Trump's 'Great Realignment'

A look at the numbers and what they mean

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Morning all. After sharing my initial reaction to Donald Trump’s historic victory I’ve now had a chance to look at the numbers. So, here are some thoughts for our Founding and Paid supporters on Trump’s remarkable new coalition of support, the key things you need to know, and what it means not just for conservatism in America but conservative parties across the Pond.

You could argue that ‘the fundamentals’ always favoured Donald Trump. While Democrats and the elite class tried to convince themselves that things like abortion and stoking fears about “fascism” might be enough to swing the election for Harris, the blunt reality ahead of the 2024 U.S. election is that most Americans felt their country was heading in the wrong direction and when it came to their top priority, the economy, they consistently favoured Trump over Kamala Harris.

And this is exactly what played out at the election. Among Americans who think the economy is in the toilet, which is about two-thirds of them, 70% backed Trump. So, you could say America is just the latest example of what we’ve seen across the world since the rise of the Covid-induced cost-of-living crisis; incumbent politicians being smashed at the ballot box. Kamala Harris is not different. She looked like, and literally was, more of the same. And voters right now don’t want more of the same.

But on a much deeper level, as I’ve been pointing out since the early 2010s, this election was always about something much bigger --a political ‘realignment’ that is still sweeping through and completely transforming Western democracies. What we’re living through, in short, is a historic reconfiguration of people’s political loyalties which has been brought about by two things; the rise of new cultural issues like mass immigration, broken borders, worries about identity and belonging, and the glaring failure of the old parties to navigate and respond to this new reality.

Politics, in short, has become ‘two dimensional’, where people’s worries about mass uncontrolled immigration, broken borders, crime, woke ideology, the erosion of their identity and history, and even the survival of Western nations …