In the end it wasn’t even close. Donald Trump won the US Presidential election with 312 Electoral College votes to 226 for Kamala Harris. And he won the popular vote too, 50.5 percent to 47.9 percent, the first Republican presidential candidate to do so since 2004. Added to that the Republicans have taken control of the Senate and it seems House of Representatives (at the time of writing final counting is still going on in Arizona).

Many of the opinion pollsters and political commentators, and much of the media got it wrong.

Trump gains ground

There was no late surge for Kamala Harris. Women did turnout in greater numbers than they did in 2020 but Harris’s share of the vote was not appreciably greater than that for Joe Biden four years ago.

Compared to the 2020 election Trump increased his share of the vote among black men from 12 to 20 percent, and among young adults from 35 to 42 percent. And 45 percent of Hispanic/Latino voters still voted for Trump despite the “floating garbage” ‘joke’ about Puerto Rico.

The issues

The major issues that determined the result of the 2024 US Presidential election were not abortion, gender issues, or a threat to US democracy.

The two key issues that decided the US election were inflation and immigration, felt keenly particularly by working class Americans. But that’s not the elephant in the room. Read on.

Blame and excuses

The blame game and excuse peddling has begun among the traumatised Democrats.

Joe Biden should have stood down as candidate far earlier than he did. Kamala Harris did not have enough time to establish her identity, or develop her political views and policy positions. As Vice President Harris did not, or could not, differentiate herself from her boss for four years. Throw in misogyny and racism and the fact that Harris was a very underwhelming candidate. Possibly all factors but still not the elephant in the room.

Are you listening?

So how to explain this seismic election result (if you can’t feel the political tectonic plates moving you must be many, many miles away from the United States).

From the USA, to Germany, France, England (think Brexit) and Italy, and among nice social democrat Scandinavians who are not “right wing”, not “hard right”, ordinary people (I mean that as a compliment) feel the political class, the ‘Hill’ the ‘Westminster Village’, the media and commentariat – the ‘They’: that THEY ARE NOT LISTENING!

That’s the elephant in the room.

As I listen to the BBC World Service (as I write), read the papers and social media comment and hear the excuses coming from politicians and commentators, they’re still not listening.