Mike's Minute: Mike's wrap of Trump's win
The best thing about the result is you can't argue with it. You can hate it, but you can't argue with it. To win not just the College, but also the popular vote, gives the result a legitimacy that is rock solid. As I said yesterday, it's hard to know what the bigger deal is - a Trump victory or a Harris defeat? The Democrats will ask themselves how is it possible, with all their money, all their incumbency and all their endorsements, they could lose to that? The answer, of course, is obvious. That's not the point. The point is whether they will ever be able to bring themselves to see it. The lack of planning post-Biden was astonishing. You wonder whether Obama, who wanted a contested race as opposed to a coronation, was right, or would it have made no difference? Biden had done them irreparable damage. "Demography does not lead to democracy", was a Kellyanne Conway line I liked yesterday. In other words, treating black people, or women, or Latinos as a singular group and expecting them to act like sheep is a path to nowhere. Why don't they get that? There is a lesson there for this country and our debate around Māori. As a message, it's almost like America didn't realise what they had in Trump last time. Or maybe Covid and the economy was all they really cared about and the carnage they are living through is so great they just want better times. If there was a consistent line I heard over and over it was: "I was richer under Trump". That's uniquely American. You would never hear people in New Zealand say "I was richer under Key" or "I was richer under Luxon". How do you explain young people? Harris underperformed everywhere. Look at New York for God's sake. They hate him, they indict him, then they vote for him in increased numbers. Speaking of indictments, what happens to his legal woes? And how mad does that all get? How about that Iowa poll from the Seltzer Group that we fell over? Yes, it was an outlier and a blow to their reputation and pollsters everywhere. The polls though, were within their margins. They roughly seemed right. Although the remaining states will probably go the way we think, they are close, as predicted. As I also said yesterday, you have to admire the force of nature he is. He is a lesson in being unrelenting. For all the madness, dishonesty and illegality, he overcame it all, not once, but twice. They will study it for years to try and make sense of it. Or maybe they already have made sense of it and it's uniquely American and it's us that thinks it's odd. Either way, it's clean, clear, unambiguous, show-stopping, possibly gobsmacking, and now we have the prospect of four years of who knows what. You'd like to think, given the campaign was slicker this time, the presidency will be slicker this time as well. A bit of legacy is in the back of their minds, so let's see. Buckle up. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.