Whatever the final count shows, America has already told its president something he did not want to hear. In the exit polls, 43 per cent of voters said they cast their ballot partly to oppose Donald Trump. Sixty-five per cent said his policies had made the economy worse. Only 38 per cent approved of the job he is doing. A president who promised to bring prices down from his first day has presided over petrol at $4.17 a gallon, diesel at $6.29, and a country in which nearly eight voters in ten say rising prices are causing their families hardship.
That is the economic indictment, and it is serious enough. But the campaign that preceded it revealed something worse: a governing party that, faced with its own record, chose to change the subject to fear.
The politics of the scapegoat
In Youngstown, Ohio, Mr Trump called Somali immigrants "low IQ" and said they "don't have pants to wear". In Port Huron, Michigan, he described Abdul El-Sayed, an American-born doctor and the Democratic Senate candidate, as "a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member" and suggested he should have to pass through a metal detector to enter the Senate. There is no evidence for any of it. The aim was not to inform voters but to make a Muslim candidate seem foreign in his own country.
This is not a matter of tone. A president who singles out communities by religion and origin is telling millions of citizens that their membership of the nation is conditional. It corrodes the trust on which every functioning economy depends, and it is no accident that it flourishes when the record on prices is hardest to defend.
Pressure on the vote itself
The same instinct shaped the conduct of the election. The Justice Department sent about 1,000 federal monitors to polling places, many to Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta, cities with large Black electorates that Mr Trump falsely accused of fraud in 2020. In the final days the administration asked the Supreme Court to set aside about 20,000 California ballots on the strength of unproven claims about non-citizens; the court refused. A federal judge blocked its attempt to send lists of alleged non-citizen voters to the states. In Alaska, the department tried to stop certification of a Senate result before a single vote had been cast.
The courts held. That they had to is the point. Institutions that are tested this often are institutions under strain.
What markets should want
Investors like to say they are indifferent to who controls Congress. They should not be indifferent to this. Tariffs imposed by decree, a war with Iran that has pushed Brent crude between $72 and $126 a barrel this year, and a government willing to treat the rule of law as an inconvenience are risks that no balance sheet can hedge. A Congress willing to check the White House, to scrutinise its spending, its trade policy and its war, would be a source of stability, not of uncertainty.
The Democrats do not deserve a blank cheque either. Voters view them only marginally more warmly than the Republicans, and many appear to have backed them out of exhaustion rather than enthusiasm. If they win power in either chamber, they will owe the country a credible plan to bring down the cost of living, not merely a case against the president.
But the choice in front of Americans was never between perfection and imperfection. It was between a politics that asks what things cost and a politics that asks whom to blame. On that question, the early verdict is clear. The count will show how loud it is.
