US election 2024 analysis: ‘Trump is hired, Harris is fired’

The US will never be the same again after Donald Trump was re-elected as president, writes Tom Minear.

ANALYSIS

For months, Donald Trump’s advisers told him the economy would decide the election. They begged him to stick to a simple script: Kamala Harris broke it and he would fix it.

Sometimes he did. At other rallies, he mused that the border crisis was a bigger issue. More often than not, he said his lines and then ranted about windmills, cows and Hannibal Lecter.

As it turns out, however, the former president did not need to ditch his antics to ram home his economic message. Americans had already had enough.

On the day of the election, a CNN exit poll found 72 per cent of voters were dissatisfied or angry about the direction of the US, and 67 per cent felt the economy was performing badly or poorly. These numbers had been steady for months – the question was whether Ms Harris could convince the country she was the solution or if voters decided she was the problem.

Former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during an election night event at the West Palm Beach Convention Center in Florida, needing just a handful of electoral votes to defeat Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. Picture: Jim Watson/AFP

The Vice President ran hard for 107 days. Thrust into the race by Joe Biden’s call to drop out, a decision that Democrats should have forced upon him last year, she campaigned admirably. But she could not outrun the President’s record. Her record.

Are you better off now than you were four years ago? That was Mr Trump’s closing argument to voters. While it relied on some Covid amnesia, given the state of the US in 2020, it nailed the widespread frustration about the cost of living: petrol, food, housing.

Americans did not need to live in the battleground states – where residents were bombarded for months by billions of dollars in political advertisements – to be fed up. In Democratic strongholds, the party’s margins from 2020 were slashed: 16 points to five points in New Jersey, 23 points to 11 points in New York, 17 points to eight points in Illinois.

Supporters at the Palm Beach Convention Center react while watching returns come in for Donald Trump. Picture: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images/AFP

Incumbent governments worldwide have been similarly punished over inflation. And while the Biden administration brought it back to earth more successfully than most, all Americans knew was they were still paying more. Prices did not fall; they just grew more slowly.

So why not vote for change? Mr Trump gave plenty of reasons that Ms Harris prosecuted fiercely, notably his role in overturning the right to abortion and the risk he posed to democracy, as so many of his former colleagues had warned of in terrifying detail.

Among men in particular – young, Black and Hispanic – this did not matter. Mr Trump is a businessman, ordinary Americans always say, and we need a businessman in charge.

So he is hired, Ms Harris is fired, and the US will never be the same.