US election 2024: “Empowering a radical agenda”

Trump’s election victory is primarily due to economic considerations made by many voters, says US expert Clüver Ashbrook. Harris gave answers that were too complex. The USA and the world would have to prepare for a Trump who would rule like he was unleashed.

tagesschau.de: Donald Trump has declared himself the winner of the presidential election. What made the difference in your opinion?

Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook: Above all, Donald Trump’s voters will have been strongly motivated by their perception of their own situation. Polls showed early this year that a large portion of Republicans and a smaller portion of Democrats were comfortable with the idea of ​​having a strongman or even the military at the helm of their country.

And so a mixture of the feeling that the country has to take a new path and the analysis of their own economic situation persuaded voters to vote for Trump, especially in the swing states.

Conversely, the Democrats’ argument of “business as usual with stability” but with a new leader probably did not resonate with moderate Republicans. In the end, they probably voted for Trump and didn’t turn out to be swing voters.

“The feeling of missing out economically”

tagesschau.de: Why hasn’t Kamala Harris been able to appeal to more voters when, in fact, the country’s economic situation isn’t that bad?

Clüver Ashbrook: When it comes to the perception of one’s own economic situation and security, it is about the prices of consumer goods, for example. It’s about expensive child care or real estate prices, which cannot yet be translated into cheap loans for everyone even after the Fed’s interest rate cut – this will also have particularly motivated voters in cities where he seems to have made gains.

These are still consequences of the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009, which were also accelerated by the pandemic. For many people, this has resulted in a job loss or change of job and increased the feeling of insecurity and paternalism from the state.

Take the swing state of Pennsylvania and especially the region around Philadelphia – post-pandemic consumer goods there are more expensive than in almost any other part of the USA. Here, voters probably couldn’t reconcile the fact that the American economy as a whole is in strong shape, but that they themselves have the feeling that they are missing the boat economically. This is also about personal status, which in the USA is strongly linked to economic position.

“The classic problem of the Democrats”

tagesschau.de: In this situation, did Harris make mistakes in her campaign and not provide clear enough answers to these questions?

Clüver Ashbrook: Harris had the classic Democratic problem. She tried to use facts to create clear text in a situation in which Americans almost only wanted images, emotions and short text. What she wrote down in her 93-page economic program brought with it a classic level of complexity in the spirit of the Democratic Party. This cannot be explained with simple messages. And when Harris was asked what her message was and what she would do differently than Joe Biden, she launched into long explanations. Apparently they were too much for many voters – at least that’s what we can see from the results now.

On the other hand, Trump was able to continue to score points with very simple populist messages: He would make America great again, he would revive America’s economic power. How he wants to do that seems to have been of secondary importance to his voters. Harris always wanted to go into the evidence and explain. She will have simply lost certain people.

Incompatible things yet compatible with each other

tagesschau.de: If the economic situation feels so bad, shouldn’t Trump have done even better?

Clüver Ashbrook: His messages were too radical for that – and the misogynistic, i.e. misogynistic, statements were simply too violent. By the way, we see that night that in many states where abortion rights could also be voted on, voters wrote the right to abortion into the constitution of their states and yet the majority voted for Trump – even though one seems to exclude the other. But it must also be noted that Trump’s success was narrow in many states.

“Fundamental departure from Reagan’s policies”

tagesschau.de: What happens now? There are signs that Republicans will also win the majority in the Senate and possibly the House of Representatives. What does this mean for government work?

Clüver Ashbrook: On the one hand, this success will be an authorization for an agenda that could not be more radical and that sets itself apart from classic Republican politics. It will be a fundamental departure from the conservative policies of Ronald Reagan.

We know from the “Project 2025” guide how each ministry should be restructured. It will be about overcoming the bureaucratic class and putting the Justice Department under the control of the White House. In the Senate, it will be interesting to see who becomes Senate Speaker and takes over from Mitch McConnell. This person will enable whatever Trump wants to play through this level.

He has already threatened to reject a budget if Congress wants to continue to provide strong support to Ukraine. He would also undermine congressional legislation that he doesn’t like. This has never happened in the history of the USA and in the understanding of the separation of powers. But in Trump we see someone who is trying in every way to break political norms and degrade America’s political traditions.

“No longer exposed to barriers”

tagesschau.de: Will it then depend, as in his first term in office, not least on his environment and his advisors?

Clüver Ashbrook: In his first term, the “adults in the room” still had a regulating influence on Trump’s chaos. Now he could be a completely unregulated man in the Oval Office, who acts erratically, pits his advisors against one another and, above all, who is not put in his place by either a Republican Senate or, if necessary, a Republican House of Representatives.

“Things that voters also want”

tagesschau.de: Are you afraid that Trump will now rule like he is unfettered?

Clüver Ashbrook: Absolutely. He announced this in all his campaign appearances. This is also announced by Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, which is behind “Project 2025”. He says that the second American revolution is coming, which will only be bloodless if the liberals allow it.

Anyone who has read the manifesto, who is familiar with the statements of Trump’s own think tank America First Policy Institute and the Republican Party platform will find all of these points there.

These are things that his voters and supporters also want to see – for example, when Trump says that he will be dictator for a day and will drill for fossil fuels, remove America from the multilateral institutions, effectively shut down NATO and only then the Europeans in NATO’s mutual assistance clause will protect them if they pay.

Trump will try to exploit NATO and Europe and play Europeans off against each other. You can find it all in the manifesto. He was prepared for this. He got a blueprint for this. And if he does indeed act as freely as he currently seems possible, this will be the beginning of the transformation into an executive dictatorship and thus the functional end of American constitutional democracy as we know it.

The interview was conducted by Eckart Aretz, tagesschau.de