Your editorial on the US midterms (4 November) notes that culture war attacks, bigotry and smears failed this time. It is worth asking why they worked before. For a decade we have argued over whether Donald Trump’s support was about economics or culture. My research, combining a survey of 6,600 US residents with social mobility data, suggests the question was badly posed. Trump’s 2016 gains over Mitt Romney’s in 2012 were largest in counties where children born poor are least likely to rise, and people there describe success as luck and connections rather than effort.
The grievance was economic. The language it found was cultural. Factory jobs lost to China became Beijing; the end of the male family wage became feminism; the decline of coal towns became climate politics. Trump’s gift was to translate economic pain into identity, which is how his coalition absorbed tariffs, welfare cuts and tax cuts for the rich.
Last week the translation stopped working. Voters spoke plainly about grocery bills, petrol at $4.20 a gallon and electricity bills pushed up by datacentres. And an electorate supposedly gripped by a culture war sent the first out gay man and the first native American woman to the Senate, elected the first black and native American female governors in Georgia and New Mexico, and chose a black Republican as Florida’s first black governor. When the economy speaks for itself, identity stops doing the talking.
That is a warning too. You note that Democrats tied prices to corruption. That is the same story of a rigged game that carried Trump, and it punishes whoever is in charge. The only way out of this backlash is earned opportunity. No party has yet tried it.
Dr Lorenz Meister
Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford
Jonathan Freedland is right to warn that Trump’s electoral defeat does not mean the danger has disappeared (After the midterms, the global right is reeling. But the danger of Trumpism will never be gone, 6 November). But his argument that another Trump is possible because Trump happened once tells us less than it should about why he happened in the first place.
Ariana Baio’s report (Republicans hoping to succeed Trump in 2028 dissect midterm rout, 5 November) offers a revealing clue. JD Vance, Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis are identifying the war, tariffs and the cost of living as reasons for defeat. They may represent different political futures, but their responses suggest adaptation rather than fundamental repudiation. The question is not simply who succeeds Trump, but whether the politics that made him possible are being challenged at all.
Trump’s defeat does not necessarily discredit the politics that brought him to power. His successors may learn from his mistakes, distance themselves from his excesses, and retain the grievances and discontent on which his movement has drawn.
Meanwhile, a Democratic victory, however emphatic, is not itself evidence that those underlying conditions have been overcome. Rejecting Trump is not necessarily embracing an alternative. Freedland warns another Trump is possible. The more uncomfortable question is whether US politics has produced the forces capable of making another Trump unnecessary.
David Eaton
Sunderland
President Trump’s policy of bringing about regime change by bombing Iran has proved to be successful. The only problem for him is that the regime he changed was his own.
Phil Bramall
West Bridgford, Nottingham
