From the start, it was improbable. And it actually didn't go any further. Kamala Harris, a black woman with roots in South Asia who was not in the race three months ago, who had to succeed a man caught up in her age and who found herself leading an impromptu campaign against a candidate convicted before the courts, in short the challenge was disproportionate.
His rival has violated all the norms of political propriety, has given lie to the old certainties of American politics that we must seek to be as unifying as possible, certainly the least repulsive to moderate voters.
Donald Trump won this election, despite himself. Until the last day of the campaign, he showed himself to be rude, vulgar, aggressive and proud of it. If the voters did not punish him, it is because the alternative inspired them even less. It has to be done.
Kamala Harris paid the price for her banal, even insignificant, vice-presidency. She had been a poor candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2020; his party should have thought twice before supporting it. The extreme prudence of her campaign and the vagueness around what she proposed to her compatriots were enough to keep away the last undecided people.
Voters wanted change, something else, anything. They preferred the nonsense that Trump offered to the Jell-O put on the table by Harris.
I don't put all the blame on his shoulders. She also ran this race for the presidency with the ball and chain of the unpopular Biden administration on one foot and that of the Democratic program on the other.
The party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama is disconnected from what Americans have become and want. They will have four years, the Democrats, to think about it.
