Why Trump Prevailed

The biggest story about this election is, perhaps, that there’s just nothing to glean from it. There’s no grand repudiation of a dynasty or decades-old consensus. It’s just a standard scenario where the opposition wins against an unpopular incumbent. That might sound anti-climatic but it’s the truth. The prevailing narrative of voters rejecting the incumbency at a time of economic insecurity is a trend we have seen play out repeatedly in the post-Covid era, from the LDP losing in Japan to Britain’s conservative being crushed. Regardless of their ideological leanings, the incumbent government has been swept from power. With that said, there are certainly large lessons for Democrats to draw from this election, lessons that might make them feel uncomfortable but need listening to if they want to move forward and find their identity in a second Trump term.

What makes the election all the more bewildering for them is that the Democrats, on paper, did everything right. In office, they guided the economy to a soft landing, with inflation falling from the highs of 2022 and settling in a stable position and unemployment declining back to where it was before Covid. They directed massive domestic spending into much needed infrastructure projects across the post-industrial states Trump had once swept back in 2016 after exploiting economic anxiety and brought further investment through the CHIPS Act. After that disastrous June debate, they rightly broke with tradition and replaced the ailing Biden with a stronger and - more importantly - younger candidate, which seemed to rejuvenate their momentum. Their election blitz saw them out-spend their opponents by billions, bringing scintillating advertisements, celebrity endorsements and large, boisterous rallies unseen since Obama in ‘08, not to mention a great ground game as thousands of canvassers trawled from precinct to precinct, fighting for the attention of every undecided voter. You can forgive them for feeling complacent. But all of that opulence and glamour amounted to nothing.

Trump didn’t just win. He won comfortably. Unlike in 2016, when he scored a surprise electoral victory but lost the popular vote, Trump will go to Washington able to claim a broad mandate. Over his four years out of power, he rebuilt the Republican Party in his image, creating a movement that only seemed to strengthen with every recrimination. He will begin his second term bound by few political norms, after a campaign in which he seemed to defy every one. This is the most staggering political comeback in American history. Nixon may have held the political redemption trophy for nearly 60 years, but that title was usurped on Tuesday evening. Trump earned his place in the pantheon of American history with his uphill struggle to get elected for a nonconsecutive term, becoming the first American president to do so since Grover Cleveland.

It’s not hyperbolic to describe Harris’ loss as apocalyptic for the Democrats, not just because of the implications posed by a second Trump presidency but also the extent and scale of their collapse. Trump’s party flipped the Senate, and (as of the time of writing this article) is in position to maintain control of the House of Representatives.

He gained ground everywhere. Not a single state swung left compared to 2020. In Pennsylvania alone, Harris failed to outperform Biden in a single county. She recorded the worst performance for a Democrat in solidly blue states in over decades in an incredibly polarized era, only managing to scrape by in New Jersey by five points. Five. Not even the most sanguine conservative voters could have predicted the size of this repudiation in their wildest dreams. Most would have been content with re-taking Georgia and Pennsylvania. The very notion of trimming down Democratic leads in traditional states like Connecticut and New Mexico would have been unfathomable a week ago.

Yet, that’s exactly what the Republicans did. Across the nation, he gained votes in places conventional wisdom would dictate he had exhausted all of his possible space. Blue areas shifted toward him, with Trump improving his performance in places like New York City by double digits. So did suburbs, rural areas, even college towns. That will be the biggest finding Democrats will learn from the autopsy of Harris’ campaign. Donald Trump came closer to winning New York than Democrats did in Florida. Donald Trump came closer to winning Illinois than Democrats did in Texas. In a world as polarized as ours, that is simply astounding.

Unlike what some progressives may argue, Harris’ gender did not, in fact, cost her the election. America is not opposed to a female president. Ironically, she underperformed Biden with female voters compared to 2020. No, she lost because the election was shaping up to be a referendum on Biden. That referendum still ended up happening, just with a different name at the top of the ticket, who had no discernible message apart from the unbelievable basis that she did not offer continuity but, apparently, change, a lie no one brought. It seems skipping a primary to coronate an extremely unpopular politician who has always struggled with an authenticity problem and was part of the unpopular incumbent admin might not have been the best plan.

Granted, Joe Biden’s decision to step aside in July gave Democrats a fighting chance, but his initial misread of Democrats’ 2022 midterm successes as validation of his presidency and bid for a second term put his party at an enormous disadvantage. So did his denial of his own mortality. And barring a turnaround, it appeared Harris couldn’t overcome the public’s frustration with his economy and the majority sentiment that the country is on the wrong track. What made it even more difficult was that Harris struggled to define herself outside of Biden’s shadow. For some unexplained reason, she couldn’t even comprehend the idea of distancing herself on major policies when she most needed to, especially when it came to the handling of the Gaza War, which remained a schism within the party over the campaign, a division she could not mend, perhaps, owing to her untested abilities as a leader, a skill she could have refined through a competitive primary.

It didn’t help matters that this quality wasn’t offset by her vice president candidate. While it may be hard for Democratic strategists to digest, Tim Walz was a strategically bad choice as a running mate. In the eyes of the American people, he was wiedely regarded as the governor who submitted to the BLM protests, the man who watched his state capital burn to the ground and barely lifted a finger. Shapiro or Beshear, two of the other leading candidates to become Harris’ VP, would have strengthened her position in the blue wall states and stemmed the haemorrhaging of independent and rural voters, which saw her lose ground in states like Texas. Since both are famously moderate, adding them to the ticket would have signaled to the American people that she is not the San Francisco liberal that Trump portrayed her as, but a pragmatist willing to build coalitions.

Liberal commentators will no doubt knee-jerkily dismiss Trump’s victory as a white backlash, a racially-charged rebuke of progressivism but the reality is the former president assembled a remarkably diverse coalition of voters. In fact, his support among White voters actually fell. He was catapulted to victory because there was a large swing from every other ethnic minority group.

Latino voters, once a reliable bulwark of the Democratic base, also continued their recent shift right. The two major voter surveys — the network exit polls and AP Votecast — differed on whether Harris won Latinos by 8 points or 15 points. But either way, it was a massive shift from Biden’s roughly 30-point win among Hispanic voters four years ago. While Hispanics are admittedly diverse in terms of country of origin and migratory background, their Christian values — in most cases, specifically their Roman Catholic beliefs — are central to the identity of many. By focusing on his opposition to abortion and the radical cultural liberalism which prevails in the Democratic Party, Trump successfully made inroads with a demographic many thought he would lose following his inflammatory rhetoric over immigration. Trump also won between 20 and 25 percent of Black men, netting him the highest black support for a Republican in 64 years. That helped him in places like Georgia and North Carolina.

The theory of “demographic destiny” — that, as the US becomes less white, the Democratic Party will naturally become the dominant political force in American politics — has been well and truly shattered. The supposedly progressive and cosmopolitan Democrats may have put up a mixed-race candidate, but it is they who have been left behind by modern-day America’s traditionalists, who are as diverse as they are patriotic.

Another fundamental thing about this election is the Republicans tried to invent male-based identity politics and succeeded. Most of their gains with minority voters came from its outreach strategy to young men. From appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast to taking selfies with content creators like Adin Ross and Jake Paul, Trump managed to not only capture the excitement of young men, but mobilise them in a way few other candidates have succeeded. While this is a global trend, Trump was actually able to translate it to tangible results by resonating with them almost like a paternalistic father figure.

These losses wouldn’t have mattered so much if the Democrats forged a new voter coalition to offset those losses, but they struggled to build one that included dissatisfied Republicans, college-educated voters and young women. By the end, Harris’ offer amounted to a single issue: abortion. It wasn’t enough. She spent crucial days on the campaign trail courting Republicans, even rallying with former Rep. Liz Cheney in Ripon, Wisconsin, the sentimental birthplace of the GOP, hoping to peel away conservatives offended by Trump’s rhetoric. For the third time, that strategy did not work because that voter does not exist, or at least in sufficient numbers to make a sizeable impact. She was chasing a constituency that does not, in fact, exist. The idea there were millions of sensible Republicans waiting to vote for Harris is a fantasy only writers of The West Wing or Veep could conjure up. It’s a tale that SNL-watching New York liberals convinces themselves exists to make them feel more comfortable, to reassure them that moderate conservatives were waiting to flock to their party.

The most galling thing is that many Democrats don’t even seem willing to face facts. With their base in the professional classes, the federal bureaucracy and the media, the party now operates with almost Stalinist conformity, using influencers to lambast their opponents with a ferocity even the Man of Steel would have appreciated. Party supporters seem out-of-touch too: a recent poll of urban professionals found their views on everything from meat consumption to freedom of speech differs drastically from those of most Americans. This Manichean mania has led progressives not to rethink but assail. As Van Jones, a long-time Democratic operative has observed, once voters choose wrongly, they’re dismissed as racists and fascists. It goes without saying that this kind of selective scapegoating is not a workable political strategy.

This is not 2016, it is something more seismic. That first Trump election was but a tremor it seems, the disaffected white working class merely the first group to break from the old order before the stampede to come. This time, Latinos, African Americans and the young appear to have followed suit, with as many as one in three minority voters backing Trump. For so long, we have been told that demography is destiny and that the Democratic Party was en route to an unbeatable rainbow coalition, as if the policies they were offering did not matter. That narrative should now be put out of its misery. The argument that the lower turnout, high engagement electorates are far friendlier to Democrats may well be proven right. Those special election overperformances between 2022 and 2024 ultimately amounted to nothing. The Republican Party is now home to the low propensity voter and thrives in high turnout environments.

A lot of the liberal rage in 2017 was because Trump's win felt like an unjust accident. Not enough people took him seriously, the Comey letter happened, and he decisively lost the popular vote. But this is a solid 2004-level win, so whatever happens is what America wants. He has a popular mandate now for the first time. This was a complete and total repudiation of the Leviathan. The managerial class has lost all credibility. The institutions they’ve hijacked and weaponized have no legitimacy whatsoever.

Dissecting and analysing the results of this election will take months, if not years. It’s arguably one of the most consequential elections in American political history and the result defies precedent. The fact Trump could gain votes in his third election after running his worst campaign is more a testament to the ineptitude of the Democrats than Trump’s robust campaigning skills. What the Democrats learn from this will shape the future of their party and the country.