LATIKA M BOURKE: How Donald Trump rose from the political grave and where it leaves a devastated Democrats

So now we know. Donald Trump was no anomaly. No one-off, no accident.

Trump is on the cusp of resurrection. Assassins could not stop him. The law could not prohibit him. His political rivals could only complain about his style but proved impotent when it mattered.

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God-like, his supporter’s cult-like faith in him and his MAGA mission is vindicated.

While the result is still to be officially called, the early hours of vote-counting in the Presidential race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris proved to be the absolute nail-biter pollsters predicted.

But as the hours went by it became evident the path to victory was far clearer for Trump than for Harris.

The Trump campaign was confident of reclaiming the White House. While the Democrats said the result could take days to finalise, every trend was in Trump’s favour.

Trump was overperforming his 2020 run and gained support from Latinos and black men. He leads the popular vote.

This means enough Americans have accepted that the insulter-in-chief, convicted felon, and inciter of an insurrection is suitable to be restored as Commander-in-Chief and, by extension, ruler of the free world.

And it means that MAGA, rooted in isolationism and a brute expression of America First is in the bloodstream of the US for the foreseeable future, its future guaranteed with JD Vance and Elon Musk – who used his social media platform X to boost Trump and Republican messaging – its next generation torchbearers.

The United States of America – threatened for global supremacy by authoritarian China – is our protector against that geopolitical re-ordering but risks becoming our unstable ally.

Trump may be transactional and thereby persuadable, but he is not dependable.

If Kamala Harris loses, as is expected, the fallout for the Bidens will be enormous. A Trump win, after January 6, should have been unthinkable.

“He can’t win a general election because in the end politics is about persona as much as it is about policy, and his persona is unacceptable to too many people,” the veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz told me in 2021.

By 2023 he revised that opinion and told me: “I now have to acknowledge that it is a distinct possibility that Donald Trump could be elected president – I did not believe that one year ago.”

Mr Luntz said the legal pursuit of Trump had strengthened the former president to make him viable.

But President Joe Biden and his party are also responsible.

The wanton neglect of the Democratic party to allow the ailing and elderly Biden to hold his iron grip on the nomination for so long was an outrage that should have been redressed far sooner.

With it left so late that Harris, who set no one’s world on fire as Vice-President, was the only option, this election result is of the Democrats making as much as it is a testament to Trump’s sheer endurance and “fight, fight, fight” political instincts.

Harris chose to make this campaign about Trump’s character and the future of American democracy and relied on celebrity endorsements even though this failed strategy did not work for the last woman who ran for the job and against Trump – Hillary Clinton.

This strategy neglected the top priority as stated in the exit polls by voters scarred by years of inflation – the economy.

If Harris is to realise that running on joy, hope and vibes was not enough, then the optimism Democrats felt after the criminally late handover from Biden to Harris will turn to rage, anger, despair and recriminations.

As they should. Because if, as Democrats led us to believe, this was an election that could not be lost, that so much was at stake for a riven, polarised America and nervous network of global partners and allies, then they did far too much to create the conditions for that outcome.

And there will be special fury for Biden. He should never have sought a second term and, instead, should’ve said so early in his term so the party could manage a transition.

The failure to run a primary contest denied the party to choose its best candidate and when Obama and Nancy Pelosi called for a short process to replace Biden, the President quashed that by endorsing Harris.

The implications could be enormous.

The GOP retook control of the Senate. This means that if the Democrats don’t control the House then Trump will have a clean sweep of all four institutions, having stacked the Supreme Court, which overturned Roe v Wade and set back abortion rights for women.

Mr Luntz also told me that if Trump did win, he feared US democracy would collapse.

There are many questions the Democrats will be asking themselves over the coming days and months.

But one they must urgently address is how the party that produced the first black president and fielded the first black woman candidate couldn’t talk to black voters.

Is it possible that people from migrant, ethnic and minority groups are tired of being portrayed and treated as diversity picks and don’t like being identified as a homogenous grouping?

Latino voters in Florida, for example, have turned that state safe Red.

Is it possible that they share the same concerns as anyone else, how to pay the mortgage, afford the groceries and protect their loved ones from those who might cause them harm or rob them?

Maybe their migrant origins make them uber-aspirational and these values were something Trump spoke to, however ugly, incoherent and downright demented some of his other messages might be.

Or maybe, they like everyone else, remembered that life didn’t cost as much when Trump was in power, however admirable Biden’s economic agenda and restoration of domestic manufacturing.

This is not just a question for the Democrats but for the centre-left more broadly.

In the UK, the Tories are the party that has broken every ceiling, producing the first woman prime minister, the first Hindu PM, the first black leader, the first black chancellor, foreign secretary, home secretary and so on.

“Why is this race even close?” Michelle Obama recently wondered aloud.

The fact she was asking was telling and it’s a question the Democrats need to start answering, by asking themselves for the reasons first.