Alert – SARAH VINE: Kamala’s biggest mistake was to assume women would vote for her just because of her gender. How utterly entitled and arrogant

As Democrats all over the world weep into their kombucha, I’m afraid I have only one thing to say: you brought this on yourselves. I’m sure Kamala Harris is a perfectly nice woman but at no point during this campaign did she demonstrate the strength of character, vision and sheer star power required to win the White House.

Many Americans – certainly most Americans I know – have deep reservations about Donald Trump. They find him distasteful, divisive, deeply dodgy. And indeed, he can be all of those things. But even the staunchest of liberals felt deeply disappointed and let down by this Biden administration and, in particular, its stubborn refusal to acknowledge the current President’s evident shortcomings.

Harris was a poor choice of candidate – but perhaps more significantly she was also an establishment choice on the part of an elite desperate to stay in power, a human box-ticking exercise who, whatever her own personal merits, was always going to stick in the craw of the ordinary American.

She was tense, didactic, finger-wagging and, above all, reductive and politically one-dimensional. She aligned herself with a narrow segment of the electorate, again its own kind of elite, comprised of people obsessed with identity politics and other liberal hobby horses, not realising – or perhaps not wanting to realise – that to win over the whole country you need to sell yourself as a broad church.

The moment Trump put on that hi-viz jacket and climbed, somewhat unsteadily, into a garbage truck was a piece of political genius, writes SARAH VINE

Bracketing all women together in this way was a bad miscalculation – as was that final, cringeworthy advert voiced by (yet another multimillionaire celebrity) Julia Roberts, with two ‘soccer moms’ defying their redneck husbands to put a tick in Kamala’s box. Life is not a Hollywood script.

Bottom line, people don’t want to be told that their concerns about important political issues such as immigration and law and order make them bad people. The job of a good politician above all else is to listen, even if they don’t like what’s being said.

One of Harris’s biggest mistakes, I think, was to assume that just because she was a woman of colour, that meant all women, of colour or otherwise, would naturally side with her, especially given Trump’s ongoing problems with the likes of Stormy Daniels et al. This is a lazy assumption that those on the left in Britain also make (see Labour’s Dawn Butler MP sharing a social media post that described the newly-crowned Tory leader Kemi Badenoch as ‘white supremacy in blackface’).

They assume that they somehow ‘own’ certain demographics, which again speaks of entitlement and arrogance. Women are far more complex and nuanced than that. In particular, Harris showed spectacularly poor judgment on the issue of abortion.

This was felt to be her so-called trump card, the idea that women would come out to vote for her in their droves to protect reproductive rights. But that seems to have backfired. Abortion rights are indeed an important issue for many women – but the idea that it’s the ONLY thing they care about is, once again, reductive and patronising.

There are just as many who think that the safety of women is equally at risk from gender politics and the dangers and injustices posed by male-bodied individuals invading their sporting fields and safe spaces in the name of inclusivity. And let’s face it, Harris’s track record on protecting THOSE sorts of women’s rights was not great.

It is also insultingly patronising to assume that women are not concerned about big issues such as the economy, immigration and law and order.

This was clear in the difference between her supporters and Trump’s: the latter a rag-tag bunch of political all-sorts, hers blue-haired harridans or hand-wringing billionaire celebrities in their ivory limousines. 

Wheeling out the likes of Oprah, J-Lo and Cardi B to lecture voters on why it was their duty to do as they were told was beyond cringeworthy and guaranteed to produce the opposite effect, as was her sycophantic appearance on Saturday Night Live, surrounded by fawning comedians and celebrities.

Former President Obama’s (late and somewhat reluctant) endorsement only served to remind people what a successful Democratic candidate looks like.

Insulated in her echo chamber, Harris utterly failed to reach beyond the dinner parties of the Upper West Side and Hollywood. But in the end, it was not she who struck the killer blow to her own campaign: it was Biden himself.

In response to an admittedly very off-colour joke about Puerto Ricans, the President described Trump voters as ‘garbage’. It was a turning point, a bald, visceral statement, an unguarded moment that became a clarion call to all those who, if not exactly Trump supporters, were damned if they were going to be told they were trash for not buying into the Kamala Kool-Aid.

It was a slip as bad as Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ – and ultimately showed that nothing had changed: this Democratic elite was suffering from a seemingly incurable superiority complex. Harris should have immediately and decisively distanced herself, but she didn’t – leaving an open goal into which Trump danced with characteristic flourish.

Wheeling out the likes of Cardi B to lecture voters on why it was their duty to do as they were told was beyond cringeworthy

The moment he put on that hi-viz jacket and climbed, somewhat unsteadily, into a garbage truck was a piece of political genius. It was funny, clever and above all self-depreciating, a quality rare in politicians but one that always connects with the public.

Afterwards, at a rally, he poked fun at his own vanity and told the story of why he decided to keep his garbage uniform on: ‘I said, “NO WAY!” but they said, “If you did, it actually makes you look thinner.” I said, “Oh…” and they got me, when they said I look thinner.’

I remember thinking then: he’s just won the election.

Trump’s killer line about needing to actually like America and Americans in order to be President really hit home: it was clear all along that plenty of Harris’s fellow countrymen and women made her and her party’s toes curl. Once again, the lessons of the Brexit referendum play out.

So Trump wins, and deservedly so. But is he the right man for the job? That remains to be seen. Winning is the easy part; delivering a successful political agenda so much harder.

He has cast himself as the champion of the reviled and the disenfranchised, an advocate for ambition and aspiration and an antidote to the wave of wokery in which America seems to be drowning.

Whether he can indeed ‘Make America Great Again’ remains to be seen: the obstacles are many and varied, from crippling national debt to illegal immigration to the situation in the Middle East and, of course, the war in Ukraine.

As he himself has put it, it will be ‘nasty a little bit at times, and maybe at the beginning in particular’. My sense is that he will focus on domestic issues to begin with, as that’s where he will feel he’s on the most solid ground. But you never know.

This Trump seems rather different to the Trump who won in 2016. Older, of course, if not exactly wiser – but certainly a more practised politician, and a man who seems ready to take a second term in office deadly seriously.