‘Two tears in a bucket’: Why voters flocked to Trump, and why some might regret it

It was a Saturday night in Holly Beach, Louisiana, and the young woman had clearly had a gutful. While we waited for a ferry to cross a bayou where it empties into the bath-warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, she stood on the sun-weathered dock and between swigs of malt liquor, kept repeating a salty idiom.

“Two tears in a bucket,” she said. “Two tears in a bucket and f--- it.”

Voters turned their back on Democrats and flocked back to Donald Trump and the Republicans.Credit: Bloomberg

When we drove through Holly Beach that night, along a stretch of gulf coast sardonically known as the Cajun Riviera, Trump hadn’t yet emerged as a political force, but already, the place was like one of his rallies on wheels. As the sun dipped somewhere over Texas, the boys drove up and down a flat, silty expanse in their pick-up trucks while girls perched on deck chairs in the flatbeds and American flags snapped in the wind.

Looking back now, there is something about that woman on the dock, with her mixture of fatalist resignation and up-yours defiance, that sums up the attitude Trump voters took into the ballot box this week when they re-elected America’s most obnoxious former president.

Americans, including Donald Trump supporters, are under no illusion about who they have put back in the White House. Mike Sakara from Tamaqua, a small town in north-eastern Pennsylvania, put it plainly when he wrote a letter published by his local paper, The Citizen’s Voice, the day after the election. “I knew Trump was a sleaze when I voted for him – I’m glad he won.”

This doesn’t mean America voted for Trump because he is a sleaze – although some of his more repellent traits lit up dark corners of the manosphere – or that character no longer matters in politics. As Democrats often grumbled during a frustrating campaign, the allowance America makes for Trump does not carry over to other political figures. Instead, it appears any judgment on Trump was itself trumped by something more fundamental.

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders pointed this out before Kamala Harris took the stage at her alma mater to deliver her concession speech, when he issued a statement accusing the Democratic Party – an organisation he twice sought to lead against Trump as a presidential candidate – of turning its back on an essential constituency.

Senator Bernie Sanders says the Democrats have moved too far away from their base.Credit: Bloomberg

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he said. “First, it was the white working class and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.

“Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60 per cent of Americans live paycheque to paycheque and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years before.

“Will the big-money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing?”

While it is easier to ask questions than provide answers in the bitter aftermath of an electoral loss, an exit poll conducted by NBC news in 10 states suggests Sanders is posing the right ones.

One of the questions asked of voters in the NBC survey was what they thought of the national economy. While one-third said it was in good or excellent shape, two-thirds said it was not so good or poor. Of the third who felt good about the economy, 91 per cent voted for Harris. Of the two-thirds who felt bad, 70 per cent plumped for Trump.

In the next question, voters were asked whether their family’s financial situation was better, worse or the same as it was four years ago. This is a reprisal of Ronald Reagan’s famous closing argument in his 1980 presidential debate against Jimmy Carter, where he requested that voters, when they walked into polling booths, ask themselves a series of simple questions: “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country as there was four years ago?”

The NBC survey responses provide telling insight into the way inflation, rising house prices, and, until recently, tepid wage growth, shaped the 2024 presidential vote. The largest group of respondents, 46 per cent, said they were worse off today than four years ago, the day Trump was narrowly voted out of office. Of these, 81 per cent said they had voted to put Trump back in.

An extraordinary 73 per cent of all voters said they were either dissatisfied or angry with how things were going in their country. If you are unhappy with the status quo, it makes little sense to vote for more of the same. America was fairly seething when it walked out of polling booths on Tuesday.

Sara James, a former New York-based NBC newsreader and correspondent who lives in Melbourne, says the oft-repeated adage of Bill Clinton’s adviser James Carville – “it’s the economy, stupid” – has never rung more true.

“We have seen this again and again,” she says. “If people are hurting, if they are struggling to pay their bills and if they feel, like Americans did, that the country is going in the wrong direction and they are worse off than they were four years ago, they vote for change.

“You can look at the underlying fundamentals of an economy and say it looks strong and robust, but when people are paying more at the grocery store for their coffee or eggs, that is a real measure and a daily issue. And that is what really came to the fore in this election.”

Carville, for all his political acumen, didn’t see this result coming. Now 80 years old, the “Ragin’ Cajun” declared to MSNBC in his thick, Louisiana drawl shortly before the election that Harris would win. “She has got more money, she has got more energy, she has a more united party, she has better surrogates,” he said. And besides, he added, Trump is “stone-ass nuts”.

In a series of video blogs posted after the election, Carville began what is likely to be a long and difficult post-mortem for his party.

The deeper you dig into the numbers, the more troubling the picture is for the Democratic establishment.

Six out of 10 white men voted Republican, but so did a majority of white women. Latino men broke 55-43 for Trump. The majority of people under the age of 30 voted Democrat, but far fewer than normally do. If your family earned under $US100,000 you were more likely than not to vote Trump. If your family earned over $US100,000, you leant towards Harris.

An irony of this election is that the American economy has recovered strongly from its post-pandemic supply constraints and inflation spike, as evidenced by the Federal Reserve’s decision two days after the election to further cut interest rates.

Donald Trump celebrates his victory with daughter-in-law Lara Trump (left) and wife Melania.Credit: AP

President-elect Trump, when he is sworn back into office on January 20, will inherit wage growth that has been tracking nicely above inflation since the start of last year. But a second Trump presidency – particularly if he fulfils his promises to impose new tariffs on all imports; higher, punitive tariffs against Chinese goods; and deport undocumented migrants on a mass scale – may breathe new life into a dragon the current administration and the Fed have just slayed.

When it comes to the likely impact of Trump’s signature economic and immigration policies, economist Saul Eslake invites some plain speaking.

“Let’s stop using the word tariff,” he says. “What Trump is planning to do is put a 60 per cent tax on all US imports from China and a 20 per cent tax on all US imports from everywhere else. The effect of that will be to raise prices and, according to estimates that, I believe, are credible, cost the average family $US2600 a year. How does that make any of them better off?

“The real winners out of Trump’s economic agenda are going to be the tech billionaires who backed him, and other rich people who will benefit from his tax cuts and won’t be hurt by his higher tariffs, because rich folks don’t buy cheap stuff from China.

“The rich are not going to be adversely affected by tariffs, they are probably not going to be greatly hurt by the higher, long-term interest rates that will result from the long-term inflation, increase in budget deficits, and erosion of the Federal Reserve’s independence that Trump’s policies will cause.”

Put another way, Trump’s remedy for modest-income households may have the perverse effect of aggravating the social and economic inequalities Sanders identifies as the central grievance of a disaffected working class. This would leave worse off the very people whose anger put Trump back in the White House.

Harris could not effectively prosecute this argument because she was part of the Biden administration, which largely kept the previous Trump government’s tariffs and promised new ones on select industries.

Eslake says Trump, who has advocated for trade protection for decades, was allowed to run on a flawed economic argument and false record. “One of the things the Democrats failed to get across is there were 160,000 fewer manufacturing jobs at the end of Trump’s first term than there were at the beginning of it,” he says.

“People think Trump brought back manufacturing jobs, but he didn’t. He didn’t reduce America’s trade deficit, he redistributed it away from China.

Nayely Nunez, from Honduras, uses her luggage to carry a child as she walks through Mexico towards the US border on November 7.Credit: Moises Castillo/AP Photo

“People like the fact that when Trump says he will do something, he does it. The problem is that when he does what he says he is going to do, the consequences are very different to what he says the consequences will be.”

Lowy Institute director Michael Fullilove, an expert on US foreign policy, says the re-election of Trump, with his promised shift towards economic protectionism and political isolation, will be discombobulating for Australians.

“Mr Trump says that tariff is ‘the most beautiful word in the dictionary’, while Australia is a trading nation,” he says. “Mr Trump is sceptical of alliances, whereas Australians are alliance believers.”

Fullilove’s advice to the Australian government is to be pragmatic in its response, develop our own national security capabilities, and, where possible, work in tandem with other US allies to preserve our interests.

“We should assemble our arguments carefully and make sure we explain them in terms that Mr Trump will appreciate,” Fullilove says. “Fight our corner where required, preferably in private. Find common ground with Mr Trump where we can, without betraying our values or doing something we will later regret.”

The potential implications of Trump 2.0 for Australia’s trade and security interests, Ukraine, Taiwan, NATO, and the broader international order are serious and troubling. But within America, the people with the most to lose over the next four years are those who can least afford it.

The NBC exit poll, when overlaid against the demographics of counties in swing states that delivered the presidency to Trump, underscores the breadth of his appeal among the voters Sanders accuses the Democrats of abandoning.

Trump at a rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on November 1.Credit: Bloomberg

Across Pennsylvania – a state the Democrats had to win for Harris to have any chance of becoming president – voters swung to Trump by more than 3 per cent. In the rust-belt state of Michigan and its formerly bankrupt city of Detroit, it was more than 4 per cent.

In Pennsylvania, the red surge was felt across rural counties, post-industrial counties and in the Philadelphia suburbs. Out of 66 counties, only nine recorded swings to Harris. The swing to Trump was most pronounced in the north-eastern part of the state, in a cluster of coal region counties near Joe Biden’s birthplace of Scranton.

In Monroe County – a community of 168,000 people where a language other than English is spoken in one in five households, the median family income is $US71,000, and three-quarters of people don’t have college degrees – Trump picked up a 7.4 swing from his 2020 loss to Biden.

In neighbouring Lockawanna County, where the median income is just $US56,000 and 17 per cent of people live in poverty, the swing was 5.6 per cent. In Luzerne, a county of 326,000 people – where a staggering 27.7 per cent of children live in poverty – the swing to Trump was 5.7 per cent.

In Luzerne County in Pennsylvania, where almost 30 per cent of children live in poverty, the swing to Trump was 5.7 per cent.Credit: Niko Kallianiotis

These are families who, if economists like Eslake are right, will experience from a rebooted Trump presidency steeper prices for goods at Walmart and the local Food King, higher interest rates if they have a mortgage, and further depletion of personal finances, which, as Sanders points out, barely stretch from one payday to the next already.

These are the voters Harris couldn’t convince to stick with her, and if Trump’s promise to them is exposed as hollow, these same voters will soon be forgotten by their new political tribe. Do they expect their lives to be better under Trump, or were they just happy to give someone a whack on the way through? As they say at Holly Beach, two tears in a bucket and f--- it.

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