As election after election and referendum after referendum shows, the yawning divide in Western politics is not between left and right: it’s between elites and everyone else. Brexit, the Voice, Trump... on every one of these, elite consensus was unanimous and strident. Yet, to their shock and dismay, every time, the vast press of voters disagreed with them.
Even on a key theme of the Democrat elites’ election rhetoric – ‘saving democracy’ – voters had a very different take than the elite consensus. To be sure, American voters agreed that American democracy needed to be saved.
But not from Donald Trump: from the Democrats.
The Associated Press conducts the broadest exit poll of voters as they leave polling stations on election day after casting their ballots. It’s called AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of 120,000 voters. In the words of the Associated Press’ own report: “While inflation and immigration emerged as the dominant themes in this year’s presidential race, another issue was prominent in the minds of voters for both major candidates: the stakes for democracy.”
“Half of voters identified democracy as the single most important motivating factor for their vote.” The key phrase here is “motivating factor”. AP continues: “That was higher than the share of voters who answered the same way about inflation, the situation at the US-Mexico border, abortion policy or free speech.”
Before the left cheer, voters agreed that democracy was under threat. But the threat was not Donald Trump.
Concern for America’s democracy was the dominant force for two-thirds of the people who voted for Kamala Harris and one-third of those voting for Donald Trump, the survey found.
But hold on. If that’s right, surely Harris would have been the likely winner. Because “democracy” was a huge Democrat theme. They hammered the line that Trump was a “threat to democracy”. Harris even called him a “fascist”.
So what’s the catch? It turns out that Democrat voters’ definition of the threat to democracy was completely different to Republicans’ definition.
A respected Democrat pollster, Celinda Lake, said that based on her work with focus groups during the campaign, she had found “the great irony is that Trump” – who was supposed to be the great threat to democracy – “won the threat-to-democracy vote”.
Because the biggest threat to American democracy, voters decided, was open borders.
Illegal immigration was an area where Trump was perceived to be the better candidate. He whipped up fear that unless it was halted “we won’t have a country any more”.
Which is literally true. A sovereign nation is, by definition, one that controls its border. Open borders means that your country is no longer a sovereign nation.
Lake’s finding is supported by a separate poll conducted before election day. September’s American Identity poll, conducted by Ipsos for Syracuse University, found that “a majority of Americans across the political spectrum” believed undocumented immigrants to be “a threat to democracy”.
In this way, Trump turned the Democrats’ attack back on Harris. Her more abstract talk of the threat to democracy was outdone by the more concrete threat perceived to come from an out-of-control border.
Not only that, but Americans have had a ringside seat for four years of the Democrats acting out every threat to democracy imaginable. It was Democrats who surrounded Washington DC with concrete, barbed-wire and troops personally vetted for loyalty to the regime. It was Democrats who subjected the entire military to a re-education campaign. It was Democrats who pursued their opponent with an avalanche of vexatious lawfare reminiscent of Soviet show trials.
And it was Democrats who tried to assassinate Trump when all else failed.
Above all, Americans recognised perfectly well that the Democrats are the party of the elite – and the elite hate the hoi polloi. When Hillary Clinton called them ‘deplorable’ in 2016, and then Joe Biden called them ‘garbage’ in 2024, Americans got to hear exactly what the Democrat elite thought of them.
Young men resent being demeaned as inherently “toxic”; many voters resent the loss of traditional language and social customs.
The US news outlet Axios reports that both Harris and Trump supporters agreed that one of the most effective ads of the campaign ran: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
And, in the end, it was the economy, stupid.
