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Donald Trump’s victory was overwhelming. Analysts have rushed to try to define the vote flows – which we’ll also aim to do – but at the basis of all discourse there is one clear point: the rightward turn of the United States is far greater than the one that gave The Donald victory in 2016 when he won over Hillary Clinton, who in any case prevailed on the popular vote front. A flagship victory that cannot be awarded to Kamala Harris in this 2024 election.
THE DATA AND TRUMP’S PEOPLE
Who makes up Trump’s people? Answering this question is not easy, especially since the various distinctions in the United States’ constituency are very different from those we are used to dealing with in the old continent. What we can do is try to draw, through the electoral data, some outlines of this mass of people who have once again identified with the tycoon. The greatest growth for Donald Trump is in the Hispanic and Asian male vote, a proof of how immigration – when legal and within the constituted order of the state – is not afraid of, but rather supportive of stricter policies towards illegal immigrants. Four years ago, when Trump lost to Biden, only 36 per cent of Hispanic voters had voted for the tycoon, while today this figure has grown considerably, reaching 54 per cent (NBC News data). Also following this upward trend is the number of women of Hispanic origin who voted for the tycoon. In 2020 they had been 30 per cent, while today there has been a growth of no less than 7 percentage points, bringing the figure to 37 per cent. Also growing, although by a much smaller percentage, is the figure of African-American voters, that has risen from 19 per cent in 2020 to 20 per cent. A reduced growth on which, according to leading analysts, the figure of Harris has probably weighed more heavily. Then there is the voting orientation in relation to one’s age to be analysed. Harris had, in fact, aimed very strongly at younger voters in this election, especially considering the data of the 2020 election when Biden could count on 60 per cent of the votes of Americans between 18 and 29 years of age (Trump only obtained 36 per cent). A figure on which the Democratic campaign perhaps relied too much and that in 2024 saw a major drop. This year, in fact, only 55 per cent of this age group voted for Harris, while the Tycoon was able to increase his percentage to 42 per cent. A number that should be cross-referenced with that of young people who went to vote for the first time this year. Among them, Trump obtained 54 per cent of the votes, against only 45 per cent achieved by Harris. An important figure, especially if we consider that in 2020 Biden had achieved 64 per cent of the vote among first-time voters, compared to only 32 per cent for Trump. Harris’s performance was higher among older voters (65 and over). Among those with a low educational qualification, Trump has widened the gap with the Democrats to 62 per cent (it was 54 per cent in 2020), while among college-educated voters it is Harris who dominates with 61 per cent of the vote. The myth of Trump’s electoral base being made up entirely of white males also needs to be revised. In fact, although he outnumbers Harris in this bracket, the tycoon has seen a slight decline since the last election. In 2020 Trump had reached 61 per cent of the vote in this bracket, while Biden 38 per cent; today, instead, they stand at 59 per cent compared to Harris’s 39 per cent in slight rise. On the female front Trump is slightly down, among white women he loses three points (to 52 per cent) while among black women he loses two points from 9 per cent to 7 per cent. In a nutshell, these data tell of an electorate that did not follow the patterns imagined (especially by the Democratic press) in the months leading up to the election. In particular, women did not unconditionally support Harris, while the growth of the Republican candidate among young people overshadowed the Dems’ strength among women under 30. Moreover, the shift in the Hispanic vote – who had supported Biden in 2020 – was also a central element in the tycoon’s victory over the Democratic candidate. A positioning that perhaps Harris’s spin doctors underestimated.
THE BIG CITIES À LA HARRIS
An immediate way to understand which way Trump has gone in this election campaign is to analyse the performance of the Democrats in the large urban areas of the USA. In Washington city, Harris would have been elected President with 94% of the vote. Similarly, in New York the Democratic candidate outvotes Trump by 4 votes to 1. In San Francisco Harris outvotes Trump by 5, while in Los Angeles she gets twice as many votes. This situation is repeated in all the large urban conglomerates, with the elite increasingly becoming the electoral basin of the Democrats, while leaving Trump and the Republicans free to expand their consensus in the rest of the country, thus obtaining the electoral results we have witnessed in these elections. A situation that was perhaps first sensed by some particularly interesting characters in the US scenario. Figures like Jeff Bezos – patron of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post – and Elon Musk have gone beyond the canons imposed by certain elites, openly siding with the tycoon in this election. One only has to think of what Musk has done: he has worked in Pennsylvania to recover votes for Trump in a key state, and tomorrow he could – in some capacity – even join the President’s staff.
THE DONALD’S RECIPE
So, what was Trump’s recipe for returning to the White House? After a four-year stop, the legal problems in which he was involved and the opposition to his re-election by a part of the Grand Old Party, he managed not only to get back on the horse, but also to take the right path to the White House. Biden addressed Trump’s voters by talking about ‘rubbish’, but the elements that the tycoon has put on the table in his relationship with his people are different and have certainly made inroads. These are not simply conservative values. The ideology expressed by Trump starts from the exaltation of the intermediate bodies of society and the contribution that workers (in all social strata and in all fields) can bring to American society. It is a conservatism that has deep roots, harking back to the Ronald Reagan era and resting on the moral and religious ideals of the nation. It is not the sterile, self-referential debate within the urban elites that interests Trump and his people. It is issues such as jobs, mortgages, taxes, economic hardship and inflation that are at the centre of their thoughts. They are not looking at ethical issues and political correctness (something Trump has never relied on too much anyway) but at the differences in the American economy between Trump’s four years and Biden’s term. It is on these topics that American citizens based the turn to the right imposed by Trump’s election.
Now the theme of the coming months (from now until the inauguration and then beyond) will be the management of the staff and the departments. Trump has staked a great deal on the promise to his voters to make the machinery of state more efficient and effective. It is also on these aspects that Republican voters will most likely measure the performance of this new administration.