My goodness, Trump is going to win!

This is what the most reliable polls and all the American bookmakers predict, all the more worthy of belief as the swings are set by people who are gambling with their own money. 

Concern among Democratic Party supporters is growing as the final stretch of the very long election campaign shows a gradual slippage of candidate Kamala Harris. 

As meteoric as her take-off was after the forced abandonment of the hitherto stubborn Joe Biden, it now seems to be her decline in all the polls, with only the ballot boxes still to certify an almost unanimous prognosis, despite the fact that the respective political apparatuses and the media insist on the uncertainty of the results, in order to maintain the tension and to keep voters from relaxing. 

Trump has not won in votes in either of the two previous presidential elections. In the 2016 election that gave him access to the White House, his rival Hillary Clinton won by three million votes, while Joe Biden needed seven million more to dislodge him. The triumph in one case and the defeat in the other is due to the fact that what counts in the end is the number of so-called ‘presidential electors’, contributed by each state under the principle of ‘winner takes all’. Trump beat Clinton 304-227 and lost to Biden 306-232. 

The mismatches observed in 2020 that led to Trump's challenge to the result now appear to have been remedied by the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which tweaks the 1887 Act and regulates both the process of naming presidential electors and the tabulation of their votes. 

These electors are set at 538, the sum total of those contributed by each state, and where those with the largest populations are obviously decisive, but also others that are much smaller, but which are decisive, having already accumulated a long history of choosing the donkey or the elephant, symbols of the Democratic and Republican Party, respectively, when the results are close. 

Given that the rural vote tends to be sociologically more conservative than the urban vote, the Democrats would have to gain a large advantage in the popular vote for Kamala Harris to become the first woman in the White House. 

And while opinion polls do not detect major movements in the Republican tendency among rural voters, they do observe them among urbanites, especially among young people, including university students, who are becoming fed up with the so-called ‘woke’ culture, and are rediscovering traditional conservative values as the foundation and roots of a life project. 

The analysts most identified with so-called progressivism are surprised by this turn in sociological trends when the economic context shows very favourable data for the United States in 2024: growth of 2.8 %, inflation of 3 % and unemployment of 4.1 %, while the Federal Reserve has already lowered interest rates from 5 %. 

The reasons for this oscillation are to be found in the confidence that Trump inspires in his national project. The slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ has been internalised in the US public's conviction that with Trump in office the country will spend much less on caring for the world and much more on its own prosperity. 

Of course, to make such a seemingly simple equation work, several things would be necessary: stop propping up Ukraine economically; keep Chinese and European exports at bay; and demand that NATO members really dig deep into their pockets if they want to guarantee their security and defence. 

Let us leave aside Israel, whose government has more undisguised sympathy for Trump than for Harris, because, in any case and with whichever administration is in power, it will continue to enjoy Washington's unconditional support and backing. 

This is not the case, of course, for Europe, which will suffer seriously if Trump follows through on the warnings - or threats - that he has constantly made during his campaign. The clashes between the EU and the United States over trade and finance, especially over defence, will be even harsher than during Trump's first presidency. However, it would be foolish for Europeans to take refuge in whining and complaining and not face up to their own responsibilities and decide once and for all what they want to be when they grow up. 

While the Biden administration has not been particularly tender towards Europe, with Trump at the helm there will be no quartering. So Europe's leaders had better face the reality that they have to take care of themselves, and that this can only be done by prioritising the fundamentals, shedding the superfluous and facing up to fierce competition in all areas from those who aspire to push the EU out of the forefront of major global decision-making or use it as a mere junior prop.