By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

Can women save America from itself? In a sense, this was the central question heading into the vote count in the most pivotal election since the Second World War. As many mainstream observers kept saying, it shouldn't even have been close given the convicted Donald Trump's vulgar norm-trashing and racist-misogynist approach. But "should" has nothing to do with it.

The candidates could not have embodied the respective offerings of their parties any more fully.

He, an ageing white alpha-male "billionaire" whose business background is pure privilege. Kamala Harris, a person of colour, of mixed Indian-Caribbean heritage, who is a woman. A woman. No woman has ever occupied the Oval Office.

This is the schadenfreude election, or perhaps it is better described as the vengeance poll. And the target of that vengeance? Elites.

It is the election in which female bodily autonomy came up smack against a panicked masculinity. But there is more.

Many, perhaps even most Americans, are angry at the government over their lived experience of the economy - inflation, job insecurity, zero-wage growth - and immigration.

And many men, even young men who traditionally don't vote at all or if they do, traditionally who lean progressive, have been stirred into action to oppose "wokeness", and to see the gender equity agenda as a zero-sum game where maleness is devalued, emaciated, humiliated.

It is a perversion of male resilience but one Trump and his tech-bro enablers have ruthlessly expounded and exploited.

So, despite Trump's denial of the fundamental precept of democracy - acceptance of the people's verdict - he has been allowed to run and he has run strongly. Nobody can doubt the energy of the man, his attraction, nor his indefatigability.

Early on, it is close with the Republican vote seemingly holding up well. Knife-edge polls throughout the weeks and months leading up to the election have so far turned out to be fairly reflective.

The democratic world holds its breath as indignant Americans weigh a choice between an uncertain future and a romanticised past.

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.