Talk to anyone outside the media bubble and they’ll tell you they saw Donald Trump’s comeback a mile off.
No way was Kamala Harris going to win, not while she was swanning with Oprah, while Trump was serving up fries at McDonald’s.
These same people – the clear-eyed Australians – clearly predicted the defeat of the Indigenous voice referendum, too.
No way were Australians going to vote to change the Constitution, to elevate one group’s concerns over another.
Which brings me to the only thing we don’t yet know about this week’s result in the US: what does it mean for our Prime Minister?
It means that Anthony Albanese must urgently get out of the world he’s lived in all his adult life – the upgrades from the Alan Joyce bubble – and find a way to reach these people. Otherwise, he’s in deep, deep trouble.
Why? Because Australians, like Americans, are very much into upward mobility, for themselves and for their families. They want reward for effort, and they want the same for their kids.
The cost of living is, as we speak, killing them. They feel it every time they go to Coles for a bunch of bananas, and a silver packet of dishwashing detergent, and get charged $89.
They feel it every time the bank sticks its hand out for the mortgage payment. Interest rate rises have doubled since Covid, and how can that be anything other than intensely painful?
The Prime Minister may well be thinking: “But that’s nothing to do with me! The Reserve Bank sets interest rates.”
True, but the idea that Albanese is partly to blame – because his government is fuelling inflation by spending too much money – has firmly taken hold.
Do you know what else has taken hold?
“My kids are never going to be able to buy a house.”
You hear that everywhere these days.
Bubble-types wax lyrical about sophisticated European-style cities with long-term rental security but Australia is not a nation of renters.
We don’t think it’s too much to ask to have a home of one’s own, with a rabbit hutch, an elderly neighbour, and maybe even a tree.
We care about that far more than we care what’s in your pants, by which I mean: the woke thing is over.
Nobody cares what anyone else does in the bedroom, with whom, or which bits; they haven’t cared forever.
They don’t care what colour you are, or how much grievance you feel about an ancient argument that has nothing to do with anyone who lives here.
Woke politics was never particularly popular, here or in the US, but because most people are basically decent, they were prepared (for a time) to step gently around the issues. No more.
Trump picked up millions of votes from women, Hispanics, and black people. They’re the focus of all the identity love, and even they’ve had enough. What were Americans concerned about? Recent polls suggested that two-thirds of Americans thought the country was on the “wrong track” under Biden.
We don’t have precisely the same measure, but Albanese’s “approval rating” sits at 54 per cent dissatisfied (that’s according to Newspoll).
Here’s some worse news, for Labor: the Liberals lead 38–26 on economic management.
To put all this another way: voters aren’t happy, and they don’t think the Albanese government is helping.
How will this translate, on election day? Voters will smash Albanese in the suburbs, particularly in Queensland.
Peter Dutton has quite a few of those seats already, and he’s likely to extend his lead in them.
He needs to do more than that, obviously. On one hand, Labor will have a one-seat majority once the electoral redistribution is applied; and Dutton has to win something like 19 to get over the line.
Expect him to go Trump-like, or even Trump-lite.
Meaning: cost of living, cost of living, cost of living. They’re going to say it until your ears bleed. Because conservative parties – Trump, and perhaps Dutton – are now the parties of the working class. If Dutton can do a Trump, and extend his appeal to the lower-middle classes (that’s anyone who winces at the checkout, as well as anyone who is over being told what an awful person they are for wanting to keep a little more of what they earn for themselves), he’s home.
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