(This article is part of the View From India newsletter curated by The Hindu’s foreign affairs experts. To get the newsletter in your inbox every Monday, subscribe here.)
After what pollsters and commentators confidently and repeatedly called a close contest to the White House, we saw Republican candidate Donald Trump win the Presidency of the United States, decisively beating his chief rival and Democrat Kamala Harris. Mr. Trump had garnered the 270 electoral college votes required for victory by early Wednesday, and now has a likely final total of 312 votes to Ms. Harris’s 226.
The outcome of the U.S. elections has sparked varied analyses – right from the very lazy, reductive “people are racist or stupid” to the more compelling arguments about why the Democratic Party could not appeal to a wide section of voters, especially the working class, and how Mr. Trump’s campaign might have spoken to those sections.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” said Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, a presidential candidate that the Democratic Party has twice rejected for his leftist ideas. One may disagree with his political ideology, but his reading of the election outcome is hardly off the mark. Multiple surveys show that Mr. Trump’s victory was in good measure fuelled by the support of the working class and racial minorities in an election that saw economic concerns dominate.
Our readers who followed the coverage of our Washington DC Correspondent Sriram Lakshman and former DC-based colleague Varghese George over the last few weeks would be familiar with the complex story that is the US election. Through ground reporting and analysis, they neatly unpacked the political terrain, the many diverse sections of voters, and their pre-occupations.
So, what does the outcome tell us? Sriram Lakshman’s comprehensive take – ‘Election 2024: Trump’s victory and the path ahead for the U.S.’ has all you need to know about the poll outcome. Watch here.
In effect, what the ruling establishments of both Republican and Democratic parties had tried to dismiss as an inconsequential disturbance in American politics has turned out to be a powerful political movement that returned Donald Trump to the White House, writes Varghese George. Read this profile of the movement that backed Mr. Trump titled ‘Revenge of the dispossessed’, to appreciate why many Americans wanted to ‘Make America Great Again’ through Mr. Trump.
All the same, “While the ‘MAGA movement’ has most certainly seen a powerful revival in the outcome of the 2024 election, the rules-based international order founded on the bedrock of universal rights and liberal values is far from dead. When the personality cult of Mr. Trump ebbs in 2028, there will have to be a reckoning,” The Hindu’s Editorial ‘Rein in the darkness: On a second term for Donald Trump’ argued.
The Hindu’s coverage of the elections tried to bring our readers a 360 degree-view of what the polls mean for Americans and the rest of the world — read Narayan Lakshman on ‘Surviving the messiah’, Suhasini Haidar on ‘What Trump 2.0 means for India and South Asia’, Stanly Johny on ‘A West Asia under Donald Trump’ and Kunal Shankar on ‘A win that will affect the global economy’. Srinivasan Ramani did some number crunching to help us make sense of the data around the polls across the States. Our team also came together online for this sharp discussion. Do tell us what you thought of our coverage across platforms!
Top 5 stories we are reading this week:
1. Susie Wiles: The Ice Maiden – Joan Sony Cherian profiles the first female Chief of Staff to the U.S. President
2. War, news, and Trump – Varghese George on U.S. mainstream media being caught in the whirlwind of domestic politics
3. Distant neighbours: India and Pakistan seem incapable of normal sporting ties, says The Hindu Editorial
4. All eyes on Baku and the climate finance goal – by Vibha Dhawan and Shailly Kedia
5. Rajiv Bhatia writes on The BRICS journey gaining heft while in transition
Published – November 11, 2024 01:43 pm IST
