Donald Trump has become the first president since Grover Cleveland to be elected to non-consecutive terms in the White House. But how did he do it?
Pollsters and pundits had predicted a close-run thing with Harris ahead in key states but in the end, the betting markets were right: Donald Trump swept to victory.
When Big Ben bongs at 10 p.m. on election night in the UK we’re told straight away who the next prime minister will be. American exit polls don’t quite work like that. Instead, AP and Fox News’s exit poll showed us that the economy and immigration were the top issues for voters.
But another poll for broadcasters showed that, for Democrats, ‘democracy’ was the most important issue…
The lessons, then: voters care about the economy and don’t like inflation. Despite growth rates Britons can only dream of, almost half of Americans view their country’s economic conditions as ‘poor’. Three-quarters of voters said inflation had caused them moderate or severe hardship over the last year.
And they remember the economy under Trump as being better than it was under Biden…
After the economy, immigration was the most important issue for voters. President Biden left Kamala with a tough sell; ‘apprehensions’ of border crossers on the southern border surged after he became president – and that clearly concerned voters. Reducing illegal migration again is a key pledge for Trump’s second term.
What seems to have caught the commentariat by surprise, though, is how much these issues mattered to Latino voters as well as white Americans. NBC’s exit poll of Latino men showed a surge in support for Trump from just under a third in 2016 to 54 per cent now.
So, what did the pollsters miss? In swing states most polling companies called it right that the votes were close and within the industry-standard 3 percentage point margin of error. However, what almost all of them missed was that this small error would mean the crucial battlegrounds fell to Trump.
Finally, what seems surprising about this election is just how poorly Kamala Harris did compared with Biden. Perhaps the most jaw-dropping moment of the night came when CNN’s Jake Tapper revealed an empty map showing that there was not a single county where Harris outperformed Biden by three per cent or more.
According to CNN, there isn’t a single county in the U.S. where Harris outperformed 2020 Biden by 3% or more: pic.twitter.com/4HCCmy3dRQ
— Avik Roy (@Avik) November 6, 2024
Comments