Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. Welcome to our twenty twenty four US election edition of voter Nomics, the Bloomberg podcast where politics and economics collide. All year, we've been talking about how voters around the world have the ability to affect markets, countries, and economies like never before. We're going to focus on arguably the biggest of them all, the American election. As we speak, victory has just been called for Donald Trump. It came as he won Wisconsin.
The SMP five hundred reacted positively, did the News, as did companies like Tesla. Donald Trump's fellow Republicans won control of the Senate, and in every state where most votes had been counted, Trump's performance was stronger than in twenty twenty. So on today's Votomics, we're sharing an episode from The Big Take podcast, Bloomberg's daily podcast, which features in depth
original reporting from around the globe. In their quick reaction US election special, Big Take hosts Sarah Holder and Bloomberg's Wendy Benjaminson break down how election Day played out and get reactions from around the world, plus what we can expect from a second Trump administration. But before all of that, I'm a Lego Stratton and I made.
Room waldron Oge.
Did you get any sleep?
I didn't. Actually, I was very foolish because I started just looking at my twitter feed, x feed, whatever you want to call it, at about midnight, and that I did a musk feed and I didn't stop, unfortunately, until until about four point thirty five in the morning. I just I just I just kept going because what we were seeing in real time was a very surprising story.
Because it wasn't night Federal Quintine exactly.
I mean, we people had expect did either Harris victory or a very very close election, which we'd still be litigating at the moment, And what we saw was clear, was very clear, and it was a clear Trump victory. I don't think many pundits were expecting that at all.
And the inquest started very quickly as well, certainly in the corresponds, I was getting around how did the left or Democrats misjudge this, and whether or not it's worse for them than the Hillary Clinton defeat. I mean, certainly that sense that America wasn't yet ready for a female president, whether or not that is the take home point in the days ahead, but it feels that there's questions around gender as well as questions around whether she was the right candidate.
Yeah, we had a very peculiar sort of set of expectations because Kamala Harris did very well in the debate with Trump and her stocks rose, and in the last few days before the vote, it looked as though she was really regaining momentum, partly because of the Madison Square Gardens absurdities, and probably because Trump seemed to be losing a bit of his focus and flair. But clearly that
was absolutely wrong. One of the big stories of this election is that the democratic notion of what democratic politics is about has been exploded. They have basically been an alliance between the educated, upper middle class elite and various ethnic minorities. And their assumption was that they could just keep adding ethnic minorities. They've got a big advantage with black voters, and they could just add more and more and more Latinos or whoever was coming in, and that's
clearly not the case. You saw Black voters voting in surprising numbers for Trump, you saw Latino voters voting in very surprising numbers for Trump, and Asian voters also shifting in some significant ways. We haven't seen numbers like this since, you know, for the Latino since since George W. Bush. And that's as really skewered the whole way of thinking of Democrats, because Democrats tend to think of these people as being exploited, as being victims, as in some way
being marginal. They certainly think of the immigration issue cutting in favor of the Democrats, and this hasn't happened. I think it's partly because class is the overriding thing. And I think that what the liberal elite, hyper educated, hyperwoke, very status conscious liberal elite has done is it's basically driven the white working class out of the Democratic coalition.
They've shifted to the Republicans. And now it's doing exactly the same thing for ethnic minorities, slowly but very significantly.
So if we just take the helicopter view of what this podcast why You and I and Stephanie when she's with us, have been discussing over the last year, through lots of ballots, lots of different elections, is this or not since this fact that incumbents have struggled, is this that trend playing out? Kamala Harris came in, took over from Biden, ran very, very tight and well executed hundred days the less probably realized too late she had to convey that she was changed. She didn't manage to do that.
So my question is was it just she felt foul of that tide that is beating up on the incumbent, by which we mean the people in power they just the electra and not feeling they're benefiting doing well enough out of it. Or was it actually she wasn't good enough or was it both?
I think economic discontent and inflation underlay this. People just felt poorer and they felt angry because they felt poorer. But there are a lot of important cultural issues as well. There was the immigration issue that people felt that Biden and Harris, by implication, had not taken that seriously enough. And there's a sort of set of cultural issues that also motivated people to sern that you might feel grumpy and angry about inflation, but do you go to rallies
and cheer. Do you really turn out and wave banners just because you're angry about the economy. I think Trump was motivating a lot of resentment about the way a very insula to the elite has been running the country in ways that go against the opinions of large numbers of people. So yes, underlying it all inflation and the economy driving all of this, but we're a very rich man.
He's incredibly successful at conveying the the underdog, and it's it's both economic, but it's also a vibe he has that he just cuts through the blandness of the political establishment.
So you have a very sort of twee cultivated, cerebral, rather bossy political elite out there, and you have this vulgan we do, we do, but you have this vulgar, boisterous man and people identify with him. They more identified with him rather than with the Harvard yachts than in the nineteenth century. And he's brilliant at summing up big things in small phrases. I mean, make America great again. It's just such a powerful thing. He's a demagogue.
Just on this question about Kamala Harris and the kind of aloofness, did she do everything she possibly could?
I thought she was a terribly weak candidate in the sense that she didn't really have a set of policies and a gender. She did very well in the debate, and then she sort of fizzled out. If you don't present a compelling message as to why you should be voted for, and if you don't present a set of policies to solve people's problems, particularly the problem of the border, then it looks as though you assume that you should be voted for just because of the person that you are.
Now we go back to Biden. Had Biden stepped down when he should have done, had he created an open primary system, had the strongest democrat one, then that would have been possible, even in difficult circumstances, for a democratic victory.
One of the things we will see in the coming days when we do the kind of analysis of the demographics is I think we thought and expected that women on mass would come out for Kamala Harris across the divide concerned about abortion rights being restricted. I wonder in the end whether that wasn't strong enough either. You certainly saw Kamala Harris make it front and center of many things she did.
Absolutely. I think we will know more over the next few days about the precise demographic makeup, but I think Soccer Mum's women did not turn out for Harris in the sort of numbers that we expected. Also, underneath it all. Do people care more about that issue or do they care more about immigration? And I think it's immigration.
When you glance at the polls and the returns on why the things that motivated people to vote, democracy comes up, and at first glance, the kind of complacent view is that that favored Kamala Harris. But actually you dig deeper, and if you've done any reporting around either America or the UK or lots of countries, actually it does us stand to reason that that might be something that motivated
people to vote for Trump. This sense, as you've been talking eloquently throughout the podcast about this sense that it was sort of, you know, the establishment was a done deal, sewn up and an impenetrable fortress that you couldn't get into if you were normal working pass Absolutely no, there's this extraordinary result, which was I think the number.
Two issue that people were worried about after the economy was the state of democracy. And you think, well, that's a very very good indicator for Harris, and then in fact those people broke towards Trump. So you know, we in the media tend to think about January the sixth and Trump's sort of contempt for due process. But in fact, what a lot of people believe is that the media is part of a cartel which tells a story to other members of the media and doesn't really relate to
ordinary people. And I think this is a huge problem for our profession that I think thirteen percent of Republicans now believe the mainstream media, and the mainstream media quite Franklin was in the tank for Kamala all the way
through this election. I think there's a crisis of confidence that we have to as a profession, get out of bubble, report on the country, on America, report on the actual angs and Anxietism, worries about regular people, and do a better job of reflecting what's going on out there rather than talking to each other.
But Adrian, I mean everything you've just said, you could have said after the Brexit vote. You could have said after the first Trump victory. When do we learn?
And it's the corporations, the universities, the professional elite, and they've got to reconnect with their country or we'll keep getting these sort of surprises, not only in the United States, but also in Europe.
Taking a step across the pond, back across the pond, we're in London. We're in the UK reflecting on all of this and what about the impact it has on UK politics? Not UK politics, Actually, I think more interesting is the economic impact. I think this morning has been quite expensive for the government.
Absolutely. I mean I think it's all in the short term, or in the simplest sense, it's a disaster for the Labor Party. Because the Labor Party is interlinked with the Democratic Party but also very hostile to Trump.
People have been speculating there might be a star a reshuffler.
Yeah, I would have thought so. I think it's very difficult to keep this current position in place. But also we're interlinked economies. We're going to get a big economic boom in the United States, lower corporation tax, lower personal tax. I think a lot of talent will shift from this country, which is being more and more heavily taxed, to the United States. So that to Trump world.
It is the case that Labor has pledged to spend more on defense, but that number wasn't actually in last week's budget, And when you look at last week's budget and how her head room was reduced in it, it's hard to see that she has much room for maneuver well.
I think there's a bigger European problem over the defense because Europe as a whole has to face the fact that it is in hawk to Trump to defend it. That Trump is not a stable or predictable or reliable ally, And I think that Europe and Britain will have to get closer and closer together. They'll have to put aside their quarrels and really deal with this defense isship. Whatever Trump does, and I think there is a big set of variables in what Trump does, we can't presume that you'll do so.
At the last time round, internationally, there was some softening of his joy. They say things to get into power.
And he likes to say very extravagant and provocative things. But nevertheless, even if he's not as radical as he claims he is, can we continue to be in hock to a country that's so unpredictable.
Well, we're going to pick up on a lot of these themes in a special edition we're going to do next week to close the year of these elections that we have been covering in depth, and we look forward to hearing from Steph again. Steph right now is I don't know, recovering retreating from a spin room somewhere anyway, Now on to the rest of the show. This is our Big Take special podcast on the American election.
At around two thirty on Wednesday morning, Donald Trump took the stage at his campaign headquarters in mar A Lago to claim victory in the US presidential election.
Look what happened?
Is this crazy?
But it's a political victory that our country has never seen before, nothing like this. I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your forty seventh president, and you're forty fifth president.
Earlier, as the campaign watch party for Vice President Kamala Harris wound down at her alma mater, Howard University, her campaign co chair Cedric Richmond, briefly addressed the crowd.
So you won't hear from the Vice president tonight, but you will hear from her tomorrow.
When Trump spoke alongside his family, in her circle and running mate JD. Vance, he'd already secured two hundred and sixty seven of the two hundred and seventy Electoral College votes he needed, clinching wins in the key battleground states of Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. And at five thirty am, Trump was declared the projected winner of Wisconsin's ten electoral College votes, bringing his total to two hundred and seventy seven.
As the results came into focus, markets reacted and the so called Trump trade searched. Bitcoin spiked, the dollar posted its biggest gain against major currencies since twenty twenty, clean energy took a hit, and Treasury bonds humbled. Today on the show how Election Day played out, reactions from around the world, and what we can expect from a second Trump term, I'm Sarah Holder, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News. It's four am in walk Washington,
d C. I'm joined by Bloomberg Senior Washington editor Wendy Benjaminson. So, Wendy, for people waking up today and catching up what happened overnight.
Donald Trump has won the presidency. It was not as close as we expected it to be.
Well, Wendy, how does this year's Trump win compared to his path to victory in twenty sixteen.
Well, it's not that dissimilar. He took all of the South, he took a large swath of the Midwest, the Plain States, and this time again he managed to break through that so called blue wall. I think we're going to have to rename that now because in twenty sixteen, Hillary Clinton failed to get all of the Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, that industrial blue wall the Democrats have to win, and it appears that Donald Trump succeeded in that blue wall.
What was Trump to do this campaign cycle that he failed to do in twenty twenty.
Well, this is one of those weird Donald Trump can get away with stuff sort of elections. He fared far better with Hispanic voters than he did in twenty sixteen or twenty twenty. And remember, in twenty sixteen, one of his famous lines was Mexico is sending us their criminals and rapists, and a lot of Hispanic voters took events to that. The Sunday before October twenty seventh, he held a rally of Madison Square Garden where a comedian called
Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage. And yet he fared far better, according to exit polls with Latino voters than he ever has.
That didn't seem to matter in the way that people thought it might.
Right, And remember Donald Trump also won this time against twenty sixteen with thirty four felony convictions, a civil claim holding him responsible for rape, appointing Supreme or justices who overturned Roe versus Wade, and a number of other comments that he's made or proposals that he has put forward
that seem anathema to most Americans. And yet here we are, and while the gender gap and reproductive rights were the issues that were going to push her over the top, it failed to materialize against the popular support that Donald Trump seems to have had.
You mentioned some of these issues that didn't seem to face voters when it came to Donald Trump. But let's talk about some of the issues that did decide this election. We've been talking all election season about the polls, including the Bloomberg News Morning Consult polls that showed that voters considered the economy their number one issue. Abortion also ranked highly immigration. What do we know at this point about how those issues specifically impacted the results we saw tonight?
Donald Trump he pinned the economy, the post COVID economy, even though it has recovered by all all measures. He pinned that on Joe Biden and by extension, Kamala Harris. He kept doing that over and over again, even though his rhetoric on immigration was authoritarian, talking about deporting millions of people, closing the border, building the wall, all those sort of things. Voters want a secure border, and he talked about it constantly, even down to the falsehoods about
Haitian immigrants eating cats in Springfield, Ohio. It all spoke to voters deep fears about the other. In quotes coming in, Kamala Harris talked a little about immigration, saying that she would sign the bill that Donald Trump killed last year in Congress. She talked about a caring economy and opportunity economy. But a lot of the time the Democrats focused on just how awful Donald Trump is, and people who think
he's awful already think he's awful the people. Then there are people who think he's an awful person, but they like his policies. And then there's the people who actually don't think he's awful. Donald Trump is awful is now a proven two time losing strategy, And yet the Democrats kept doing that over and over again.
And here we are, well, what about Trump's economic policies attracted voters and how much are we going to see the results.
Well, that's going to be the big question, Sarah, because his economic policies he promised to offer. He offered so many tax cuts that if every single one of them were enacted, I'm not even sure the US government could function because there just wouldn't be enough money coming in. So some of those will be enacted, but it couldn't
be all of them. The tariffs he is proposing, placing sixty percent tariffs or more on imports from China that many economists say is going to raise prices for consumers. And his immigration policy if he carries out the deportation of twelve million undocumented workers in this country, an undertaking that I don't even know how something like that works
or how long it would take. Nevertheless, that is going to put a huge hole in the construction industry, in the agricultural industry, and could possibly hurt the American economy. So we'll see how popular these ideas are after he begins to enact them.
Well, despite these long term concerns, and even before some of these key states we're talking about were called, we saw markets responding to Trump's lead. How did they respond well?
The dollar got stronger overnight in preparation for these tariffs to be enacted. It's very good news for bitcoin. He's a huge supporter of crypto, and a number of markets rose and anticipation of certainty. I think it is not necessarily that they are happy Donald Trump won. It's they know who the president is and they are reacting to them.
After the break will dig deeper into the Trump campaign promises that could become the administration's policies and what it all means for the global economy. Wendy What if Donald Trump's promises on the campaign trail told us about what his next administration is likely to prioritize in office.
His priorities will certainly be the economy and immigration first and foremost. The difference this time is that in twenty sixteen, a lot of traditional Republicans, because that was the only kind there was in twenty sixteen, joined his cabinet, joined his administration because they wanted to show this newcomer how government works and set up some guard rails for some of his more outlandish ideas. That's not happening this time. This time, he is going to be surrounded by people
who are loyal to him. Loyal to him is the keyword, not the Constitution, the rule of law, things like that. So I think there is some fear out there about the disappearing of the guard rails that were there in his first term.
What do tonight's results say about the future of abortion access in this country?
Well, it is certainly now a state's issue. There is not enough Democrats or pro reproductive rights members of Congress to codify Roe Versus Way to put abortion rights back into law, and so the Supreme Court decision to send it to the states and have a patchwork of laws all over the country seems to be now the way
it is. Remember also that there are still two Supreme Court justices who are nearing the age at which they might retire or pass on, and Donald Trump will have an opportunity with a Republican Senate, at least for the first two years, to appoint two more conservative justices on the Supreme Court, which would of course make the Supreme Court one of the most conservative in US history.
So if Republicans do maintain control of both chambers of Congress and the Presidency, what will it mean for US spending on geopolitical conflicts like the war in Ukraine or in the Middle East.
Well, the Ukrainian President Vladimir Lensky put out a statement this morning congratulating Trump and looking forward to his decisive leadership, and that was the right thing to say. Diplomatically, Donald Trump is very much into making deals. He wants to make a deal with Putin. He wants Putin and Zelenski to come to a table and come to terms. Those terms would end up probably being more favorable to Russia than to Ukraine, and the US would no longer support
Ukraine and its fight against the invasion. It is also extremely good news for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin net Niyaho. Kamala Harris had at least suggested some interest in the humanitarian crisis going on in Gaza, and what former President Trump has said is that bb Netanyaho's nickname Bib, needs to finish the job in Gaza. And so despite the fact that I think he got more Arab American support than one would have suspected, I think this is a very good day for Putin and Netanyahu.
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. This episode was produced by David Fox, Thomas lou and Julia Press. It was edited by Aaron Edwards and Wendy Benjaminson. This episode was mixed by Alex Zuguia. It was fact checked by Thomas Lou, Julia Press, and Jessica Beck. Our senior producer is Taomi Shavin. Our senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our executive producer is Nicole beemster Boor. Sage Bauman is
Bloomberg's head of podcasts. If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.