28 United States The EconomistNovember 7th 2020
I
t has becomea cliché of liberal editorialising to demand that
voters repudiate Donald Trump’s populist platform as well as the
president himself. Wherever the final vote tallies land, it will be
hard to argue that they have.
At the time of writing, Mr Trump looked on course to lose his re-
election bid with the second-highest number of votes ever record-
ed. He seemed to have achieved that feat mainly by turning out the
most characteristic parts of his coalition in force. White working-
class men, in particular, cemented the Republicans’ hold on some
of the territory he took for them in 2016. Mahoning County in
Ohio—which is dominated by hardscrabble Youngstown, whose
construction sites your columnist visited on the trail—went Re-
publican for the first time since 1972.
The president’s populist rhetoric—his hounding of elites and
foreigners, his race-baiting—also proved to be much less of a turn-
off generally than the Democrats had hoped. Bumper support from
Cuban-Americans in Florida and Mexican-Americans in southern
Texas saw Mr Trump more than double his winning margin in the
first state and kill off Democratic dreams of winning the second.
Exit polls suggest he increased his share of support from every
group except white men. If that is right, Democrats won the elec-
tion chiefly through their improved turnout effort, not by wooing
voters from Mr Trump.
And this, to recap, was after an election campaign that had fea-
tured the president at his worst. In the midst of a deadly pandemic,
he derided public-health experts and ridiculed his opponent for
following their advice. He gave nodding support to a conspiracy
theory which holds that Democrats are devil-worshipping paedo-
philes. He called Kamala Harris—Joe Biden’s black, female, run-
ning-mate—a “monster”. It is not hard to see why Mr Trump’s op-
ponents consider the results too close. Yet their hopes of a full-on
repudiation, encouraged by a dose of hubris as well as by rotten
polls, now appear unrealistic.
Contemporary nationalist populists—such as Andrzej Duda in
Poland or Viktor Orban in Hungary—and American presidents
alike tend to win re-election. By that measure, merely dislodging
Mr Trump would represent an achievement. And Mr Biden’s cam-
paign message, it should be noted, was almost entirely devoted tothevitalimportanceofdoing exactly that. If the result was not a
crushing rejection of Mr Trump, it seems nevertheless to have
been a rejection.
For those who worry about the endurance of Mr Trump’s strain
of populism, it should also be noted that it is not altogether clear
what it is. After his victory in 2016, Trumpism looked like a rally-
ing-call to the economically distressed. Mr Trump fought this
campaign on his claim to have built “the greatest economy in the
history of our country”. A mixture of isolationism, cronyism, na-
tivist rhetoric, somewhat performative authoritarianism, cor-
porate tax cuts and personality cult, Trumpism is what the presi-
dent says it is. No one finds this more frustrating than the small
minority of Republicans—including Senators Tom Cotton and
Marco Rubio—who have attempted to turn the party into an actual
vehicle for the working-class concerns Mr Trump raised. Arguably
he has thereby emerged as the main obstacle to the conservative
movement he inspired.
His influence may prove to be most enduring if those frustrated
adherents take over in his wake. Mr Rubio and the rest appreciate
that the pre-Trump party had become detached from its main sup-
porters. And the president has normalised protectionism and oth-
er policies that they like. But there is no reason to assume a popu-
list successor to Mr Trump would persist with his race-baiting and
thuggery—or, at least, get away with it so easily if he did. Another
oddity of the president is how voters who would normally balk at
such bad behaviour have given him a pass. Mr Trump, a loud-
mouthed celebrity for 40 years, is in that sense a political one-off.
This should be somewhat reassuring to his critics in both par-
ties. Mr Trump has transformed the right—but his influence may
be less enduring than these results suggest. In a polarised environ-
ment, they probably represent less of an endorsement of him even
on the right than it seems. His low approval rating suggests he has
again been backed by Republicans who dislike him, but cannot
bear to vote for the alternative. The logic of such hyper-partisan-
ship is that, once he is out of office, many Republicans will shift
their allegiance to a new leader, and be influenced by him in turn.
Yet there is still plenty in the election verdict to worry Trump-
ism’s opponents. Above all, the president’s success in broadening
his coalition points to their own weaknesses. Democrats will prob-
ably take from this that they should have offered Hispanics a better
economic message and done more campaigning among them.
They say this after most elections. Yet after a campaign almost en-
tirely governed by negative partisanship on both sides, Democrats
should think harder about how they may have actively repelled
their flagging non-white base.Populist polarisation
Cuban-Americans are hostile to socialism, a label the Democratic
left proudly wears. Mexican-Americans care less about Mr Trump’s
anti-immigrant rhetoric than Democrats—in the face of much evi-
dence to the contrary—persist in believing. A doggedly upwardly
mobile community, Hispanics do not generally consider them-
selves to be the downtrodden minority the left refers to them as.
The Democrats will not be a reliable alternative to right-wing pop-
ulism unless they correct such errors and widen their appeal.
In the current polarised environment, anything less than full
control of the government is a recipe for deadlock and disaffec-
tion. It was the enabling condition for Mr Trump. That America ap-
pears to be headed for another bout of divided government is
therefore hard to celebrate. 7Lexington Trump and Trumpism
The president has transformed his party. But how enduring his influence will be is unclear