Penbo: A focus on mainstream concerns won Donald Trump the election

I wouldn’t have voted for Trump, but from similar experiences in our own backyard I can understand why so many Americans did, writes David Penberthy.

The continuing collapse of blue collar support for the United States’ supposed party of the workers is a cautionary tale for the political Left everywhere.

It’s a reminder that for progressive people the path to victory leads through diners and shopping malls, not wine bars, college campuses and company board rooms.

It’s a reminder that insulting people for disagreeing with you is the surest path to defeat.

It’s a reminder that glad-handing cashed-up celebrities in the belief that their backing will foster social change will actually achieve the reverse, by rubbing the average punter up the wrong way.

It was not surprising Donald Trump won this year’s US election, David Penberthy says. Picture: Jim WATSON / AFP

There is no way I would have voted for Trump but I am not in the remotest bit surprised that he won, and expected him to win.

I would also dispute whether his supporters are all a bunch of rednecks and bigots, as some on the Left suggest they are. With some unhinged exceptions of the January 6 variety, most Trump voters are normal people with legitimate mainstream concerns.

Indeed many of them spent 16 years voting for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Were they rednecks and bigots back then? No. They are people who are worried by day-to-day things.

Being worried about the cost of groceries, electricity, petrol and housing does not make you a bigot.

Being alarmed about the collapse of order along one of the world’s longest borders does not make you a racist.

Being confused about the merits of free trade when your city has become an industrial wasteland because it can’t compete with China does not make you a moron.

Being sceptical about renewables when you can’t pay your power bill and can’t afford solar and batteries does not make you an enemy of the planet.

Against this backdrop of genuine grievances, a once broadly-based Left party in the Democrats looked more preoccupied by fringe PC concerns. This is a lethal problem for the broad left everywhere, where it finds itself being defined by its extremes, by those who think glueing your bum to the road is a valid statement against climate change, or that getting drag queens to read books to children an effective way to promote tolerance.

Affluence and remoteness are also becoming the source of repeated electoral defeats for the progressive side of politics. There is a chasm between the lives led by middle-class university educated people who support progressive causes and the working people whose support is numerically essential to implement them.

Kamala Harris may have been focusing on the wrong issues. Picture: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

We saw it here last year with the Voice, where what could have been a sellable proposal to help the most put-upon Australians was lost amid politically correct gesturing by the big end of town, painted planes and all that, with cries of “racist” towards anyone who dared question the merits of the idea.

The best example of that happened in our own state, in the northern suburbs federal electorate of Spence, where the Yes campaign was born and then buried. Anthony Albanese came to Elizabeth to launch the Yes vote and two months later the voters of Spence killed it dead, returning the highest No vote recorded anywhere in Australia.

All that from Labor people to their bootstraps. Four-fifths of them telling the PM where he could stick his Voice idea while they worried themselves about making ends meet.

We can see it now with the deadest duck of all on the progressive side of politics, the Australian Republic, which has never recovered from its celebrity-driven campaign and model-related squabbling at the 1999 referendum. A republic is more distant than ever, even though the very idea of monarchy should be an offence to the less affluent, given its historic reliance on the unjustified acquisition and retention of wealth on the absurd basis of birthright.

When Donald Trump trounced Hillary Clinton in 2016 barely anyone on the Left saw the freight train coming. When Trump was running in the primaries he was regarded as the joke candidate. When he got the nomination the Dems and most in the media thought Clinton had it in the bag. The only two people on the Democrat side of politics that I can remember predicting a Trump win were the old-school leftie and presidential aspirant Bernie Sanders, and the documentary maker Michael Moore, whose home state of Flint, Michigan is now home to the smouldering remains of America’s once-great car industry. Both these blokes saw the result coming because they live among blokes with calloused hands whose wives do second jobs to make up for the economic hardships their family sustains.

The 2016 Clinton campaign epitomised elitism in that Hillary almost seemed to be running because like her husband she wanted a turn at being president too. It epitomised arrogance with her appalling “deplorable” sledge doing more to galvanise Trump voters than anything Trump said during the entirety of that campaign.

Fast forward to 2024 and one of the defining moments of the campaign, possibly the defining moment, came courtesy of President Joe Biden with his quip about Trump voters being “garbage”. I know that it was a response to the truly appalling remarks by a so-called comedian at Trump’s Madison Garden rally, but one of them is a comedian, the other the leader of the free world, ostensibly campaigning for his deputy but effectively driving a final nail into her coffin. The only excuse you can make for poor old Joe is that he doesn’t seem to know what day of the week it is anymore.

Bernie Sanders was campaigning just four days ago in Pennsylvania, railing against the blue collar drift in the direction of Trump.

“Working-class people are angry, and some of them are thinking about Trump!” Sanders said. “The current system is broken!”

Sanders was right. It’s a pity that none of his colleagues were listening to him this year, or in 2016, and are too busy bagging these voters to bother trying to talk them around.