The overwhelming victory by President-elect, Donald Trump in the U.S. election should send a cold shiver through progressive parties across all democracies, including the Labor government in Australia. Labor and the Greens are feeling the pain given their losses in Queensland.

In the United States, key voter demographics for Harris — including Hispanics, college-educated voters, and independents — swung to Trump. Former Victorian Labor Party director Pollster Kos Samaras told Neos Kosmos, “Donald Trump’s victory revealed a deepening divide between traditional working-class voters and the established left-leaning parties.”

This trend, he said, has been “reshaping politics across the Western world, including in Australia.”

“The recent Queensland State election underscored a growing separation between urban progressives and the working poor in regional areas,” Kos Samaras

Despite the pro-Palestinian protests that engulfed U.S. universities and Trump’s firm allegiance to Bibi Netanyahu, many Arab Americans shifted to the GOP. Black Americans and blue-collar workers also shifted to Trump.

Regardless of Trump’s dark nativist demagoguery, 13 per cent of Black voters nationally and 45 per cent of Latino voters moved to Trump, according to CNN exit polls. In the 2020 U.S. election, Trump secured eight per cent of Black voters and 32 per cent of Latinos — the shift was dramatic. Longstanding Democratic strongholds turned to the GOP, abandoning their traditional party.

According to Samaras, parties that traditionally “championed labour and working-class interests are now seen as urban-centric.”

“Traditional labour-aligned parties are now drawing support largely from university-educated professionals while leaving regional and working-class voters feeling neglected and unheard,” Samaras said.

James Carville, the Democratic Party strategist behind President Bill Clinton’s success, reminded us of Clinton’s famous line: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Carville also blames the lack of an “open process” in electing a Democratic leader. In his Post Election Message – Part 1 on YouTube, Carville said, “What killed the Democrats, and what killed Biden, was a sense of disorder.

“Part of the sense of disorder was the unfortunate events of what I would refer to as the ‘woke’ era,” he added.

“We got beyond it [woke era], but the image stuck in people’s minds that the Democrats wanted to defund the police, that they wanted to empty prisons. The immigration stuff, obviously again a big mistake, but more importantly, it created the perception of disorder.”

“Part of the sense of disorder [in the Democrats] was the unfortunate events of what I would refer to as the ‘woke’ era,” James Carville

Professor James Arvanitakis, now Director of the Forrest Research Foundation, Fulbright Fellow, and author of Living Blue in a Red State: Understanding the Trump Phenomenon and the Conservative Backlash, said:

“There were three things they could not shake — whether true or not: economy and inflation, border and immigration, and American shame: how things used to be and where they are now, or America losing its place in the world,” James Arvanitakis

“Then there is name recognition and engagement, one of the most searched terms last week was ‘Did Biden step down?'” Arvanitakis told Neos Kosmos.

“People don’t care; they want things to work and add to that a sense of ‘anti-incumbency’ and it was the perfect storm for the Democrats.”

The Australian Labor government has squandered goodwill by not ensuring bipartisanship on the First Nation’s Voice to Parliament referendum and failed. As Australians feel the pain of grocery costs and mortgages, the government is focused on passing bills that limit young people’s access to social media and imposing greater oversight over what can be said on social media, in case it causes “harm.”

The Trump victory should be a warning bell against policies perceived as social engineering, and elevate identity over unity and cohesion. In the least, the GOP victory should be a stark reminder, as President Clinton said, “It’s the economy stupid”.