America more polarized than ever

In an interesting analysis published in France in Le Monde Diplomatique, Jerome Karabel, a professor in sociology at Berkeley, gives the main reasons for Donald Trump's victory in the November 2024 presidential election.

Main excerpts below :

The re-election of Donald Trump, this time with a lead in votes over his opponent, reflects significant electoral shifts towards the Republican Party among popular categories, but also among young people and Hispanics. The gap between the two candidates may be less than 2% of the electorate, but the Democrats cannot shake off the image of an elitist, urban and overeducated party.

What does his victory reflect?

• A polarization of American political life that continues to deepen:

Between 1994 and 2014, the proportion of Republicans seeing Democrats as a “threat to the well-being of the country” more than doubled, from 17% to 36%; same trend in the other direction among the Democrats, with 16% and 27% respectively. This was the background to the 2016 election.

• The relative weight of the two major parties has been very similar for 25 years:

Over the course of the seven presidential elections held from 2000 to 2024, the Democratic vote and the Republican vote have both oscillated within a very narrow range: between 48% and 53% for the first, between 46% and 51% for the second. This meant that any Republican entering the presidential race in 2024 could count on a floor of around 45% of the vote – a crucial factor in understanding how a candidate with as many negative attributes as Mr. Trump was able to garner half votes.

• The rejection vote:

The rise of this rejection vote, which we see in many democracies, is characterized by an electoral choice motivated less by sympathy for one of the two parties than by detestation of the other. To measure the phenomenon, researchers use “emotion thermometers” to express grades in degrees on a scale from 0 (negative) to 100 (positive). In 1978, 19% of those surveyed gave the opposing team 30 degrees or less. In 2012, this proportion increased to 56%, almost tripling (1). At the same time, we are witnessing a worsening of “affective polarization”, which manifests itself in a deep aversion towards supporters of the other party.

• A more marked polarization in the US than in any other industrialized democracy (2):

It now even affects the most intimate of spheres, that of the couple. In 2020, a study revealed that only 6% of those questioned had a spouse who was a supporter of the opposing party (3).

• Soaring prices and upheavals following Covid-19:

Across the Western world, these two factors have recently driven incumbents from power. However, inflation is an extremely sensitive subject for Americans, no less than 60% of whom say they have difficulty making ends meet. (4)

• Confidence in institutions at its lowest:

Kamala Harris was seen as the candidate of the system and the status quo, which, in the current climate, is not an advantage. The US is the G7 country where citizens have the least faith in their institutions. While nearly 80% of Americans said they had confidence in their government in the mid-1960s, this rate reached a historically low level of 22% in April 2024...(5) In this atmosphere marked by cynicism and distrust, an anti-system candidate such as M. Trump had every chance.

• Trump's progress since 2020:

He has made progress across the country, especially among residents of rural areas, young people aged 18 to 29, non-white voters without a diploma and Hispanics, both men and women. It is to these categories that he owes, essentially, his victory in the election.

• “A powerful and unprecedented mandate? »:

He actually can't claim this. His lead, less than 3 million votes, is half as large as that enjoyed by Mr. Biden in 2020. Mr. Trump, who totaled less than 50% of the votes, was only ahead of Ms. Harris by 1.7 points .

• The Democrats' loss of the workers' vote:

This trend is already old and this vote continues to decline, as in many Western democracies. In the US, this erosion has long been especially visible among the white working class. The new development in the 2024 elections is the increase in the Republican vote among workers of color (6). Hispanic men, among others, whether workers or not, voted for Mr. Trump by 55% against 43% for Kamala Harris, while Biden was ahead of Trump in this group by 23 points in 2020...

• Not only economic reasons, but also cultural ones:

The question of gender, exploited to the point by the Republicans, is an example of this. Whether or not Democrats are more contemptuous than their Republican counterparts (of which they are often accused), their party has become for many synonymous with "political correctness", cancel culture and "wokism"(8) as a symbol of the abyss which has widened between the party elites and the working class, with very real electoral consequences. A survey carried out the day after the election among three thousand voters showed that, among the reasons given to justify the rejection of Kamal Harris, the fact that she seemed "more concerned with dealing with cultural issues like that of trans people, than with coming in aid to the middle classes” came in third position, just after inflation and immigration (13).

• The final word (and a note of optimism!):

Trumpism is not without antecedents in the history of the United States: we think of the expropriation of Native Americans, the institution of slavery, the Klu Kux Klan, the anti-immigration leagues of the beginning of the 20th century, to McCarthyism, to the campaigns of conservatives George Wallace and Patrick Buchanan, or even to the development of armed militias. But the United States is also the country that saw the birth of the abolitionist movement, the movement for women's rights with the Seneca Falls convention (1848), the movement for homosexual rights, in the wake of the Stonewall riots. They are the home of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the socialist Eugen Debs and Roosevelt, who was elected president 4 times to implement his New Deal. And they were the first Western nation to elect (and re-elect) a black president.

The period which is opening will be marked by the clash between these two competing traditions. If Trumpism is indisputably part of what America is, it is very far from being reduced to it.

(1) Alan L. Abramowitz, The Great Alignment Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump, Yale University Press, New Haven 2018

(2) May Wong, "America leads other countries in deepening polarization", Stanford Institute for EconomicPolicy Research, Jan 20 2020, https ://siepr.stanford.edu

(3) Colin A. Fisk znd Bernard L. Fraga, "'Til death do us part(isanship). Voting and polarization in opposite-party marriages"

(4) Jessica Dickler, "61% of Americans say they are living paycheck to paycheck even as inflation cool", CNN 31/07/2023

(5) "Public trust in government: 1958-2024", Pew Research Center, 24/06/2024

(6) Zachary B. Wolf, Curt Merrill and Way Mullery, "Anatomy of three Trump elections: how americans shifted in 2024 vs 2020 and 2016", CNN 6/11/2024

(7) Rachel Uranga and Brittny Maija, "Why Latino men voted for Trump: "It's the economy, stupid"", Los Angeles Times, 8/11/2024

(8) Maureen Dowd, "Democrats and the case of mistaken identity politics", The New York Times, 9/11/2024

(9) "Why America chose Trump: Inflation, immigration and the democratic brand", Blueprint, 8/11/2024