Tony Blair leads tributes to 'incredibly direct' deputy, known for not pulling his punches - on one occasion, literally.

The former prime minister remembers the moment in the 2001 general election campaign when John Prescott punched a member of the public.

John Prescott who served under Tony's Blair's Labour government has died aged 86.

Donald Trump’s decisive victory may proclaim an unpredictable new era for American government and society, but it also reaffirmed an enduring political truth: It is virtually impossible for the incumbent president’s party to hold the White House when Americans are discontented with that president’s performance.

Americans provided Trump with a sweeping victory after a campaign in which he had darkly promised “retribution” against a long list of enemies and offered an agenda centered on mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Trump seems within reach of winning the popular vote, becoming the first Republican to do so since 2004. Republicans, exulting in winning at least three Senate seats as well as the White House, instantly called the magnitude of the victory “a mandate”—and Trump seems sure to treat it as a license to pursue his most aggressive ideas.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her team, recognizing the threat of widespread disillusionment with President Joe Biden, tried to transform the Democratic campaign from a retrospective referendum on the performance of the administration in which she served into a prospective choice about the agenda and style of leadership she and Trump would bring to the next four years. Ultimately, she could not overcome the widespread unhappiness over the country’s current conditions. Biden’s approval rating among voters never exceeded 43 percent in any of the major swing states, according to exit polls. At least 55 percent of voters in each of those states said that they disapproved of Biden’s performance, and Trump typically won four-fifths or more of them.

Overall, despite any expectation to the contrary, the gender gap was not especially large. Harris’s inability to amass a greater advantage among women likely reflected the fact that they were at least as dissatisfied with the economy and Biden’s performance as men were, according to exit polls. Just 44 percent of women in exit polls said they approved of Biden’s performance, and nearly seven in 10 described the economy in negative terms—a view even more emphatic than the one men expressed.

Disapproval of Biden’s record and disaffection over the economy proved a headwind that Harris could not overcome. Exit polls showed that Americans remained concerned about the possible excesses of a second Trump presidency. But in their deep frustration over current conditions, they placed less weight on those worries.

[Read: How Donald Trump won everywhere]

As Doug Sosnik, the top White House political adviser to Bill Clinton, wrote in an email yesterday: “The 2024 election marks the biggest shift to the right in our country since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.” The New York Times calculated that nine in 10 U.S. counties moved at least somewhat toward Trump in this cycle. A striking sign of that change was his dramatic improvement in big urban centers with large populations of Black and/or Latino voters, including the counties encompassing Philadelphia, Detroit, and Las Vegas. But Trump also improved (compared with 2020) in communities dominated by working-class white voters, such as Macomb in Michigan, Luzerne in Pennsylvania, and Kenosha and the small cities around Green Bay in Wisconsin.

Harris maintained the Democratic hold on the prosperous, well-educated inner suburbs around major cities. But in most of them, her party’s margins declined relative to its 2020 results. She slipped just slightly in predominantly white-collar areas such as Montgomery and Delaware Counties outside Philadelphia, and Oakland outside Detroit, and failed to improve on Biden’s deficit in Waukesha, around Milwaukee. The result was that in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Harris’s margins in these big suburbs were closer to Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 than Biden’s in 2020. That wasn’t enough to withstand what I’ve called the “pincer” move of Trump’s concurrent gains in the smaller, mostly white, blue-collar places and the much more diverse urban cores.

The geographic pattern of actual vote tallies for Trump captured the magnitude of the red shift more vividly than the two major surveys that try to measure voters’ behavior for media organizations: the exit polls conducted by Edison Research and the VoteCast survey done by NORC. Neither found any increase from 2020 in the national level of support for Trump among white voters; nor did the exit polls show more than minimal improvement for him among white voters in the Rust Belt states. The exit polls recorded modest improvements for Trump among Black voters, with his gains coming entirely from men, and a big improvement among Latinos. (VoteCast found solid advances for Trump among both Black and Latino voters.) In each survey, Trump made his most dramatic gains with Latino men but scored notable improvements among Latina women as well. Young voters, in both data sets, moved notably toward Trump as well.

The exit polls showed Harris winning women (of all races) by eight percentage points and losing men by 13 points. The VoteCast study similarly showed Harris winning women by seven points and Trump winning men by 10 percentage points. At that level, Harris’s lead with women was much smaller than Biden’s in 2020, and even smaller than Clinton’s advantage in 2016.

The story on the economy was similar. Two-thirds of voters in the national exit polls described the economy as only fair or poor; roughly that many expressed negative views in each of the three former “Blue Wall” states and Arizona, with discontent rising to about seven in 10 in North Carolina and Nevada, and beyond that in Georgia. Solid majorities of those economically discontented voters backed Trump in each state. So did a big majority of the roughly 45 percent of voters who said they were worse off than four years ago.

Harris did win handsomely among those who said they were better off, but they constituted just one in four voters. She also won the narrow backing of those who said their condition was unchanged. But none of that was enough to overcome Trump’s preponderant advantage among those who thought their condition had deteriorated under Biden.

Working-class voters without a college degree—many of them living paycheck to paycheck—were especially down on the economy. More than three-fourths of white voters without a college degree nationwide described the economy in negative terms—as did seven in 10 Latino voters. (An even more telling eight in 10 Latinos did so in the Sun Belt swing state of Nevada.)

The issues that Harris and the Democrats had hoped would offset economic discontent simply did not have enough bite. Two-thirds of voters in the national exit polls said that abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances, but about three in 10 of those voters supported Trump anyway. More than a quarter of women nationwide who supported legal abortion backed Trump.

[Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

The muting of the abortion issue was especially dramatic in the former Blue Wall states that ultimately settled Harris’s fate. In 2022, the first election after the Supreme Court rescinded the constitutional right to abortion, Democratic gubernatorial candidates Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania each won about four-fifths of voters who supported legal abortion, while Tony Evers in Wisconsin carried about three-fourths of them. But, in a crucial erosion of that pro-choice support, Harris won only about two-thirds of those voters in Michigan and Wisconsin and about seven in 10 in Pennsylvania. A much smaller share of voters in each state said abortion should be illegal most of the time, but Trump won about nine in 10 of those.

Harris did not entirely fail at raising alarms about Trump. In the national exit polls, 54 percent of voters agreed that Trump was “too extreme.” But about one in nine voters who viewed Trump as too extreme voted for him anyway—a striking measure of their willingness to risk an uncertain future over an unacceptable present. Likewise, in the VoteCast survey, 55 percent of voters said they were very or somewhat concerned that Trump would steer the U.S. in a more authoritarian direction; yet nearly one in six of those voters supported him.

“I think that Trump has been helped by this sense that things are careening out of control at home and abroad, and it makes people more willing to contemplate the smack of authority,” William Galston, a senior fellow at the center-left Brookings Institution, told me.

Jackie Payne, the founder and executive director of Galvanize Action, which studies moderate white women, told me that according to her research, many female voters who believed Trump would improve their economic situation simply brushed aside rhetoric and proposals from him that they found troubling. “They were choosing to believe a vision of him that was aligned with what they wanted to get out of him—a strong economy—and they were absolutely discounting anything that felt extreme as disinformation or hyperbole, even if he said he would do it,” she said.

Voters around the world have reached similar judgments this year in the aftermath of the inflation that followed the coronavirus pandemic: As a Financial Times analyst pointed out this week, incumbent parties have lost ground, or lost power altogether, in all 10 major democracies that held elections in 2024. The priority voters gave to current economic conditions in their decision making followed a long U.S. tradition too. Incumbent presidents with low public-approval ratings almost never win reelection—as Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H. W. Bush in 1992, and Trump himself in 2020 demonstrated. The similar but less discussed scenario is the difficulty facing a party seeking to hold the White House even when its unpopular president isn’t running. That applied when Harry Truman in 1952, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, and George W. Bush in 2008 were off the ballot; their party lost the race to replace them in each case. Biden now joins that dour procession.

But the most apt precedent for this election may be 1980. Laboring under widespread discontent, including over a raging bout of inflation, Carter tried to use his campaign to shift attention to the risks he said his right-wing rival, Ronald Reagan, represented, with some success: Doubts about Reagan did keep Carter close in the polls. But in the campaign’s final days, voters decided that continuity with Carter represented a greater risk than change with Reagan—and flocked to the challenger in crushing numbers.

[Read: How Trump neutralized his abortion problem]

Voters were willing to take an even greater leap this time. Trump made almost no accommodation for voters uneasy about him. Instead, he intensified his false accusations, inflammatory racist rhetoric, and profane personal attacks. Trump has surrounded himself with extreme figures who promise a revolution in government and society.

His senior immigration advisers have promoted plans for a militarized mass-deportation operation, complete with internment camps, and the possible removal of U.S.-citizen children of undocumented adults. His party is likely to control both chambers of Congress—and in any case, the president has broad unilateral authority to set immigration policy, as well as to impose the large tariffs Trump has pledged. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has already rendered him virtually immune to criminal prosecution for any action he takes as president. Trump is returning to the White House unbound.

Reagan’s victory in 1980 solidified a realignment in American politics that began under his Republican predecessor, Richard Nixon. Reagan cemented working-class white voters into the conservative movement’s electoral coalition—both white southern evangelical Christians and northern industrial workers in places such as Michigan’s Macomb County—who became lastingly known as “Reagan Democrats.” Those voters remain a cornerstone GOP constituency: Even four-plus decades later, they were the two groups that supported Trump in the largest numbers on Tuesday.

Many Republicans believe that Trump now has the chance to secure an equally significant shift in the party allegiance of Black men and Latino voters of both genders, who voted for him in historic numbers this week. That opportunity surely exists. But realizing it in a lasting way will require Trump and the Republican Party to maintain the support of millions of voters of color and justify their faith in him on the economy over any concern about policies such as mass deportation and more aggressive law enforcement.

Now those communities, along with all of the other Americans disappointed in Biden over the past four years, will learn whether Trump can deliver the economic benefits he promised without plunging the country into deeper acrimony.

Every four years, some liberal Americans threaten to leave the country if a Republican wins the presidency. Canada has become almost a joke—or maybe a fantasy—in certain left-leaning circles, not just a country but an escape hatch, a next life waiting if the election goes the “wrong” way. But some liberals insist that they’re not joking this time: They are very scared, and very ready to leave if Donald Trump is reelected.

I spoke with Americans from different backgrounds and communities about their plans to emigrate if Trump wins. Some are worried about their physical well-being, others about the future of same-sex marriage, and still others are distressed about the possibility of large-scale violence in the aftermath of his victory—or even his defeat. How many Americans are seriously considering leaving is unknown, but a New York Times callout to readers over the summer generated some 5,000 responses from across the political spectrum, including people who had already moved and others who were planning to. Whatever the true number, these Americans’ plans are evidence of the unusually tumultuous and threatening period the country now finds itself in. Some of them certainly will not follow through; emigrating is not easy, and many would lose benefits both hard and soft—Medicaid, jobs, friendships, familiarity—by leaving. But even so, their fear is great enough that they are seriously considering it.

I am a refugee. I came to this country from Afghanistan, in 2021. There, women have lost all basic rights, including the right to education. There is no longer freedom of speech. The economic system has collapsed. Daily life is permeated by an atmosphere of fear. Trump is a different sort of threat—an obviously lesser threat than the Taliban, I would argue. But I still empathize with would-be émigrés. I can very much understand the need to leave a place that no longer feels safe, and I believe that their concerns are genuine.

[Mira Kamdar: Why I’m glad I left America]

Pamela Reading-Smith, a Democratic activist from South Carolina, told me she believes that most Americans are underestimating what is at stake in this election. “He is going to turn this country into an authoritarian country,” she said of Trump. She fears that if he comes to power, violence will follow, and he will “crack down on the media,” including this publication. “Once we lose the media,” she said, “who are the people of the country? They are no one, because they have no knowledge of what’s going on.” If Trump wins, she plans to move to Spain, where her son and his wife live.

Many of the people I spoke with told me they fear political violence. Cynthia, also from South Carolina, said: “My perspective is that he did encourage people to take over the Capitol. If Trump were to lose, I would be concerned about far more widespread violence.” She and her husband are considering moving to the suburbs of Vancouver, Canada, starting with six-month visas. They will stay in the Pacific Northwest of the United States around election time and make their final move from there. Tony Proscio, a 70-year-old from New York, told me that a second Trump presidency is one of several reasons that he and his husband may soon move to London, where they have visited many times and have a good number of friends. “When you’re two men married to each other, it’s not hard to imagine how that could go badly for you,” Tony told me by phone during a recent trip to London to meet with realtors. He said he was very worried about whether Obergefell v. Hodges, the decision that legalized same-sex marriage, can survive a future Supreme Court, if Trump makes yet more appointments.

Margaret, 83, a Floridian who is retired from medicine, said that if Trump wins, she will be leaving the country as soon as she can. Like Pamela, she is considering Spain. “I don’t trust him. I don’t think that he knows what he’s doing,” Margaret told me. “I just find the man’s behavior, his attitude toward women, shocking.” (Both Cynthia and Margaret asked that I not use their last names, as they live in deeply conservative areas and their views are unpopular.)

Kim Lawson, 63, from Newnan, Georgia, is also considering leaving if Trump wins. “He’s a very fluid liar, and I don’t share values that he has; he is demeaning and derogatory towards people. And I don’t want to listen to it for four more years,” she said. She and a group of her single friends are looking at Spain or Mexico for their possible relocation. Lawson pointed to Project 2025 as evidence of changes Trump might make to the country. “I don’t want to be part of it,” she told me.

Of course, many people who want to or even make plans to leave won’t actually do so in the end. It is hard to move to a different country, obtain residency, and build a new life, especially for those who don’t speak the local language. And moving can be politically and morally complicated; some may decide that they want to stay and fight Trump’s policies, working toward electing Democrats in other elections. “I personally can’t imagine giving up my country unless my family were starving, [or] if we were under threat of death,” Cynthia Lowe, a Democrat from South Carolina, told me, though she said she understood why other people who were more personally threatened by Trump’s policies, such as immigrants, would be quicker to go.

Most of the people I interviewed for this story are past retirement age; they have enough financial resources to consider moving abroad. Many younger citizens may not be able to do so, and may have additional challenges—building a career as an immigrant, the difficulties of living away from family—to consider.

From my perspective as a refugee to America, there is something surprising about all of this. For those outside the U.S., it can be hard to really see its challenges, to understand the intensity with which people living here fear for their country. This is a liberal nation. But for the people I spoke with, it will no longer be a place to call home if Trump returns to power. You cannot realize what is going on in America until you start living in America.

In Jilly Cooper’s world, men conquer, women sigh, the sun shines perpetually on pale-gold Cotswolds mansions with bluebells in bloom, and absolutely everyone is DTF, as the parlance goes. If Charles Dickens had been alive at the end of the 20th century, with a Viagra prescription and a window into the sporting pursuits of the English upper classes, he might have written books like Cooper’s: as heavy as doorstops and horny as hell, meticulously researched and brimming with romps in the verdant countryside. The Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn’t even a gleam in Kevin Feige’s eye when Cooper created Rutshire, a fictional county occupied by a cast of wicked aristocrats, innocent heroines, and vulgar strivers who rotate in and out of her novels, fortune hunting and bed-hopping and scrutinizing one another’s family trees with one laconically arched eyebrow.

This is no country for modern men. Rivals, arguably the best of Cooper’s particular brand of bonkbusters, is set in 1986, which makes the new TV adaptation for Hulu technically a costume drama, stuffed with shoulder pads, canary-yellow Versace shirts, permed hair, and lots of Laura Ashley. To love Cooper’s stories, as I have for several decades, is to be constantly aware of how enmeshed they are in a particular time and place, one where racehorses were celebrities, groping was standard, and everybody seemed to be in love with Princess Diana. Even the author herself has floundered when she’s tried to update her style for the 21st century. (I’m too often haunted by a line from her 2006 novel, Wicked!, in which she tackles 9/11 by lamenting that the “people leaping out of the flaming tower windows” tragically had “no wisteria to aid their descent.”)

And yet, I can say: Make room in your life for Rivals. It’s undoubtedly the silliest show that’s come to television this year, but it’s also deeply serious about pleasure, which makes it as faithful to the ethos of its source material as anything could be. In the opening scene, Rupert Campbell-Black (played by Alex Hassell), the gravitational center of Cooper’s world, is seen pleasuring a woman in the bathroom of a Concorde jet, thrusting so vigorously that she hardly notices when the plane goes supersonic. Rupert is a former Olympic show jumper, a Conservative MP, and a lothario in the James Bond (or Casanova, or Warren-Beatty-during-the-1970s) mold, which is to say that he’s entirely unlike anyone who’s ever actually lived. When he swaggers back to his seat, the female passengers swoon slightly as he passes. The tone, immediately, is one of absurd, winking excess. Rupert, arrogant, priapic to a fault, and vulnerable underneath the machismo is—somehow!—hard not to root for, if only because everyone who hates him is so much worse.

[Read: Let’s never do this to Edith Wharton again]

The actual dramatic arc of Rivals involves the arcane world of British commercial-television franchises—which, the less fretted over, the better. The primary villain is Lord Tony Baddingham (David Tennant), the cigar-chomping, new-money heir to a munitions fortune and the boss of a regional British TV network who’s both evil and pathologically jealous of Rupert. In need of a hit show, Tony poaches Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner), a fiery Irish talk-show host, from the BBC, and promises Declan total authority over his interviews. Declan’s feckless wife, Maud (Victoria Smurfit); his angelic elder daughter, Taggie (Bella Maclean); and his younger daughter, Caitlin (Catriona Chandler), all immediately fall for Rupert, whose ancestral manor house is located just a couple of fields away. Declan, quite a serious character in the novel, proceeds to drink obscene amounts of whiskey and smoke intellectually in the bath, glowering beneath his mustache.

The business of television during the heady Thatcherite ’80s feels fundamentally at odds with the bucolic Cotswolds setting—an aesthetic clash of giant cellphones and gentle pastures, boardroom meetings and stray sheep. The unifying force, of course, is sex. Everyone is doing it, and with gusto. Tony is sleeping with his star new producer, Cameron Cook (Nafessa Williams), imported from NBC for her professional acumen and passion for yelling. Maud is sleeping with an old flame. Rupert is sleeping with basically everyone. In the first episode, a mortified Taggie catches him playing naked tennis with the wife of one of his fellow MPs. Patient, virtuous, and brave, Taggie is obviously the romantic heroine of the story, yet the TV adaptation finds surprising depth in a will-they-won’t-they storyline featuring a dowdy writer, Lizzie (Katherine Parkinson), and a gentle, gruff tech investor, Freddie (Danny Dyer). Both married to (terrible) other people, they have the kind of sincere, curious chemistry that defies more conventional romantic storytelling. Pleasure, Rivals insists, should be for all.

To be this camp now, this kitschy and unabashed, is no easy feat. Cooper’s novels are easy to parody, yet Rivals never veers too far in that direction. The clothes, the music (a key romantic scene is scored to Chris de Burgh’s “The Lady in Red”), the extravagance, and the boozing—all are roundly mocked. But the writers, Dominic Treadwell-Collins and Laura Wade, seem to have an underlying affection for both the source material and the era. This isn’t to say they’re nostalgic; quite the opposite. The series is savvy about what women in 1986 were working with, and it even has flashes of real acuity toward the end. But watching Rivals, I was more drawn to the qualities it has that’ve been largely absent from more prestigious shows this year: joy, and also abundance, sly humor, and fun. Amid a glut of dour, depressed series with Serious Things to Say, a show that carries itself so lightly is absolutely welcome.

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