US Elections: Another Polling fail by the polling industry.

As the results come flooding in it is clear there has been another massive collective polling error by the polling industry. Trump swept all the so called toss-up states and did approximately 5% better than the polls predicted in the country as a whole. Every poll has a margin of error of between 3 and 6% depending on the sample size, but when you are talking about the average of literally thousands of polls, that is an unacceptably high margin of error.

It also looks like the Republicans will gain significant majority in the Senate and retain the House – despite polling indicating the Democrats had a slim lead in voter preferences for the make-up of Congress. The loss of the Senate was predictable as the Democrats were defending a number of seats in republican strongholds like Montana and Ohio, but their losses extended further than that to well established Senators like Bob Casey in Pennsylvania.

Democrats had been favoured to re-take the House, however, and their failure to do so means Republicans now control the Presidency, Senate, House, and the Supreme Court. With the Supreme Court already having given Trump a blank cheque for his actions as President, there is now almost no constitutional barrier to Trump implementing his agenda in full, including detaining and expelling millions of immigrants, both legal and illegal, and using the National Guard and armed forces against his political opponents. The USA is now less a democracy and more an empire with Trump as an emperor largely above the law.

He is now likely to appoint Elon Musk as an “efficiency Tsar” to implement Musk’s plan to cut Federal Spending by “at least $2 Trillion. To put that figure into perspective, the entire government budget ran to $6.7 trillion last year, of which the Social Welfare budget alone accounted for $1.4 trillion. Even across the board cuts of about one third would throw millions into poverty and the economy into a severe recession.

Even cuts of this magnitude might not be sufficient to reduce the Federal deficit as Trump has proposed to extend his 2017 tax cuts for the rich at a further cost of $5.3 trillion. An analysis by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), estimated that Trump’s policies would increase the federal deficit by many trillions, and cost twice as much as Kamala Harris’ budgetary proposals.

Trump’s promise to do a deal with Putin before he even takes office probably means the Ukraine can kiss goodbye to the Donetsk region as well as the Crimea and perhaps the existence of Ukraine as an independent state, given that such losses would fatally undermine the Zelenskyy regime and threaten the stability of the rump Ukrainian state. Unless Europe is prepared to step into the breach with huge increases in military expenditure there is probably little that the EU, UK, or anyone else can do about it. Eastern European states will feel existentially threatened and we could be on the brink of further wars in Europe.

All of this might suit the MAGA agenda very well – Russia immiserated, Europe divided and possibly at war, and Netanyahu taking the fight to Iran. Only China remains to be tackled, and that will be done through tariffs and the repatriation of manufacturing to the USA. Ireland’s economic model of hosting US multinational corporations and pocketing a significant share of their profits will also be at risk. Trump has promised tariffs against European products and a reduction of corporation tax to 15%, the same level as Ireland. US corporations may not re-locate back to the USA en masse, but it will be very difficult to attract new US foreign direct investment.

A lot depends on what Trump ultimately does, as opposed to what he said he would do. But there should be no doubting the ambition of his collaborators like JD Vance, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to completely change the face of the US economy and society. Virtually no senior members of Trump’s last Presidency supported him this time around. Trump 2.0 promises to be nothing like Trump 1.0 who had very limited success last time around. This time around it will not just be the Supreme Court which is transformed, but the entire nature of the US economy, polity and society itself.

Frank Schnittger

Frank Schnittger is the author of Sovereignty 2040, a future history of how Irish re-unification might work out. He has worked in business in Dublin and London and, on a voluntary basis, for charities in community development, education, restorative justice and addiction services.

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