Yesterday was the day when the USA election results gradually unwound throughout the wee small hours of the morning. The previous evening, I snatched a few hours in bed and watched the early predicted results roll in and it was evident that the Republicans were going to have a good night. It was only when I got up in the morning that I fully appreciated the extent of the Trump victory and, of course, Pennsylvania was flipped from Democrat to Republican after which Kamala Harris was evidently doomed. There are several thoughts that have occurred to me as the morning progressed. All of the analysts were saying that this was going to be an incredibly tight election and the result would not be evident for some days until even Friday or Saturday. Instead we have a situation in which the Republicans not only control the Presidency but have also gained control of both Houses of Congress (House of Representatives and the Senate) as well as the Supreme Court stuffed full of Trump nominees. Thus we have an almost incredibly dangerous situation which the framers of the American constitution tried very hard to avoid that all of the major organs of government be under the control of one political party. So we have a situation where, in addition to Presidential power, anything he proposes will receive the endorsement of the two houses of Congress as well as the Supreme Court which means that there is nothing to stop the most extreme or illiberal of legislative measures passing into law with no prospect of opposing it or even amending it for the better. One factor which stood out from the post mortem analysis that has been conducted throughout the morning is that once again, as is now almost traditional, the Republican vote was underestimated by the pollsters. If you look at the series of opinion polls carried out throughout the last few months, Kamala Harris was always about 1.0-1.5 percentage point ahead of Trump but we now have is, in round terms, a 5% gap between the share of the popular vote that Harris was predicted to achieve and what Trump actually achieved. Now in very round terms, a 5% gap is enormous in an electorate of 160 million and represent some 8 million Americans across the country who voted for Trump but who the pollsters did not identify. This means that across the 50 states of the USA, there were in each state some 160,000 Trump voters whom the pollsters did not identify but nonetheless 'came out of the woodwork' and gave Trump victory. Incidentally, the same sort of phenomenon is identified in the UK as 'shy conservatives' i.e. a tranche of people who never reveal their voting intentions to the pollsters but who nonetheless seem to emerge and to vote for right wing parties.There is also another very telling demographic statistic in that the Trump appeal extended as far as the Latino and black male populations in a way that the Democrats could not understand, let alone predict. In other words, the Democrats took the latino and black vote for granted and this cost them dear when they actually voted for Trump. The problem is that the Democrats thought of the latinos as a block whereas the older immigrant communities who had worked their way up and into American society may well have wanted to differentiate themselves from the recent arrivals from Latin America and not necessarily identify with them. Again, we have seen the same sort of 'overlooking' in the UK electorate where Boris Johnson exploited the fact that the white, male sections of society, not college educated were taken for granted by the Labour Party whereas Boris Johnson (in his time) and Nigel Farage manage to sweep into right wing voting. So now we have a president of the United States who is the oldest ever elected, a convicted felon and only person since the nineteenth century to be re-elected having once lost power. The world economy may look on with some trepidation as Trump has vowed to reintroduce tariffs which will usher in a period of isolationism and protectionism. We also have a whole series of legal judgements that have gone against Trump who is now in a position to pardon himself or to sweep away all legal actions against him. A lot of the post election analysis has also concentrated upon the fact that, in the end, it was not the abortion issue but the economy that held most sway with voters. After the pandemic, many voters did not feel that the economy had delivered for them and felt that inflation had hit hard in the past and was continuing to do so. Also I discerned from several 'vox pop' interviews that Trump had implanted the idea very successfully that he was a very successful businessman and there, by extension, knew better than Harris how a modern economy works. Anybody who has followed the Trump biography know this to be very wide of the mark but it is the perception rather than the reality, that hits home. I conclude after this soul searching that Republican voters are inclined to overlook all of Trump's evident faults and to forgive his transgressions whereas Democrat voters did not have the same feelings towards their candidate who will soon, one presumes, disappear from the public view.
This morning, after we had absorbed some of the news of the election, Meg and I made a quick trip down to Waitrose to pick up a copy of our newspaper. There we did receive the good news that our friend who had fallen and cut her head in the toilet of the store would be returning this afternoon to pick up her mobility scooter which had been kept safe for her overnight. This was good news for us but we also learnt that she had lain on the toilet floor for a whole two and a half hours before the ambulance actually arrived. For lunch, I tried an experimental dinner which one of our carers said she prepared for her children and they loved it. It involved heating up some mackerel fillets in the oven and then serving them on a bed of egg fried rice which she prepared herself. I was not quite sure how to do this but I fried an onion, scrambled the egg into it and then adding rice to the mixture. I used Arborio rice but perhaps I should have used a long grain white rice instead. But the results were pretty pleasing as well as tasty so perhaps I shall refine my technique and cook this dinner again.
© Mike Hart [2024]