe him.
Long before the faithful run out of faith, though, the other 68.7% will have soured. (And 30.3% were sour to begin with, voting for Harris. Remember that margin, just one percent.)
No happy place
A disappointed America, fed on fear and anger, won’t be a happy place. A demagogue can ramp up the scapegoating, ramp up the chaos, ramp up troops on the street, ramp up bloody suppression of protest, ramp up his tribalism and deportation camps.
And the angry faithful will buy it. At some point, average Americans hopefully won’t. Given time and the chance, they tend to be better than that.
When the real majority turns, it may not be pretty, given the devotion of the faithful and the Trumpy rent-seekers.
In the immediate future, I’ll take comfort in the figure that fewer than one in three American adults I meet are MAGA mad – and I’ll be mainly in blue states where the odds are even better.
Trumpification Australia. The winners and losers and what might be
This post was originally published on Michael West.