Here's how the winner of the 2024 US presidential election did it | Jonathan Freedland

HThere's a prediction about the US election that you can put in the bank. When the result is finally known, there will be a rush of pundits and prognosticators who will rush to insist that in fact they knew it all along and that, although it was difficult to see through the fog of polls and changing data, the end result was obvious. Even inevitable.

This will be even more true if, when the will of voters is finally known, it wasn't so close after all, with one of the two leading candidates sweeping most of the swing states to secure a healthy majority in the Electoral College. otherwise the popular vote.

The funny thing is, if this happens for either candidate, it wouldn't entirely be a surprise. Even now, you can sketch out, in advance, a very plausible argument for why Donald Trump might be poised to regain the presidency. And you can do the same to explain why Harris could be poised to become the first woman to hold the world's most powerful office. So, in the same way that Boris Johnson wrote two columns on the eve of the Brexit referendum, one advocating Brexit, the other staying here, while the US verdict is still unknown, it is the story of how Trump, or Harris, achieved this.

Start with the scenario of a victorious Trump. To understand it, you might need just one number: 28. That's the percentage of Americans who tell pollsters they think the country is on the right track. A measly 28%. In such an environment, the existing parties lose out. And for all the drama and buzz over her rapid installation as candidate and positioning herself as the face of change, Harris is a member of the incumbent party and a prominent figure in the current U.S. government. A nation that made it clear long ago that it wanted to fire Joe Biden, largely because of the cost of living and rising prices, as well as immigration, was bound to seize the opportunity to do the best thing and reject his deputy.

If there was any way to avoid this fate, it would have required Harris to make a cleaner break with Biden than she wanted. Whether it was out of personal respect for this man or fear of breaking up her coalition, she did not do the right thing. In this tale, a key moment would prove to be her appearance on The View in October, when she was asked if, looking back over the past four years, she would have done anything differently from her boss. Nothing comes to mindwas his response. In one fell swoop, she stripped herself of the mantle of change and confirmed Trump's core message: vote Harris, get Biden 2.

If it were necessary to explain a Trump victory in 2024, being an incumbent in difficult times will be the crux of it. But that won't be the whole story. Other factors, besides inflation and oil prices, will have played their role, linked more to culture than to politics. Trump's astonishing lead among men, particularly those without college degrees, including some, albeit nuanced, evidence of increased support among men. Black and Hispanic men, previously out of reach of the Republican Party, underscore an element of Trump's appeal that has endured for nearly a decade. Call it a cultural challenge. He sees the wagging finger of all those who judge, whether the media, the universities, the woke, foreign countries, especially Europeans, or, in its loosest definition, women, especially women educated, and shows them a big and big environment. finger in response.

This is what it took Trump’s critics so long to understand. What for years he thought would harm him, a scandal, two indictments, multiple criminal prosecutions and convictions, only made him stronger, confirming him as an outlaw , a transgressor who crossed the very lines that so many of his mostly male supporters were eager to cross. with him. This photo of him, stained with blood, seconds after dodging an assassin's bullet, urging his followers to fight, fight, fight! How, we might come to ask, did we ever think he could be beaten after that?

After all, Harris was his ideal opponent. A liberal, accomplished and wealthy California woman, an avatar of the cultural elite he and millions of others despise. In case that impression of her wasn't clear enough, she reinforced it with a parade of A-list stars campaigning for her down the stretch, repeating the same mistake Hillary Clinton made in 2016.

Finally, given that the United States is hardly cured of racism or misogyny, it should not come as a shock if, in the coming days, we see that a black woman could not be elected to the White House . It may be 2024, but the United States may not be ready yet.

So much for a Trump victory. How will we explain Harris' victory, if it happens? The answer can be summed up in one word: women. Outraged by the Supreme Court's Dobbs ruling, striking down abortion rights in 2022, women confounded pollsters in that year's midterm elections: There was no red wave Republican, despite the surge in inflation, because women came in large numbers to prevent it. Success in 2024 would mean that once again, and with an intensity missed by most surveys, American women have quietly decided to do exactly the same thing to the man who shaped the Supreme Court, the ultimate Dobbs . author: Trump.

In this sense, and in others, Trump's fate would have been sealed before the 2024 campaign even began. If he loses, it will surely be because he has become too toxic a figure to win: as evidenced his place on the losing side of every election cycle after that first narrow victory in 2016. What's more, the toxicity has only gotten worse recently, his authoritarian and fascist tendencies laid bare more than ever, whether in his threats to deploy the American army against the enemy from withinthat is, his liberal criticisms, or his declared desire to be surrounded by the kind of generals Hitler hadobeying his every whim and dictate. For too many Americans, that might have been enough.

Trump has torn up so many old-school political truths that it is tempting to think that none of them are valid anymore. But organization on the ground remains important. If they win, Democrats will point the finger at a machine that helped get their vote in critical states, precinct by precinct. Trump entrusted this task to Elon Musk, but there are some things that even money can't buy.

A Trump defeat would confirm another old rule: No politician can ever completely escape his record. This time, to take one example, he hoped to make a breakthrough with Arab and Muslim Americans, upset and furious about the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza. But that would have forced those same crucial voters to forget what Trump promised a decade ago: a Muslim ban, denying entry to the United States to people from a long list of Muslim countries. Amnesia exists in politics, perhaps particularly in the United States. But there are limits.

All of these different elements are real, even though they can combine into two very different narratives. Who will win the American elections? Nobody knows. But even if we don't know the outcome yet, we can already understand it.

• Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for the Guardian

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