How Donald Trump Sealed the Deal podcast: Yaron Finkelstein on how everyday Americans did a deal with Trump
A seismic change in American voter behaviour delivered Donald Trump his victory at the ballot box. I should know, I saw it firsthand - and it could have ramifications for us all. | LISTEN NOW
We will shortly arrive at our destination. In just a few days’ time, Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States – for the second time – is scheduled. On the steps of the US Capitol, in the crisp and biting January air of Washington DC, where only four years ago a mob of his supporters stormed the country’s seat of power, President Trump will once again swear the oath of office:
I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic …
So help me God.
But, how did we get here? A lot has been said and written about the second coming of Trump. The consequences for America and the free world remain to be seen. I’ve met with Donald Trump in the White House, and the man up close is very different to his political persona. While he is certainly an intriguing figure as a leader, more intriguing to me has always been the idea of Trump as a political winner – and understanding the voter mindset that delivered this result. As a political strategist and adviser, I’m interested in why people vote the way they do. So what was it about Trump – the candidate – that compelled everyday Americans to cast their vote for him?
Let’s go back to October 2024, when I packed my bags and headed to the US with the intention of capturing the mood of these everyday Americans. I wanted to find out what was going on, on the ground, in a contest that the polls were saying was too close to call. What lessons for other elections could we learn from a contest like this? What could it tell us about voter intentions in western democracies? What would it tell us about America? I took audio equipment to record people’s comments on this journey into America’s heartland (I went to eight states, including Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Michigan), which feature in a special podcast episode for The Weekend Australian Magazine, available online.
In West Virginia, I met a mother and son on opposite sides of the political divide, she an ardent Democrat, he a Trump supporter (albeit one who’d voted for Bernie Sanders in the past). While he canvassed a wide range of issues from national security to immigration, she was firmly in the “anyone but Trump” camp. And yet I met plenty of Trump voters, too, who didn’t fully trust him. Who even felt let down by him the first time, but who were voting for him again for reasons I will come to.
In fact, what struck me most about this campaign as I was going through these critical states, right up to election day, was the transactional nature of this election. It wasn’t a popularity contest; the American people weren’t electing a homecoming king or queen. Rather, this was a deal that they were entering into for their future. Talk about the Art of the Deal.
In more than two decades spent deeply involved in politics, and in elections, for various leaders, premiers, and governors, I’ve seen elections from the inside out, from planning to polling day. Here in Australia, that experience put me right in the centre circle with Scott Morrison for the so-called unwinnable miracle victory of 2019. And I was right there for the bruising loss in 2022. During a period as global head of campaigns for one of the world’s best campaign firms, I was a specialist adviser and strategist for winning contests and campaigns in democracies of all shapes and sizes.
So it may be surprising to learn that when I headed to the US and the states that would determine the election of its next leader, to speak with people preparing to vote in the November election, the study was result-neutral. It didn’t matter so much to me how these people voted – although it obviously mattered to them! My plan was to use interview techniques developed for working with focus groups to go beyond hearing what people think, to consider how and why they arrived at their views on an issue – to get a more profound sense of what was really behind their thinking.
I would discover how articulate Americans are. They have a view, and they’ll share it, and they share it in a way that’s very easy to understand. Overwhelmingly, I came away with the impression that Americans, unlike Australians, are more than happy to tell you what they think, and as I travelled through those eight states in October I was able to glean meaningful insights into how non-Californian, non-New Yorker Americans were thinking.
Q. So if Donald Trump wins, what do you think will be different about America over the next four years?
A. Well, I think he’s going to send back all the illegals, at least the worst ones, and that’ll free up a lot of money for the American citizens, because what they’re giving to illegal immigrants, they’re taking from the poor here who need it more.
Q. How does immigration matter to you? I mean, you’re from Pennsylvania, yeah, and you’re a long way away from the borders. So what is it that most troubles you about what’s happening with immigration?
A. I think mostly that we are putting them on social programs right off the bat, which is going to take from the American people, because it’s going to have to be financed by our taxes. And instead of it going to our issues and our citizens, it’s going to people, right off the bat that committed a crime to get here. And it’s also feeding into that government taking care of you like Daddy, instead of taking care of us, you know, and we need to be. I mean, we’re working class Americans for the most part in this region, youknow. We’re paying in, and people that aren’t are taking out.
One early realisation that took me by surprise was how clearly the result would hinge on voter turnout, and which of the two candidates could mobilise enough of their base to front up on election day. It’s an idea that does not have immediate relevance in Australia, given our compulsory voting system, but in very, very tight contests there are lessons we can learn.
If you looked at the polls throughout 2024, you could easily have concluded that this election was going to be close, but we know in a non-compulsory voting system that the unknown quantity is voter turnout. People can tell you how they intend to vote, but will they actually turn up on polling day? My sense at the outset was that both Trump and Kamala Harris were relying on a cohort of voters to get them over the line. In his case, it was what might be described as young men aged under 30 – a notoriously unreliable demographic to come out to vote. In her case, it was probably also an under-30 cohort, but female. Ultimately, at the end of my research, I would conclude that Trump had the edge in this equation because his voters knew exactly why they were going to vote for him and knew why they needed to. That meant Trump held a firmer grip on his potential voter base. Let me explain.
There will always be people who love their candidates – but that’s not a majority. You can’t win with just those people. There were too many voters for Trump and too many voters for Harris who were clearly saying, Actually I don’t know that I love you. I don’t need to love you, but I know why I need you. And that takes us to this very simple concept of the transaction. People think: I have to make a deal of some kind. I’m going to accept all your flaws, or I’m going to accept what I need from you and I’ll do what I need to do. I’m going to give you my vote, and you’re going to give me what I need.
A transaction is actually quite a rational proposition. You need to do two things. You need to persuade people by facts and reason, but you need to motivate them through emotion. A transaction requires both. You need to show them rationally why, on balance, this is the deal for them, and then have enough juice in the tank to get them to come out and vote for you. Having done the deal on the rational, you then get them to vote on the emotional.
I formed a view very quickly that the spectre of Donald Trump loomed over both Democratic and Republican voters. It was as if he was on both sides of the ballot: for Democrats, he was a reason to vote for Kamala Harris. Voting against Trump could only be done via her. For Republicans, a vote for Trump was a vote to change the course of America. Harris was, in some ways, a diminished presence on the ballot paper because of that equation.
Take the mum and son I met in West Virginia. It was in a college town that has a very strong coal mining heritage and votes red. I found the woman in a bar, and she was very happy to share her thoughts about the big issues. She went straight to why she needed to vote for Harris, not why she really wanted to.
“I’m not particularly pro-Harris. I just think anything would be preferable to Trump. I really do. I mean, he’s talked about terminating the Constitution. He’s talked about using the military against his political opponents, American citizens who don’t agree with him. And he’s talked about, ‘Why can’t my generals be like Hitler’s generals?’ I just don’t understand how anybody isn’t alarmed by that enough to say this is a non-starter …
“But my son, who is very well educated, smart … he’s pro Trump.
“I don’t understand, given the information that is readily available to everyone, how anyone can support the fascist; I just don’t get it. And I will say this: I’m a lesbian, so LGBTQ rights are super important to me. My son, who was raised by two women, is a Trumper, and I f. king don’t get it.”
Time and time again, I heard about families that were divided. We’ve all heard stories about how America is divided, but it was always interesting to see that at a very micro level. Here was a mother and a son who had diametrically opposed views. How were they dealing with it?
She explained to me that she simply couldn’t talk about politics with her son. She asked me to find him, and to ask him why he was voting for Trump – and then she wanted me to share his views with her. I was to be the interlocutor between the two. So I sought him out, and I found his views to be fascinating. Here’s what he had to say:
“I think it’s important to me to return to what I see as sanity. When I was in law school my concentrations were on national security and international law. I am very concerned with American values and principles, the things that we consider to be fundamental. I’m concerned with foreign wars, foreign affairs. So those types of things are all on my mind: staying out of war, bringing back peace. Bringing back sane, commonsense, foundational American principles to the forefront.
“If Donald Trump wins … you’re going to see more of a return to sanity. I think you’re going to see the death of the mainstream media, and that’s going to allow for a lot more independent sort of journalism, and with that come more differing opinions and more open-mindedness. A lot of people feel like they’re being told by people, you know, in New York City on a mainstream media network what to think about something they’re seeing with their own two eyes in their own neighbourhoods.”
It’s easy to describe younger voters as being disengaged. But I kept finding young people who had thought about the issues they cared about. However, they weren’t necessarily thinking about all the issues. They had narrow views, and I don’t mean that in a bad way, it was just that they knew what was important to them, and here was a perfect example of someone who had clearly done his homework. As his mother noted, he had done his research. In no way had she described him as ignorant or dumb. Far from it. Voters tended to be engaged on the two or perhaps three issues that really matter to them. At an election, they know what they care about. They go deep on it, and they make a decision. In 2024, this was quite an interesting phenomenon.
Generally speaking, all of us can nominate what our top few issues are when it comes to our own lives, and these can be fluid. The issues that are important to you today may be different to the top issues that will impact your actual vote on election day. We know from most credible polls that in November 2024, the economy was the No. 1 issue, whether people were voting Republican or Democrat. (For Democrats, abortion and reproductive rights also ranked highly – but since the reversal of Roe vs. Wade a number of states have moved to make practical changes to their own laws in order to protect abortion rights. So even if abortion was important to you, you felt that it was being sorted.)
Many Americans were wondering, then, Who’s best to manage the economy? For one Trump supporter I encountered at a rally, attending with her sister, and wearing identical outfits, there was little doubt. Our exchange went like this:
A: Donald Trump, as a business owner, knows how to run a business, and the United States is the biggest business in the world. We need someone who can handle running a business and all aspects of the business, rather than people coming into office who have no experience running a business and are more just about power and politics rather than about the common person in the United States.
Q: But what’s wrong with the economy? All the indicators say it’s starting to improve, but you have that as your No. 1 issue. What most concerns you about the American economy?
A: Right now, the prices for everyday people. A lot of people are out of touch with that – they’re in the upper echelon and it really doesn’t affect their pocketbook … I think we need to stabilise that for future generations.
One of the Trump rallies I attended was organised in a town in Pennsylvania named State College. It’s called that because the state college – Penn State University – dominates the whole town. It’s an extraordinary place. The facilities are amazing. There’s a college football stadium that has a capacity close to 100,000, equal almost to the MCG.
I met three young men in the queue waiting to get into the rally. They were no older than 22, and together they seemed like a trio of very average people. They weren’t adorned with Trump paraphernalia, they were straightforward types who were lining up just like me to get in. The minute I asked if they’d be kind enough to share some views, they were more than happy to. I asked one of them, what were the top issues for him at this election?
A. Number One has got to be the economy for me, because … being a college student, everything’s so much more expensive, and every year I’ve been in college things have continued to get more expensive, and that affects my bottom line as a student. Number two has got to be the border.
At this point one of his friends interjected enthusiastically, commenting: Those two things are the biggest things, the economy and the border, especially the border right now, just because the economy is struggling right now and we’re allowing so many illegal immigrants and it’s not helping the economy.
Immigration to the US hasemerged as a defining issue of the election and on my visit it wasn’t hard to see why. This issue is there for all to see: it is literally in your face, on the streets, every day. In a number of cities in the US there has been a rapid influx of immigration and to be blunt, the numbers are overwhelming. The government, or various city halls, have not necessarily handled the assimilation of these people well. Many are deemed “illegal” or “undocumented”, and have crossed into the US over its border with Mexico. Efforts to integrate them culturally, economically and physically into the existing society have not been successful.
What this situation represents is a very optical expression of a loss of control or a change in circumstances. The issue of “border control” then becomes a proxy for something else. Primarily, if we don’t control who comes into the country, what else do we not have a sense of certainty and destiny about? “Immigration” actually speaks to a wider a sense of security that applies far more broadly.
People often talk about John Howard’s immigration policies of the 1990s and 2000s, and particularly what might be described as a “hard line” approach, but what they often forget is that when our borders were “under control” we also saw a significant increase in immigration. Immigration was not the issue, it was just that people no longer believed our borders were “out of control”. It’s when you think something is “out of control” that you become troubled by it. That is the key to understanding why people are troubled by the immigration issue from both the Left and the Right, and it is key to understanding why so many see Trump as the figure to reinstate control and security.
In my experience, elections are always a vote on the future. Voters cast their ballot guided by certain sorts of questions: What kind of country do I want to live in? What kind of country do I want for my children, and my children’s children? Overwhelmingly, I got the impression that these decent Americans who shared their thoughts and feelings about the election were trying to say to me that they were thinking ahead. But what is changing at pace is the question of political identity. There’s no doubt the data shows a realignment in party politics, and it’s clear on the ground that there is a change occurring. From my perspective it’s hard to know whether it’s a final evolution, but if you look at the electoral results there is a clear trend that the Republican Party now represents very different demographics to what it did even 10 years ago. Will it also be the case in Australia? Are we destined for a realignment of significant consequence? Trump showed an ability to galvanise his voter base, as well as to convince the undecideds in places where the Republicans once held very little sway. His election is proof that a great realignment has occurred, in America at least.
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