Americans said they were worried about democracy. Then they voted for Trump

To be a Brit in America is to be constantly on the defensive. Other Brits like to tell you, constantly, how stupid Americans are; how annoying their accents are; how bad their infrastructure and their food and their views and their healthcare system and obesity rates are; how sad it is for you that you live there. I’ve spent the past six years that I’ve lived in New York City rebuffing those claims, and also reminding them that each state is practically a country. But this week’s election result has made things particularly difficult.

As the exit poll results came in on Tuesday night, I allowed myself to feel optimistic. I’m long on America, somewhat unexpectedly: I came out here in January 2019 intending to stay six months, and instead built a life. I endured the pandemic in a studio apartment in Brooklyn, taking lockdown walks through a deserted Times Square in disbelief. I witnessed the celebrations in November 2020 when Biden won: people were literally popping champagne corks on rooftops around me and dancing with flags in the streets. And in 2023, I had my son in New York. He’s an American citizen. I believed, when he was born, that the US had left a bad period behind and was a land of opportunity again (in hindsight, maybe it was the epidural.)

So, on Monday and Tuesday, I told my British friends that the pessimism being reported across much of the UK media was wrong. I reminded them that late polling from the swing states looked good for Harris, and that her rallies were packed and energetic. I talked about the huge turnouts for women voters and swings toward the Democrats from older women, who usually reliably vote Republican. I told them about lines around the block in college towns in Pennsylvania, where students were waiting two hours to vote. All of these things did happen. But none of them moved the needle.

Exit polls in the US are a little different to the UK. They don’t just chart voting intention; they also ask questions about how voters are feeling and what issues motivated them when they went to the ballot box. What we found out from Tuesday evening’s exit polls was that Republican voters were very worried about the economy, and Democratic voters more about abortion. Nevertheless, all voters said they believed abortion should remain legal, at least in some circumstances.

We also saw that both sides said they would be “scared” if the opposite party won. That’s unsurprising, considering that Trump had been teasing the likelihood of post-election violence for weeks in the event that he lost. Republicans had also been talking about a Harris win as a future where Democrats seized control of everything and brought in “communism” — with the real fear of an assassination after Trump had already survived one attempt on his life at a rally.

We also found out from those same exit polls that a large proportion of Americans — over a third surveyed — said they were worried about the state of democracy in the country. Years of talk about supposedly compromised voting machines, about “finding votes”, about ballot boxes left unattended in backs of cars or in the middle of roads, about Russian interference, about Hunter Biden’s laptop and quid pro quos and fraud, fraud, fraud had worn everyone down. Trump said mail-in ballots should be banned in 2020 then encouraged his supporters to use them in 2024. His own strategists vacillated between saying that democracy was real and valid and would lead to a Trump victory, and that Democrats were underhanded so they’d need to be underhanded, too. The messaging was all over the place from both parties, and the atmosphere was tense.

Harris and Walz, for their part, did try to push back on this. Walz repeatedly talked about how, as a football coach, he knew it was important to accept a result at the end of a game, to shake hands with your victorious opponent and to move on. But the fears linger. People in my building in Brooklyn today wondered aloud if the election had been fair. Maybe Trump had stolen it for real, one said.

In all likelihood, that didn’t happen. This is a genuine, democratic landslide for Trump. His win reflects a lot of sentiments in the country: worries for the economy, concerns about immigration, general disenfranchisement, religious fundamentalism, racism, sexism, and dissatisfaction with the Democratic machine and its neoliberal approach to pretty much everything. But I keep coming back to the amount of Americans who said they were worried about the state of democracy. Because what we do know is that Trump has a disregard for democratic norms.

Trump said he would be a dictator on “day one”. He has repeatedly praised Viktor Orban, whose illiberal democracy in Hungary has been named by most experts as a dictatorship in all but name. He reportedly said Hitler did some good things, and that he wanted generals as loyal to him as Hitler’s. He’s talked about “terminating” the Constitution, about punishing his enemies and amplified posts that called for bringing in “televised military tribunals” for politicians who disagree with him. He said he’d demand to know journalists’ sources and jail reporters who didn’t comply. Celebrities like Taylor Swift who endorsed Kamala Harris were going to “pay a price”, he added. And as The Independent attempted to report from his watch party on election night, we were told that we couldn’t get the credentials — just like other outlets, like Politico and Axios, who weren’t allowed in, apparently because they’d written stories critical of the Trump campaign.

With Republicans now in control of the Senate as well as the White House — at the time of writing, we’re still waiting on results from the House of Representatives — it will be easy for Trump to enact pretty much any legislation he wants. And it’s likely he will bar non-sympathetic publications from getting close enough to him to hold him to account, too. Whatever side you’re on, that should worry you. A democracy thrives with a government that has a robust and honorable opposition. If the opposition can’t even get into the room, things tend to go south pretty quickly.

From the UK, I got almost the exact same text message again and again from friends this morning: “Come home.” New York remains fairly protected from the worst auspices of Trump, and the majority of New Yorkers voted Democrat (although Trump won 30 per cent of the New York City — not state, but city — vote this time around, a significant jump from 18 per cent in 2016). I’m aware I’m privileged to live in an area where things like the fall of Roe v Wade are unlikely to touch me; and, of course, I have a British passport, meaning I can leave whenever I want (some life logistics notwithstanding.)

Yet there is so much to love about America, so much that Europeans with a caricature in their heads miss. The enterprising spirit, the can-do attitude and the positivity; the focus on community values and the lack of tall poppy syndrome; the sincere way in which people root for each other, and the open way in which they are able to talk about taboo subjects like money. It’s a beautiful country with incredible national parks and landscapes. Opportunity is abundant — if you’re in the right place. But there’s also a huge wealth disparity, an entrenched and shocking history of racism, and some of the worst poverty I’ve ever seen in a developed country — heck, even in developing countries.

Trump ran a dark campaign based primarily on fear. He won. He won especially big among people who barely ever see government involvement in their lives: rural people, whose fire services are run by volunteers, whose concerns include encroaching animal predators on their land, whose schools are tiny and underfunded. I don’t think they all wanted far-right evangelical oversight or fascism. I think a lot of them simply felt entirely disconnected from the Democrats and even from the types of Republicans who aren’t responding to the current moment with a dystopian primal scream.

Likewise — and while I have many, many issues with the people who believe that Trump is good for this country — I refuse to believe all those voters who ticked the Trump-Vance box wanted a dictatorship. Now, I just hope to God they don’t get it.