CNN political commentator Scott Jennings said that President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the election over Vice President Kamala Harris was a signal that working-class Americans are fed up with the current administration.
“This is a mandate,” Jennings said. “He’s won the national popular vote for the first time for a Republican since 2004. This is a big deal. This isn’t backing into the office.”
The Fox News Decision Desk projected a Trump victory on Wednesday after he accomplished key wins in a handful of battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
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“This is a mandate to do what you said you were going to do: get the economy working again for regular working-class Americans, fix immigration, try to get crime under control, try to reduce the chaos in the world,” Jennings continued.
“I’m interpreting the results tonight as the revenge of the working-class American, the anonymous American who has been crushed, insulted, condescended to,” he said. “They’re not garbage. They’re not Nazis. They’re just regular people who get up and go to work every day and are trying to make a better life for their kids. And they feel like they have been told to just shut up when they have complained about the things that are hurting them in their own lives.”
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“I also feel like this election as we sit here and pore over this tonight is something of an indictment of the political information complex,” Jennings said, speaking about the media ecosystem, especially in the lead up to Election Day. “The story that was portrayed was not true.”
“We were told Puerto Rico was going to change the election. Liz Cheney, Nikki Haley voters, women lying to their husbands,” he said. “Night after night after night, people were told all these things and gimmicks were somehow going to push Harris over the line, and we were just ignoring the fundamentals: inflation, people feeling like they were barely able to tread water at best.”
Jennings said that reporters and commentators need to work harder to listen to and to communicate with the “half of the country” that voted to support Trump.
