Trump’s vote in the Bronx was up to 27%, from 16% in 2020, and in liberal Manhattan Trump picked up over 17% of the vote compared with 12% four years ago.
Trump is believed to have won 44% of all women voters.
Matthew Hooton has over 30 years experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties and the Mayor of Auckland.
OPINION
The good news is that Donald Trump’s election win wasso overwhelming there is no question about its legitimacy.
Unlike 2016 and 2020, when he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden respectively, Trump romped home, beating Kamala Harris by 72 million to 67 million votes, as at Wednesday evening, New York time.
Trump’s win was such that, in 2024, Democrats can’t even blame the Greens’ Jill Stein, as they did in 2016.
Perhaps more important as the world’s liberal elite tries to make sense of his triumph, Trump did better than in his two prior outings in some of the US’ poorest and even woke urban communities.
Here in New York, Trump’s vote in the Bronx, partly represented by far-left Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was up to 27%, from 16% in 2020. In liberal Manhattan, Trump picked up over 17% of the vote compared with 12% four years ago.
Wealthy New Yorkers voting Democrat were surprised to learn their house-cleaner or waiter at their diner votes for the Republican candidate, when a generation ago it was the other way around.
At least, according to exit polls, the gender gap between Trump and Harris was less than between National and Labour in New Zealand.
Trump is believed to have won 44% of all women voters, including 52% of white women, 37% of Latino women, 36% of women under 30 and even 7% of black women.
There may be no women opposed to abortion in any east coast newsrooms or political-strategy firms, but a third of American women believe abortion should be illegal or highly restricted. Even when a women voter names abortion as her number one issue, are pollsters sure that’s because she is appalled that Roe v Wade was overturned by Dobbs v Jackson or because she worries Dobbs might itself be overturned?
Likewise, of the 35% of Americans who identified the state of their democracy as their top issue, how many were Democrats worried about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and role in the attempted coup of January 6, 2021, and how many were Trumpians who believe the deep-state cheated him of victory in 2020?
Trump won majorities among mainstream Protestants, Catholics and Christians in general, including 80% of born-again or evangelical Christians.
Atheists, agnostics, Jews and people of other religions – still a minority in the US, even collectively – voted for Harris.
Among gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender voters, Trump won one in eight.
On family income, Trump won the popular vote among households earning under US$100,000 a year (NZ$166,000), while Harris won among households earning more.
Of those who never attended university, Trump was ahead two-to-one. The numbers are reversed among those with postgraduate degrees, but that still means Trump won a third of the US’s most highly educated people.
If the old Reagan-Republican let alone Clinton-Democrat parties want to turn these numbers around, they’ll have to do better than either despising or pitying those historically associated with either party who are now part of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.
The knee-jerk response from liberal talking-heads is that Trump voters are the losers from globalisation. Liberal commentators evoke an image of a poorly educated and now unemployed Detroit car-industry worker.
But most of the 72 million Americans who voted for Trump don’t regard themselves as losers in any sense, and the overwhelming majority of them aren’t.
They own small businesses, earn good money – certainly by New Zealand standards – and enjoy their communities, families and lives.
To put it in terms liberal elites may find easiest to understand, they live and thrive within a certain culture that they value and want to preserve.
It involves hard work, risk taking without the safety of inherited privilege, volunteering in the community, being part of local clubs, going to church, being proud of those who served in the military, and believing citizens should own guns to protect themselves from criminals and – if it came to it – the state.
Were this an indigenous culture, liberal elites would join in demanding its protection. But instead, it’s a culture that those within it know is sneered upon by the majority on the coasts.
Newly elected President Donald Trump is back in the White House for a second term. Photo / Getty Images
These non-coastal Americans reject being told they should change, and how they should live instead. They may enjoy Taylor Swift’s songs, Oprah Winfrey’s talk shows and Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones, but there’s no way they will be told what to think and how to vote by billionaire celebrities.
Their contrariness is based on their belief they live in the land of the free, including the personal liberties promised to them in their constitution. Such contrariness is perhaps not unrelated to why the US has been the world’s greatest-ever source of innovation, entrepreneurship and constant renewal.
In any case, the 72 million have spoken again, this time even more powerfully than in 2016 or 2020. Their views have already changed the world and will continue to do so.
It is extremely unfortunate that their legitimate demands to be respected but left alone have been expressed through a person as dangerous to the world’s strategic and economic stability and survival of the American democratic republic as Trump.
We may prefer it be expressed, as it has been for decades in New Zealand and more recently in the United Kingdom, through someone more like Winston Peters, Boris Johnson, Kemi Badenoch or even Nigel Farage.
Liberal democracy combined with free-market capitalism, protected by the Nato and wider US-led alliance, are humankind’s greatest achievements to promote liberty, material wellbeing, human happiness and peace.
They are worth defending against Trump’s authoritarianism, protectionism, isolationism and vulgarity.
But, for those who wish to lead that defence, it’s no longer enough to cast Trump’s 72 million voters and other admirers around the world as mere victims and deplorables, clinging to their guns and God.
Even pragmatically, the Trump majority is now a fact on the ground and isn’t going anywhere.
More importantly, the 72 million are citizens of the US and of the wider free world.
Their culture, outlook and interests deserve to be taken seriously on those grounds alone, even by those who believe they are largely wrong.
It is not for them to change but the global liberal elite, who need now to find a way to incorporate Trump voters’ views and concerns into the post-World War II “Washington Consensus”, so that it – and all its extraordinary benefits – can survive at all.
