Why BJP keeps winning
November 9, 2024
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(The article was originally published in Indian Express on November 09, 2024 as a part of Dr Madhav’s column titled ‘Ram Rajya’. Views expressed are personal.)
Four years ago, in November 2020, when the results of the US presidential elections were announced, Donald Trump vociferously complained that the Democrats “stole his election”. Despite rejection of his claims by election officials and the courts, his Republican supporters remained convinced, with a majority believing that a widespread fraud had denied Trump a second term. Four years later, when Trump returned to bid for a second term as US president, he literally “stole the show”. It was a massive victory — not only securing a majority in the electoral college, but also a popular majority, majorities in both Senate and the House, majority of state governors and majority in state legislatures. No Republican president in several decades could register such a comprehensive victory in one election.
The US electoral map looks very red, with a few blue dots on the West Coast and the Northeast. While the so-called swing states went to Trump, cracking the Democratic “blue wall”, states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, which voted against Republicans since 1992, except on rare occasions like 2016. In what appears to be an inclusive victory, Trump garnered a substantial share in the Latino, Black American and minority vote.
This must be seen as a victory for Trump rather than just a defeat of Kamala Harris. She was pitted against many odds in this election. She was not the natural choice of the Democrats as she did not pass through the fire test of the primaries. That led to lack of enthusiasm in the party and senior leaders like Robert Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard switched sides to support Trump. She had only three months for campaigning in a vast country, not enough to distance herself from the disastrous legacy of the Biden administration. Finally, entrenched sexism and gender dynamics in the American polity, that make it an uphill task for women candidates to prove their worth and win male votes too, did not help her. Despite these handicaps, she secured more than 47 per cent popular vote in a highly polarised election, indicating that the Democrat vote base remains substantially strong.
On his part, Trump faced unprecedented media bias. In fact, this election has once again exposed the extreme liberal bias of big media in New York and Washington. Trump enjoyed no-holds-barred support from Elon Musk, the flamboyant Tesla CEO who also controls Twitter, now known as X, in reaching out to the millennials and young voters. One important message from this election is the reiteration of the superior power of social media over the so-called mainstream media in carrying political messages.
This mandate, at one level, was a rejection of Biden’s disastrous economic policies that led to high inflation. It was also a rejection of Biden’s, and also Harris’s, NGO-style politics that led to extreme levels of wokeism and cancel culture. One of the first presidential decrees signed by Biden in 2021 was to allow transgender men to use women’s toilets. With the overt and covert support of the liberal administration, woke groups converted university campuses into unsafe places for people with different ideologies, so much so that parents started fearing for the safety of their children.
Trump’s emphatic victory reiterated what authors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge described America to be: The Right Nation. Irrespective of whether they elect a Democrat or a Republican administration, Americans remain conservative at the core, the book argued in the early 2000s. Trump’s campaign highlighted certain conservative concerns regarding issues like illegal immigration, abortion policies and wokeism, besides promising to “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) through economic policies like increased import tariffs and “Buy American” campaigns.
From his “build the wall” programme in 2016 to creating the “largest mass deportation programme in history” in 2024, Trump’s campaign against illegal immigrants appears to have struck a chord with the American voters who were fedup with the policies of the Democrats on this question. War between the Democrats and Republicans over illegal migrants became so intense that the Republican governor of Texas dumped them in buses and deported them to New York where the Democrat mayor hired hundreds of rooms in hotels to settle the illegals. Not just hotel rates, but crime rates too went up, leading to Harris struggling even in Manhattan, a hardcore Democrat county. During the campaign, Trump indicated that he would restrict legal migration too by reinstating his first-term policies like “Remain in Mexico” and also a sort of “ideological screening” for immigration seekers by restricting entry from certain countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
On issues related to LGBTQ and wokeness, Trump’s poll-time rhetoric is bound to create a lot of heat and dust in the country. He took a reasonable approach on the abortion question, refusing to impose a federal ban and returning abortion regulation to state governments. That helped blunt the Democrat campaign in favour of full abortion rights to women, and also won votes from conservative women groups for the Republicans. However, it is on the transgender issues that Trump is expected to take a tough line — he declared that he would end the practice of “boys in girls’ sports” and also the mandatory DEI programmes in federal institutions.
Liberals are in shock. They thought that Trump would remain an accident, an exception and a historical blip. But he is back with a vengeance, demonstrating the potential to reshape American politics in a mould they abhor. Trump is going to redefine the global political landscape too. Woke liberals of the world have to brace for more shocks.
