The night before the US election, the analysis across cable television was pretty clear: Kamala Harris had it.
“You know when you can just feel it,” a former Hillary Clinton aide on a CCTV panel show told the viewers, “people said the same thing in 2016, but this is just different.”
She was far from alone. “I’m feeling great,” a Democrat expert said, smiling. She’s got an inclusive vision and a to-do list.”
It was strange to hear this sentiment because, traveling around the swing state of Wisconsin in the run-up to the election, I had not heard much positivity. There was little sense that Kamala’s dream was catching fire.
What I saw was people were either upset or angry about inflation, the price of food or, more importantly in a country with sparse public transport, fuel.
Our trip’s mission was different from other media outlets’ coverage of the US Election. Rather than following the main junket from city to city, photographer Phil Harris and I tried to get off the beaten track and find out how everyday Americans felt.
What quickly emerged was that the caricature of Trump supporters as Far-Right neo-Nazis with horrendous views on just about every topic was completely inaccurate.
Whilst you can find a handful of people who match that description at his rallies, the focus the UK media has had on that minority is a total misrepresentation of the political landscape on the other side of the Atlantic.
But perhaps, most egregiously from a journalistic perspective, by focusing on the outliers who think January 6th was a psyop or that women shouldn’t run the country we are doing nothing to help British people understand the world’s most powerful country.
The truth is that even the people most heartbroken by Trump’s victory had friends and family who voted for him.
What I found was that practically every Democrat who thought the former president was shameful or fascist had brothers, uncles and female friends who were a red hat-wearing MAGA fans.
That type of duality is rarely presented by the UK press who prefer to focus on the, as Emily Matlis might say, ‘batsh**’ element. On the ground, however, what is obvious is that the vast majority of Trump supporters are regular people whose main concerns were economic.
For example, the young men who backed him were not doing so because they’d been groomed by some online manosphere into heartless misogynists, these were kids who were worried about their student loans and buying a house in the future.
Not that this is what the TV news reported. As the countdown to the vote began CNN spent huge amounts of time discussing how a racist joke told by a comedian at the Trump Madison Square Garden rally now meant Puerto Rican voters would not vote for the former president.
“In a close race, that could be crucial,” was the repeated phrase.
I found it hard to believe that the commentators felt that an entire ethnic group’s feelings were so homogenous that analysts could say that a joke at a rally was going to influence their voting intentions.
Was it not possible for them to understand the fact it’s possible for people to hold two seemingly conflicting beliefs at the same time? I wondered.
The media commentators didn’t appear to understand it was possible for Puerto Ricans to be offended by the joke and still think Donald Trump would be a better president.
I also thought was it not offensive to suggest people vote based purely on who they are rather than what they think?
No data was offered to support these assertions and there were no Puerto Ricans being interviewed saying they were switching sides.
But it was a pattern that was repeated endlessly on the TV news. The bigger the gap between what they claimed and what I saw on the ground the more I started to think Trump was going to win.
And then he did.
In the aftermath, left-wing commentator Owen Jones was savaged on X for tweeting “I’m going back to my hotel in New York […] With a Muslim Pakistani American cab driver… who voted for Donald Trump because “the prices were too high” under Biden.”
After having JK Rowling accuse him of “sneering” Jones claimed he was attacking the Democrats for pushing voters towards Trump with their economic policies.
Whether he was sneering or not, Jones’s cab driver illustrated what I was seeing on the ground, that people were attracted to Trump because they thought their lives would be better under him. And it should be pointed out that the Guardian commentator wrote a column agreeing that the victory was not a surprise.
For many Trump voters it didn’t matter what race or religion they were, in many cases, it didn’t even matter whether they liked him or thought he was a good person, which many people didn’t.
They chose the person they thought would improve their lives.
Now the consequences of that could be massive and far-reaching, there were people on both sides talking about the death of democracy and civil war post-election.
But let’s not misrepresent why people chose Trump. The majority I met were not mad, racist or fascist, they simply thought he’d get them the best deal.
