The reasons for Donald Trump’s victory

If there is a silver lining for the devastated Democratic Party and its supporters after their crushing electoral defeat, it is that the decisive nature of Donald Trump’s victory will prevent the party from second guessing small decisions that would not have made a difference.

Trump became the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years. He improved on his numbers from 2020 in 48 states and in almost every county across the entire country. People of every age, race, and sexual orientation were more likely to vote for Trump than they were four years ago.

Such a comprehensive victory may prove helpful for Democrats in the long run. The result would not have changed if they had nominated someone different for Vice President, or if Harris had gone on Joe Rogan, or if she was less hawkish on Israel, or if the campaign had knocked on more doors, or called more voters, or bought just a few more ads.

The wholesale defeat was a rejection of the current idea of the Democratic Party, and the autopsy has already begun.

The chief culprit, according to many, is current President Joe Biden. A successful presidency is less about implementing effective policies than it is about convincing voters why those policies are effective. Biden’s failure to communicate how his economic policies were improving the lives of ordinary Americans at a time of rising prices and high interest rates left voters seeking change.

The current president had strongly implied that he would serve only one-term, but his political hubris and desire for power — the folly of many men — won the day.

For too long his enablers and much of the party attacked its own dissenters and supressed any serious challenge. By the time he was pushed to drop out, his party was heading for a landslide defeat, and a plurality of the country (including a supermajority of Republican voters) was furious at the Democratic party for hiding what appeared obvious to many: Biden’s rapid age-induced decline made him unfit for office.

Kamala Harris did well in the short time she was given to unite the party around her candidacy and produce genuine enthusiasm for her campaign. Hers was a gaffe-free campaign that stayed on message, but with hindsight she was a poor candidate dealt a bad hand in a tough political climate.

Perhaps out of a fear of appearing disloyal to her boss or an unwillingness to rock the boat, Harris refused to disagree with any of Biden’s decisions or announce any major policy differences. She ran as the successor of an unpopular administration, unable to promote its record yet powerless to promote change.

She and Tim Walz ceded the podcast and alternative media market to Trump and JD Vance, handing the Republicans near exclusive reach to a population that does not attend political rallies or follow mainstream news.

And no matter how well Harris closed out with a positive economic message — no matter how often she tried to explain that prices were falling, wages were rising, and that America’s reviving economy is ‘the envy of the world’ — the effect of years of inflation was baked in.

Ultimately, Joe Biden exited the race too late for a serious primary process that might have produced the candidate with the most cogent story of change.

The MAGA movement

Democratic failings are only one half of this story.

The other half is Donald Trump and his emboldened movement, the power of which is hard to overstate.

Over the four weeks leading up to Election Day, I met Trump supporters up and down the country. We spoke at length at a church near the US/Mexico border, at a gun show in Arizona, at a rally in Virginia, at a bed and breakfast in small-town Pennsylvania, and on a street corner in Philadelphia. They were, for the most part, friendly and generous with their time.

Here’s what I observed:

1. Trump voters believe that “the liberal elite” holds them in disdain. A big motivator in voting for Trump is “owning the libs” and causing “liberal tears”.
2. Many Trump supporters are working class. They’re convinced the ruling, educated, white-collar establishment has left them behind. Men of all ethnicities, and particularly white men, hold these views most strongly.
3. There is a disconnect between objective economic measures suggesting America has recovered from the pandemic better than any other developed nation and how these voters feel about their own hip pocket. Most said they had experienced financial stress in the past few years.
4. These voters care, deeply and in great numbers, about the changing definition of gender. They care especially about what they refer to as “transgenderism”, pointing to taxpayer-funded assistance for gender affirming care (though they don’t call it that) and what they describe as “men in women’s sports”. This came up again and again.
5. These voters love Trump — for his willingness to say what he thinks, for his mocking of the left, for his humour. Most of them believe he has been unfairly persecuted and that the 2020 election was stolen.
6. Their rhetoric towards “illegal immigrants” is hateful and at times conspiratorial. Many of them believe the Democrats plan to bring in as many people as possible from beyond the border, grant them citizenship, and settle them in swing states to cement a one-party tyrannical rule. Overall, there is a fierce rejection of any unauthorised immigration, a view shared by many first-generation Latinos and other migrants who came to America with visas.
7. Trump supporters and the broader MAGA movement detest the mainstream media. They think those of us who get most of our content from mainstream sources are being fed propaganda. They get most of their information from conservative TV and radio, X, and podcasts. The top three podcasts in the US last week were the Joe Rogan Experience, the Tucker Carlson Show, and The Charlie Kirk Show, reaching tens if not hundreds of millions of Americans. All three endorsed Trump.

It was striking to experience this totally different information ecosystem in which these people live.

Before election night, I had thought they existed in their own small bubble of propaganda and misinformation, and that they would likely be defeated by much higher levels of support for Harris and the fairly conventional Democratic ticket.

I still think much of what they believe is misinformed, but in hindsight it is we, not they, who live in the smaller bubble.

The Democrats’ shrinking tent

Once the party of the working class, Democrats are now the party of the educated.

People with college degrees dominate traditional media spaces, business conference rooms, and political offices. They set the agenda, so it’s easy to feel their views are shared by the majority. But just 36 per cent of Americans have a college degree — a shockingly low number that has been shrinking for over a decade.

Political staff offices and NGOs are filled by idealistic white graduates from elite liberal colleges, but the average American, including Black and Hispanic voters, is far more moderate.

In his autopsy for The Atlantic, “What the Left Keeps Getting Wrong”, the author and academic Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote:

Biden either could not or would not forcefully distance himself from the Democratic Party’s need for performative “wokeness” — the in-group messaging used by hyper-online and overeducated progressives that consistently alienates much of the rest of the nation.

“We don’t get to decide who feels marginalised”, Ezra Klein said last week.

According to exit polls, some 47 per cent of voters perceived Harris as ‘dangerously liberal’, including significant numbers of Black and Hispanic men, as well as moderate suburban white women who expressed concerns about transgender women playing in their daughters’ sport competitions. Indeed, the Republicans’ most successful campaign slogan — the one that moved the needle more than any other — was: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

We could write off these opinions as misguided or even bigoted. In the past week people have flocked to Instagram and other social platforms to decry the result as a product of sexism, racism and selfishness. But I think all that does is reinforce the MAGA movement’s view that the establishment looks down on them.

In 2019, online liberals attacked Bernie Sanders for speaking on Joe Rogan’s podcast, accusing him of implicitly promoting a “transphobe, Islamophobe and sexist”. But how can one move minds without speaking to them?

As the pop culture and music writer Spencer Kornhaber wrote in The Atlantic:

Harris wouldn’t have won just by going on a few more podcasts — but if more Democrats had spent more of the past four years in the mix, figuring out how to spar, complicating the right’s narratives about inflation and immigration, finding ways to redirect attention toward their own agenda, who knows?

To grow their tent — to reclaim their position as the home of the working class — Democrats might just need to reach across the aisle; to return to Fox News (which most of them have been boycotting since 2007), to go to the places with the people who feel left behind, and to engage with opinions they reject.

What next?

No party has ever won re-election when their president’s approval rating was so low and perceptions of the economy so weak. And in the post-pandemic, inflation-affected year of 2024, every governing party facing election in a developed country lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened since records for this began in 1905.

Some Democrats are using these data points to attribute their loss exclusively to historic and global trends, arguing that Harris was doomed from the start but that they’ll be back with gusto by the 2026 midterms.

I think they have a point, but there’s a limit to its value.

This election did not just fall out of a coconut tree. Donald Trump appears to have completed a political realignment that began when he walked down the golden escalator in Trump Tower almost a decade ago. The Republicans’ new coalition is multi-racial and working class. Trump has won over an influential number of Hispanic voters, Black men, young men, and city dwellers in blue bastions like New York and California — all considered part of Democrats’ core consistencies.

It is now up to the Democrats to respond.