Who "betrayed" Kamala Harris?

2024-11-06 19:49:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

Kamala Harris

When the index that the New York Times newspaper uses online to calculate a presidential candidate's chances of victory passed 90%, Republican front-runner Donald Trump had not yet reached the 270 votes needed for his second presidency.

The newspaper's computer workers were on strike, but the index appeared as a surprise and hit the hopes of Vice President Kamala Harris, igniting the enthusiasm of Trumpists, firstly billionaire Elon Musk.

America's turn to the right is far greater than that of 2016, when Hillary Clinton dominated the popular vote and ultimately surrendered by a handful of votes, moreover, voters chose Trump as a protest, unaware for his dashing style; and saw the collapse of the Capitol, January 6, 2021, making his own ministers talk about the "fascism" of their leader.

Control of the Senate, regained, will allow the administrations of Donald Trump and JD Vance to govern without much upheaval until at least the 2026 midterm elections.

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump

Today, America is voting passionately in a referendum on Trumpism that chooses the manifesto of duties and tariffs, of a radical war on immigration with the deportation of illegal immigrants, of no abortion, of distrust of traditional allies and institutions founded after the world war and the war of Cold.

Trump spoke clearly of a return to "America First," an isolationist and protectionist rallying cry popular in the 1930s.

The dynamics of the 2024 US election could not be clearer and soon the world, the European Union, China, Russia, will learn the lesson, from the fields of Ukraine to the infantry attacks of North Korea, to the Middle East on fire .

Key states, where Harris dreamed of a narrow victory, gradually went to Trump's side, and the night turned dark for the Democrats.

The first signs had come early, from Florida, when people were still unconsciously dancing and singing at Harris headquarters.

Kamala Harris

In Miami Dade, where the Democratic presence is historic, Trump got a flattering result and even in the strongholds of the Grand Old Republican Party he bettered the records of 2016 and 2020.

A similar pattern emerged from the vote in Georgia, with women not supporting Harris in the expected volume, young men voting for him in such a percentage that it erased the potential Democratic supremacy among women under 30 and above all Hispanics who did not take sides as they did with President Joe Biden.

Anti-Latino jokes at the last GOP rally in Madison Square Garden are forgotten in the quest for lower prices and lower taxes.

This is the tide of the 2024 election, clearly, which the strategists of first Biden and then Harris underestimated.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris

The identity politics of men, women, people of color, white, Latino, Asian, LGBTQ+, workers, farmers, graduates, college graduates disintegrates after the pandemic, eight chaotic years of populism in a maelstrom of individualism where tax cuts promised by Republicans to individual people are more fascinating than the trillions invested in reforms and public spending by Biden.

And the threat to deport millions of illegal immigrants, which seemed to spark so much outrage online, is being cheered at the polls.

It is a war-weary America in faraway countries where, according to a Pew Institute study, the real dream for most citizens is not to get rich and move up the social ladder, as in Fitzgerald's classic novel "The Great Gatsby." , but, in a more modest way, to maintain social status and not take steps backwards, like grandfathers and fathers after the fall of the Berlin Wall and globalization.

Yesterday's vote leaves Donald Trump as master of the land, and allies and opponents will soon be dealing with a protagonist who will lack the timidity and discretion of his first term, sure to have his countrymen on board. side and with a deputy like Vance who will give him intellectual ideas, radicalizing politics to the right.

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The conservative Silicon Valley crusade, led by South African twins Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, with campaign coffers and social media mobilization, gives neo-Trumpism a special valence.

Musk could be named in the spending review, cutting that Deep State, the federal bureaucracy that Trump has always hated, and tech oligarchs fight to expand markets without borders: not by Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and editor of the Washington Post, for support Harris, this can be explained in this way, with Thiel's motto 'freedom is no longer compatible with democracy'.

The social and political makeup of the 2024 vote forces Democrats to face a brutal examination of conscience.

As we wrote yesterday, the loss weighs on Joe Biden, unable to retire in time for an open primary season and then Harris' godfather, with the double jeopardy of nominating a black and Asian woman who , as his deputy, shares his unpopularity.

Joe Biden

Never in the history of the USA has the party of an unpopular leader like Biden returned to the White House and the tradition has not been broken.

Great artists, the energy of Harris, a sixties-style mobilization of volunteers were not enough to reunite the nation that decided to see Trump II, experiencing firsthand the experiment of tax cuts, tariffs and nationalism.

For Trump, it is a remarkable personal victory, after the two attacks he suffered, the immediate bloody response in Butler, Pennsylvania, and a campaign conducted with even darker rhetoric about American decline and the walls that must be erected against all.

A Trumpist White House will attract European conservatives to the right, starting in Italy, while radicalizing progressives on the left, starting with Schlein's Democrats and Melenchon's militants in France.

No one can rationally predict which currents and movements will open the gates of voting in the USA in 2024 and how far they will all take us./ "La Repubblica"