The US election: Are Democrats a threat to democracy?

Published Nov 13, 2024, 6:05 PM

Have we completely misunderstood why Donald Trump won the American election?

An avalanche of political commentary has convinced us that Trump clinched the presidency because of a simple message.

He was just better than Kamala Harris at managing the economy.

Today, international and political editor Peter Hartcher on what the broadest American exit poll tells us really drove Americans to choose Trump.

And how this might play into the upcoming Australian federal election.

From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. This is the morning edition. I'm Samantha Salinger Morris. It's Thursday, November 14th. Have we completely misunderstood why Donald Trump won the American election? An avalanche of political commentary has convinced us that Trump clinched the presidency because of a simple message. He was just better than Kamala Harris at managing the economy. Today, international and political editor Peter Hartcher, on what the broadest American exit poll tells us really drove Americans to choose Trump and how this might play into the upcoming Australian federal election. So, Peter, first off, let's rip off the band aid. What mistake did Australian politicians make, do you think, in terms of the lessons that they took from the outcome of the American presidential election?

Well, I don't think they've made serious mistakes yet, but the instant consensus conclusion of the political. The chattering class in Australia, you know, a lot of the political commentary, the media, some quite a few politicians themselves, staffers, the whole class was this is squarely about the cost of living. Donald Trump won because Kamala Harris couldn't satisfy Americans that she had a solution to their pain. And while that is certainly a part of the picture, an important part of the picture, it's not the picture. And so if you simply take that lesson from the American election, that it's all about the cost of living and only the cost of living, then that's a seriously misleading conclusion to take based on what we know at the moment.

And I loved it because I'm not sure if listeners saw it, but the the headline to your piece was it's the Democracy, stupid, which, of course references the famously coined term by longtime political strategist James Carville, who said, it's the economy, stupid, which was, of course, his explanation for how Bill Clinton was able to win the election over George Bush in 92, which ended three terms of Republican rule in the white House. So if the cost of living wasn't the decisive issue that led to Trump's win, as so many of us, including myself, did conclude, then what was it?

Well, and it was fair enough to conclude that I should point out, because it was the big noise, right? The big noise was about. It's all about inflation, cost of living, the pain. It's also about the other subsidiary issues. You have to look at the evidence. The most authoritative piece of evidence is the exit poll conducted by the Associated Press. This is the the benchmark and has been for many years. AP conducts exit interviews with 120,000 Americans after they've just cast their vote, as they're emerging from polling stations. That's the biggest sample of any exit poll by far. They ask voters after they've just cast their vote, what was the the decisive issue in the way you chose which candidate to support. And they reported that the biggest issue was democracy. Threat to democracy. State of democracy. And that that was more than inflation. More than cost of living, more than immigration, more than abortion, more than freedom of speech. It was democracy.

Okay, so, Peter, this is why we're so lucky to have you to walk us through this, because I'm sure many listeners would, I imagine, be like myself thinking, what are you talking about? Because, of course, the main thrust of Kamala Harris's entire campaign was that Donald Trump himself was a threat to democracy. So ergo, why wouldn't she have won? I mean, does this actually mean that the Democrats were perhaps perceived as a threat to democracy?

Well, this is the thing. It's how you interpret it. And this was explained to me by a Democrat, one of the leading Democrat pollsters, who was one of the two main pollsters for Joe Biden. Her name is Celinda Lake. And she explained to me that why is it that you can have the dominant issues being democracy? And yet the campaign pushing that most directly is the campaign that loses. And she squares the circle by explaining that a lot of voters define democracy, not as the ability to exercise democratic rights, such as voting in an electoral ballot, but many defined it as the state of the borders. Many American voters interpreted the perception that the borders were out of control, as in the way that Trump had presented it as an existential threat to American society. And remember, Trump said, if you don't fix the border, you won't have a country anymore.

Did you fire anybody that's on the border that's allowed us to have the worst border in the history of the world? Did anybody get fired for allowing 18 million people, many from prisons, many from from mental institutions? Did you fire anybody that allowed our country to be destroyed. Joe.

So he portrayed it as a fundamental threat to the country, to the system. And a lot of voters interpreted that through the lens of a threat to democracy itself. So in that way, Trump actually turned back the Democrats attack, turned it back on the Democrats to his advantage, which is pretty extraordinary and very difficult to see unless you had focus groups talking to electors, real people, uh, before and during the campaign, as Celinda Lake did, and other political professionals did, that gets behind the superficial polling answers in in those 900 cheap and ultimately misleading polls. And I mean, we know why the US media runs them and fetishizes them because they provide a constant source of cheap headlines and news, but they're really are misleading. And we really should shouldn't pay much heed to them. I'll just add another thought, please. So threat to democracy was the motivating force for two thirds the motive force for two thirds of Democratic voters, according to AP Votecast. Right. The exit poll. And for one third of the Trump voters. So that's a huge, huge chunk. One single issue. And partly for the Trump people, it was about the state of the borders. But there were other issues as well under that rubric, that broader rubric of the threat to democracy. They thought the out of control border was a threat to democracy, but they also thought that Harris's policies more broadly, were so extreme that Harris was an extremist and therefore a threat to democracy in herself. And that turned essentially on identity politics and her history supporting identity politics.

Okay, so I wanted to actually get into this and what lessons, I guess, from that there might be for Australian politicians and perhaps the rest of us on specifically on identity politics, because you wrote of the American election that the lesson was, quote, inflation is painful, but xenophobia unleashed is primal. So can you walk me through, I guess, what you hope we might take from this, or rather, what we what we might endure if we don't?

Okay, well, I should qualify this by saying it's not what I hope so much as what I analyze and interpret. This is not an expression of my own wishes, but an attempt at the best possible objective analysis guided by US experts. So yeah, the inflation, the economy problem is painful for all of us. But for American voters, especially, anybody earning under 100,000 USD a year was really feeling the pain. But the immigration question and the concept that there were millions of all sorts of out of control people flooding the country, and then the awakening of the xenophobic reaction to that, the exploitation of that through the Trump campaign that is primal. It's a primal fear that there is a threatening unknown tribe or tribes that are coming into your town, your neighborhood, your homes, and they're going to do horrible things. You know, Trump, of course, took it to an extreme about eating your pets, but he got everybody talking about it in many ways for for many months. It arouses the deepest human fears, and that's why it was important. It's one of the subsets of identity politics. So let me just say identity politics is picking up one strand of one minority within a society and elevating it. Its claims for superior rights, superior rights to others in the society. A liberal democracy turns on the concept that everybody's rights should be equal. Identity politics doesn't do that. It takes each minority, or one minority at a time or whatever to elevate them above everybody else. And that proved to be one of the subsets of this explanation about threat to democracy, because a lot of people thought that doing this was an extreme kind of politics that threatened the majority and threatened them. And the political problem with that is you push one minority or minority rights hard enough, and it invokes a reaction from the other identity, which is known as the majority. You push minority rights hard enough and the majority reacts. And that is what happened with Trump. Trump was championing a reaction of the white majority, especially men, as the overlooked group, and Trump provoked and capitalized on a majority response to identity politics.

We'll be right back. So is there a lesson here for our own politicians? I guess in particular, labor, that, you know, if they focus too much on identity politics, it might very well lead to a loss. You know, particularly, I guess, now thinking about the federal election that's coming up.

Yeah, absolutely. So Anthony Albanese has tried very hard to marginalize identity politics. And his government, generally speaking, I think in terms of overall policy has done a really good job of that. They have been advocating for the working class and the progressive concept of raising the living conditions of the working class rather than, you know, one, one small minority or even a large minority to advocate for that specifically. So wages, industrial relations policy and the rest of it. The problem and the exception to that, and it's a big one, is the voice referendum. It turns out that the voice is an enduring problem, even though the referendum was more than a year ago. So the government was riding high in the polls, doing very comfortably until the Voice referendum, when its polling numbers took a hit. And the critical thing is they have not recovered. They've continued to bump along the bottom and even deteriorate slightly. It looks like it looks like a fundamental breach of the electorate's trust in Albanese. It looks like and I say it looks like, because, you know, it's a living experiment. We await more evidence. But a lot of Australians thought that Albanese was taking up the cause of a specific minority, above and beyond those of the majority, and this was a form of identity politics for which he's being punished.

And he really is. I mean, just this past week, we saw Opposition Leader Peter Dutton making the comparison between the American election and the voter mood in Australia, particularly on this point. He's spoken on radio and on TV about how the Albanese government, talking about the voice made voters who couldn't pay their mortgage or electricity bill angry and how? Like in the US. According to Dutton, the failure to crack down on immigration here is, quote, just a disaster. So do you think that message is resonating with Australian voters?

So the Australian Labor Party has known for a long time that if you're seen to have out of control borders, labor is punished, especially because it's seen to be sympathetic to immigrants and tolerant of illegal immigrants, whereas the coalition is not. Albanese has maintained the coalition policy on boat arrivals to try to keep that under control. And it's no coincidence, by the way, that labor has initiated most of the toughest policies. It was Paul Keating who introduced mandatory detention for all boat arrivals. It was Kevin Rudd who introduced the policy that if you arrive by boat, by boat, you will never be resettled in Australia. The coalition Morrison did the boat turn backs but and they those are the three harshest measures in particular. And two of those were from Labour prime ministers, because Labour is particularly vulnerable on this at the moment. The Albanese boat people policy has been effective in controlling boat arrivals. In the last two days, four people turned up on a remote island off the coast of the Northern Territory, and the coalition has tried to magnify that as another example of a of a failure. It's hardly a threat for people, but, you know, they will work hard at this because they know how sensitive the Australian electorate is to it and how vulnerable labor is.

This is now the 23rd boat arrival, and it's another one that's been undetected. Our borders are not secure under the Albanese government. How can a boat make it to the mainland without any detection whatsoever? I think it's clear that the Prime Minister should have been honest with the Australian people today when he addressed the media. He should have provided advice.

The bigger problem is the overall immigration intake, which labor has been frantically trying to scale back over the course of this year, but it has so many elements that aren't subject to immediate government control. Students who already have visas flocking back into the country trying to get in before these new caps put in place, and all the rest of it, um, are going on. And so we're having enormous numbers after the two year freeze on immigration during Covid. We're now having an enormous catch up and it looks like a flood. And this is a risk to Albanese. It is a risk to labor. The coalition will play this up over the six months between now and Election Day, and labor has to deal with it. I should add, this isn't about the reality of the borders, whether they're under control or not. It's the perception of whether the borders are under control or not, because perception in politics is reality. It is, it is.

And I wanted to ask you more broadly, I guess, as to whether there's signs that perhaps our culture is becoming more receptive to some other Trumpian messages, I guess because I noticed with interest that Nationals Senator Matt Canavan spoke on the ABC's Q&A program on Monday night about how his son sees Donald Trump as a hero because he is sick of seeing masculinity demonized.

My boys have all constantly been told in school about how the evils of masculinity and how terrible men are, and.

So do you think those messages are cutting through, too?

Yeah, absolutely. Trump has picked up on that. He, of course, represents an unpleasantly aggressive and bigoted form of masculinity. It's a it's an overreaction, but it's persuasive to a lot of male and especially young male voters. Australia has had a similar thing to a lesser degree. But, um, a lot of young men do think, and I've got three daughters as well as two sons, and young men do feel diminished. They do feel sneered at. They do feel that they're being, um, demeaned as, uh, potential rapists. That The only descriptor ever applied to masculinity is toxic. And so Matt Canavan has picked up on that. You can be sure that Peter Dutton has picked up on that as well. And Dutton won't be as crass or as as gross as Trump in trying to capitalise on that in Australia. Those those things just don't work because we have compulsory voting. Everybody turns out, and you can't you don't need to press it, press the hot buttons to get turnout, and if you do, you'll just alienate a lot of the people who are turning out anyway. So it won't be as gross and crass as Trump, but it'll be subtler. But it's there. It's a reality and is a potential problem for labor, and especially for the Greens. If labor can't be seen to be competent on economic management, it will lose. And that's long been the case. And it's again it's once again in the balance about whether Australians will see that. Albanese does have economic competence or not. When they won the election two and a bit years ago, labor did so at a time when the polls were giving labor an advantage on the being the perceived better economic manager and and perceived better on national security as well. Morrison had just been demoted. Written off. And labor was seen to be competent on those two. Now they've lost. They lost both those titles after The Voice, there was such a it seemed to represent such a breach of trust with the electorate as well as, of course, as the grinding effect of inflation on people's perceived living standards and actual purchasing power. Labor lost both those key credentials for taking power. Now, on the economy, some of that's come back. Labor's status has improved a bit on economic management as perceived in the polls. But it's it's now an open contest. Whether they can recover that in time for the election, which is due by May.

Well, thank you so much, Peter, for your time.

Always a pleasure, Samantha.

Today's episode of The Morning Edition was produced by Julia Carcasole, with technical assistance by David McMillan. Our head of audio is Tom McKendrick. The Morning Edition is a production of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. If you enjoy the show and want more of our journalism, subscribe to our newspapers today. It's the best way to support what we do. Search the age or Smh.com.au forward slash. Subscribe and sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter to receive a comprehensive summary of the day's most important news, analysis and insights in your inbox every day. Links are in the show. Notes. I'm Samantha Salinger Morris. This is the morning edition. Thanks for listening.