Across the Atlantic, the question burns the lips of its many detractors. “After all this, how can we still vote for Trump?” By “all this”, understand the numerous controversies and scandals which have continued to mark the campaign of the former tenant of the White House: “dog-eating” migrants, insults against Kamala Harris – “mentally disabled” , “crazy”, etc. -, ambiguous declarations on the future of democracy, threats against NATO. Not to mention some hard blows, such as his conviction in the Stormy Daniels affair, a televised debate which did not turn to his advantage and the powerful Taylor Swift who came to swell the ranks of Kamalamania. With, in the background, the still vivid memory of the assault on the Capitol in January 2021.
“I don’t even understand how he was elected the first time,” Jim, a fervent Democrat, tells us. The sixty-year-old, originally from Kansas, is hardly tender with his fellow citizens: “If you are ready to support a man who has no program, no vision for America and who only seeks to enrich himself , it reveals your personality,” he says, a bit disillusioned. Because the latest polls only give the current vice-president a slight lead at the national level. The two candidates are even neck and neck in key states (Trump is favored in North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona). About 46% of Americans ready to try the Trump adventure again? A surreal situation in the eyes of his opponents. But not necessarily irrational.
In an analysis recently published in The Conversation, Alex Hinton, professor emeritus of anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, puts forward several explanations. Starting with the biases that predominate on the left. “Trump’s base cannot simply be seen as ‘pathetic’ racists, as Hillary Clinton said in 2016, or as country people wearing red MAGA hats, he believes. His voters are generally more older, white, rural, religious and less educated. But they also include others who are not part of these demographic groups. Which may have different reasons to vote for the former president. Starting with money. “It’s true that total jobs and the average wage have increased under Joe Biden’s term. But for some Trump supporters, this economic boost pales in comparison to the massive surge in inflation during Biden’s mandate”, points out Alex Hinton who, in order to better understand the motivations of the supporters of the Republican candidate, went to meet both “the faithful of Make America Great Again” and “moderate conservatives who hold their noses and vote for him.”
In an interview with L’Express dated September 18, conservative political columnist Peter Roff explained that “there are many people who support Trump and who are not all white men, and for whom the idea of making money is a priority. They say to themselves: ‘I want to feed my family. I want my children to live the American dream that I couldn’t have. And Trump understood that.” In fact, during the debate with Kamala Harris on September 10, the Republican uttered the word “inflation” nine times, the terms “dollar” and “money” eight times each. The Democrat only twice for the first, and not once for the other two. Kamala Harris also made fewer references to “jobs” than her rival.
Second theme likely to convince the most undecided to slip in a Trump ballot: immigration. A subject deemed “very important” by 82% of Republican voters. According to a Gallup poll from June, 55% of Americans want it to decrease (a proportion which has not been so significant since the end of 2001, just after the September 11 attacks). However, “as with inflation, the number of people crossing the border illegally has skyrocketed under the presidency of Joe Biden, even if this massive influx fell to its lowest level in four years in July 2024”, underlines Alex Hinton. Here too, the Republican candidate has flair. During the debate, Trump spoke of “borders” 12 times, four times more than Kamala Harris, and linked the issue of migrants to that of “crime” 17 times.
“Unpretentious masculinity is Trump’s primary appeal”
Beyond the economy and immigration, some Trump voters, the academic continues, simply compare his balance sheet when he was president with that of Biden-Harris, with the feeling that the balance tilts clearly in favor of the first. Alex Hinton notes two other criteria that speak in favor of the Republican candidate: “Trump supporters think he is better placed to deal with the rise of China.” On the other hand, American taxpayers “feel like they are largely paying the bill” for the twin wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
THE Financial Times, he became interested in mid-July to this “asset which escapes many Democrats and foreign observers”, namely: “the Trump factor”. “For many admirers, unadorned masculinity is the former president’s primary appeal,” the authors write.‘article. A poll carried out by NBC on September 29 indicates that 52% of male voters are ready to vote for Trump compared to 40% for Kamala Harris. A survey carried out in August in the six key states shows that men between 18 and 29 years old lean 53% for the Republican candidate, against 40% for the Democrat.
On this last point, Richard Reeves, founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, believes that “young men feel less comfortable on the left than previous generations, due to Democrats’ reluctance to talk about issues that men specifically face, while sometimes portraying them as problematic. Here again, the supporters of the former president understood which button to press. “Donald Trump’s campaign has begun airing a digital ad aimed at men under 35 in key states that criticizes Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s running mate, for implementing the state tax. state tobacco to Zyn, a nicotine sachet popular with young men,” noted political reporter Allan Smith on NBC News a few days ago.
Furthermore, despite his sloppy language and his multiple moral issues, Trump still largely appeals to evangelicals, who represent around 25% of the population and 80% vote for him. For what ? “It is addressed to that part of white America which fears seeing its central place in society called into question. It is also to Trump that we owe the appointment of the conservative judges to the Supreme Court who overthrew Roe vs. Wade, the culmination of a decades-long quest by evangelicals to restrict abortion Finally, and just as importantly, Trump is in step with evangelicals’ growing hostility to abortion. regard to immigration – a hot topic in the church pews these days”, analyzes the Financial Times.
So the Republican candidate’s list of “sins” doesn’t matter. A 20-year-old voter, interviewed by the British daily, confirms: “If I can see even a particle of my faith represented and protected, my vote will go in that direction.” Moreover, the Republican candidate, who has increased the back and forth on the subject of abortion so as not to alienate the most moderates, seems to have made a good calculation. “Donald Trump narrowed the gap slightly with Kamala Harris on the question of which candidate would do a better job on abortion rights, mainly by improving his standing with Republicans by a few points,” points out an article in the New York Times dated September 23.
The Trump “syndrome”
More surprising, if the Democratic candidate appears in the eyes of those surveyed as the more sympathetic of the two, “when voters do not like Kamala Harris, almost all of them do not intend to vote for her, but when voters do not “don’t like Donald Trump, a significant portion of them still support him”, attests an article published on the CBS news site. Thus, “of the two-thirds of voters who do not like Trump personally, 21% vote for him, four times more than the number of voters who do not like Harris personally but support her”, shows the YouGov poll carried out between September 16 and 20. Even more surprising, if “most voters say they find Trump insulting when he speaks, more than a quarter of those who find him insulting support him regardless.”
As for the disastrous image of the attack on the Capitol by pro-Trump activists in 2021, columnist Peter Roff is betting that it will hardly weigh in the balance on November 5. “In the eyes of his supporters, trying to kill a man who is running for president of the United States is at least as great a threat to the democratic process,” he says.
Of course, all these indicators do not predict the result that will come out of the polls. But “if you don’t see past Trump’s lies, chaos and narcissism, you don’t understand why people might vote for him in the first place,” wrote Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former adviser, in the British weekly The New European. Wondering in passing whether he himself had not previously been affected by “Trump Derangement Syndrome”… A psychological state that the famous CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria defined as a “hatred of President Trump so intense that it impairs people’s judgment. Understand that for those who hate Trump, it would be possible to underestimate his chances of regaining, once again, the Oval Office… And you, how much do you hate him?
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