By Mark Kenny

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

One week ago I shared a stage in Canberra with an uber-confident Rory Stewart who insisted Kamala Harris would not only win but win big.

Election punditry borders on foolhardy just days before the result is known.

But Stewart, a global podcast sensation and author of the scathing Westminster memoir Politics on the Edge, seems happiest swimming against the tide. As a reformist Tory minister in 2019, he took on Boris Johnson for the UK prime ministership and returned to the backbench when BoJo won. Johnson would later exclude him from the Conservative party room along with 20 other MPs for voting against a "no-deal" Brexit.

The Llewellyn Hall stage wasn't the only thing I shared with Stewart last Sunday.

As regular readers would know, I had written that morning that I also expected Harris to get over the line, propelled, I assumed, by a quiet, determined infantry of women.

Women repelled by Trump's misogyny and aghast at the Dobbs decision on abortion from the Donald's hand-picked Supreme Court.

Stewart dismissed the deadlocked polls arguing that since the end of the landline phone, surveyors had struggled to construct a representative sample of the electorate.

He went further, too, suggesting that pollsters had been so embarrassed by a succession of bad predictions that they were now over-correcting and inflating Donald Trump's support.

In fact, they had again under-reported enthusiasm for Trump, just as they had in 2016 and in 2020.

Critically, women either didn't turn out for Harris or actively supported Trump.

My own "nauseously optimistic" prediction came from somewhere else though. I broadly accepted the blizzard of polls putting the two sides at 50-50 - notwithstanding that individual companies might have been "herding" - weighting their data to stay in the peloton.

My suspicion that Harris would prevail turned on a subjective calculus that was less actual arithmetic and more moral maths.

Where Stewart said the pollsters' methodology was "fundamentally" broken, I figured that after two impeachments, the 2020 election denial, criminal convictions and the credible horror stories from inside the first Trump administration, mainstream America would re-assert itself as "fundamentally" democratic, "fundamentally" adult and "fundamentally" wedded to honesty.

This was not just wrong, it was wrong-headed.

Somewhere amid the off-shoring of industries caused by globalisation, the billion-dollar bailouts for the wealthy in the GFC, and the traumatic deprivations of the pandemic, Americans had lost faith in their centrality to the national project.

Somewhere in there too a switch flicked from blue-collar to red-cap as Americans started to feel that the risk of more-of-the-same was worse than the risk of pulling the whole rotten edifice down.

For a growing cohort of disaffected ex-union, ex-Democratic voters, the clearest danger in the election was not becoming a loser from unforeseen change but remaining a victim of ongoing stability.

A stability that for working people meant a triple whammy of high prices, porous borders, and low wages.

Just as the Brexit referendum blindsided the elites in Britain in 2016, the unlikely, unorthodox candidacy of Trump later that year, would overwhelm the GOP and go on to overrun the White House.

Then, as now, Trump was the sledgehammer and the more emotive and direct his rhetoric, the more it reassured ordinary Americans that he was not a seasoned DC insider, or a darling of "woke" Hollywood.

In 2024, the Democrats continued to misread this realignment and centre-left parties in Europe and Australia are in danger of doing likewise.

Stewart had actually captured the wreck-the-joint zeitgeist when describing the mindset of rank-and-file members as they compared replacements for Teresa May in 2019: "Some, at least," he wrote of the party's exasperated base, "are fed up with politicians who pretend to know better, and would like to throw one of us like a hand grenade at the entire system."

They picked Johnson.

Across the Atlantic four years after Stewart wrote those words, a similar tantrum instinct informed America's 2024 result in a contest where negatives became positives. Failings which would surely have sunk Trump's candidacy in earlier decades - a felony conviction, obvious lies, security breaches, election denial - marked him out as a true renegade, a genuine outsider.

Trump's "offences" only made him more suitable for the task of representing the people not the system.

Indeed it is arguable that Trump defeated Harris not in spite of his crimes and misdemeanours but because of them. Further, Trump rose in the estimation of ordinary Americans not despite the scathing critiques of his character from CNN, MSNBC, NYT et al, but because of them.

At the Democratic National Convention in 2016 - during the first concussive race between Trump and a qualified Democratic woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton - Michelle Obama famously declared "when they go low, we go high".

Eight aggressive years later, the Democrats have had their lofty superiority tweaked for them by their own voters. Now it might read, "when they go low, we wheel out billionaire actors and musicians to lecture work-a-day Americans about democracy, civility, and the American dream".

The Democrats' surprisingly tin-eared strategy was well summarised by one astute observer I spoke to midweek, "Bruce Springsteen is a working-class hero only to people who are no longer working class".

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