[Security Forum] What US election watchers in Seoul missed about Trump

Cho Byung-jae, former chancellor of the Korea National Diplomatic Academy for training diplomats, says many watchers of the US presidential election in Seoul were caught off guard by Donald Trump’s victory because of a failure to grasp shifts in US conservatism.

He was speaking at the Security Forum 2024 co-hosted by The Korea Herald at the National Assembly in Seoul on Wednesday.

“Most election forecasts got it wrong this time again, like how they got it wrong in 2016 and then in 2020,” he said.

“In 2016, everyone was saying Hillary Clinton was going to win but Trump won. In 2020, it was going to be a landslide victory for Joe Biden but the margin was actually pretty close,” he said.

“Up until the Election Day, people were debating if Kamala Harris was really leading. When the polls closed and the tallies began, it turned out that Trump had swept all seven battleground states. He was also ahead in the national polls.”

Cho’s book, released in May with the prophetic title “The Return of Trump: Crisis or Opportunity?,” has gained renewed attention after the Republicans reclaimed the White House.

One theory for explaining how most projections showed Harris and Trump to be tied, when the latter came out the decisive winner, is that a Democratic-leaning bias is dominant in the mainstream media environment, he said.

“Think about where most of us here are getting US presidential election news. Our main sources are the likes of The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, and we generally expect them to give us a fair coverage,” he said. “But put in the context of the political landscape of the US right now, they all have a Democratic Party bias.”

Cho said with the exception being Fox News, platforms that gave Trump a favorable portrayal were nontraditional outlets such as Breitbart News, which used to be run by onetime White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.

“The way Trump sees it, the only outlet that’s worth worthwhile in American news media is Fox News. The rest are ‘fake news’ in his eyes,” he said.

Cho said that analysts and news organizations in Seoul did not seem to have considered these newer right-wing media outlets that were on the rise as they tried to make sense of the US election.

“Cable channel Newsmax for instance was among the first to project a Trump win, which went unnoticed in South Korea because The New York Times at the time was saying otherwise,” he said. “In a way we were judging the US based on stories that are coming out of just one side of the country. We were not getting the whole picture.”

Cho said that Trump has successfully played on the themes of anti-establishment and working-class discontent, while his rival Harris echoed the voices of the middle class and the college-educated.

The fears Trump that raised about immigrants replacing American workers and white voters being left out in Washington politics found a growing political resonance, he said.

“Trump came along in 2015, tapped into their rage and blamed their problems on the Washington elites and the establishment,” he said. He added how Trump won them over may be more acutely portrayed in “Hillbilly Elegy,” a 2016 memoir by his running mate and Vice President-elect JD Vance.

Cho said that Seoul has to keep in mind that Trump’s election shows that the message he represents was supported by more than half of the US and to an extent, by Democrats as well. The Kamala campaign also embraced his narratives about immigration, he said.

“Americans picked Trump again, and the task for us in Seoul is to adapt to the changes heralded by the results of this election,” he said.