The challenge for Democrats is not to upbraid those constituencies who have slipped away from them but to do the real work of democracy and engage them on their terms. It is not enough to tell people that headline economic data is improving if you are not willing to address their lived experience of hardship, something that can’t be done through celebrity endorsements and memes (“Kamala is brat”, anyone?). As one reporter for a Nashville newspaper put it, discussing the loss of black male voters to Trump, “as long as Dems continue to focus on what should be instead of what is, they will continue to bleed support — whether those voters continue to shift to the right or opt out of the political process altogether”.
Like most nations, Australia will be treading on eggshells for much of Trump’s presidency, hoping that he doesn’t ride roughshod over international trading arrangements, alliances and agreements.
As Chip Le Grand reports, an extraordinary 73 per cent of American voters in an NBC exit poll said they were either dissatisfied or angry with how things were going in their country. Voters unhappy with the status quo will of course look for change. There are lessons there for Australia’s incumbents.
During the Queensland state election, when abortion suddenly surfaced as a campaign issue, then NDIS minister Bill Shorten remarked that “it seems like someone in the LNP swallowed the Trump playbook”. Some on the Right will now see that playbook as a winner.
So many aspects of the campaign have seemed peculiarly American – the assassination attempts targeting Trump, a declining Biden hanging on as long as possible in the hope of a second term – while in mandatory voting Australia has its own peculiarity. But both Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton will have noted the potency of attack lines based on the cost of living and unchecked immigration.
In the end, the key difference may be in the power of the presidency itself. It gives Donald Trump a dominance no politician here can imagine. Its role in shaping all our futures remains to be seen.
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