Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump!
A dozen of the best takes on what just went down in America
Unless you’ve been living under a rock1, you probably know by now that Donald Trump has just won a sweeping victory to be elected once more as President of the United States2. And one of the biggest questions I hear from UK friends is - after everything he’s done - how did it happen? Why did so many people vote for him again?
I could write a hot take on this - but let’s face it, I’m no expert on US politics. So instead, here are twelve of the best takes I’ve read on why Trump won so decisively.
Meanwhile, the planned piece on childcare reform will have to wait until the weekend.
What just happened?
Trump won - and won big. He’s on track to win not just the electoral college, but the popular vote as well. Republicans have taken the Senate and look likely to win the House. He outperformed his 2020 performance in 2367 counties, declining in just 240. Though neither affected the results, two of the areas he made the greatest increases in vote share were deeply Republican Florida and staunchly Democrat New York City3. All this despite Harris outspending him in what was the most expensive presidential race ever.
He lost ground slightly amongst white voters (though still gained a majority) but gained over ten percentage points with Hispanics, gained with Asians and Native Americans and - narrowly - with black voters. He narrowed the male-female gap compared to 2010 from 15 points to 10 points. He did lose a little ground with wealthy voters - but gained strongly in the working class, particularly working class men.
So, why did it happen?
Brief Twitter Takes
Rupert Harrison, former chief of staff to George Osborne, blames it on inflation, immigration and identity politics4:
Tim Shipman of the Sunday Times says essentially the same - with added blame for Biden and credit for Trump’s charisma.
The Pre-Election Takes
Arch-pollster Nate Silver formally predicted the vote as too close to call5. But two weeks before he’d written that his gut was telling him Trump would win - and perhaps that poker-playing instinct of his was telling him what his model couldn’t. Regardless, his list of 24 reasons why Trump might win - majoring heavily on inflation6 and immigration, but also taking in the assassination attempt, a less than optimal Democrat campaign and racial depolarisation - remains an excellent summary of why he won:
Similarly, Matt Yglesias has written a couple of things since the election, but none of them have the explanatory power as his ‘27 takes’ written a week before - which majors heavily on inflation and the heavy losses by incumbent parties across the globe7. He argues Harris should have done more to distance herself from Biden - and indeed that Biden should have stepped down far earlier.
Women and Ethnic Minorities
Trump lost women and ethnic minorities - yes. But he lost both by a lot less than he did in 2020, and these gains more than made up the small losses amongst white folk.
UK election guru John Curtice observes that:
Without Joe Biden – a practising Catholic – on the Democrat ticket, Catholics, for many of whom abortion is a key issue, now swung to Trump too. They backed him by 56 per cent to 41 per cent, just as they did in 2016.
The ideological division also helps explain why men have been more inclined than women to back Trump. That was again true on Tuesday. However, there was little sign of the widely made suggestion that the gender gap would widen, given the particular prominence of the abortion issue this time around.
Rather, at 10 points, the Democrat lead among women was down on the 15-point gap in 2020, while Trump’s advantage among men, 10 points, was similar to the eight-point lead he enjoyed in 2020. It looks as though the issue may not have changed many women’s minds after all.
This surprised me a lot, especially after the 2022 mid-terms. But a great example of this is in Florida, where a measure to allow abortion up to 24 weeks was on the ballot paper. It got 58% support - but Trump still won the state 56% to 43%.
Rakib Ehsan argues that Harris took the ethnic minority vote for granted, while the Trump campaign actively courted Native Americans, Hispanics and others:
"But one of the strongest predictors of voting for Trump in this election was being Native American — with nearly two in three voters in this group opting for him (64%).
Back in September, Trump pledged to the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina — a battleground state where he has emerged victorious — that it would be granted federal recognition if he was returned to the White House, which in turn could open access to federal funding for education, healthcare, and economic development.
He also accused the Democrats, under the presidencies of both Barack Obama and Joe Biden, of neglecting Native American matters.”
Meanwhile, Issam Ahmed, talks of similar tactics by Trump to win over Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, the largest Arab-American enclave in a crucial swing-state:
“The Trump team also did what Harris notably did not: show up in Dearborn.
Her campaign's decision to tour Michigan with former Republican lawmaker Liz Cheney -- a vocal Iraq War advocate -- also alienated many Arabs.
Trump's outreach, on the other hand, benefited from a new link to the community: Lebanese-American Michael Boulos, who is married to his daughter Tiffany Trump.
Boulos' father Massad Boulos was a key emissary for the campaign.
Despite lingering skepticism over Trump's seemingly contradictory stances, Bishara Bahbah, chairman of Arab Americans for Trump, had faith in his next president.
"Yes, he said 'finish the job,' but when I inquired exactly what that means, I was told 'stop the war,'" he insisted.
"He's said it, and he'll do it. Trump has proven he does what he says."
Cultural Disconnect
On his substack, political scientist Yascha Mounk argues that Harris’s - and the Democrats more broadly - failure to distance themselves from radical leftist views on trans, identity politics, open borders and defunding the police has shattered ordinary Americans’ trust in institutions and made them see Trump as no worse than those who oppose him:
A small cadre of extreme activists obsessed with an identitarian vision of the world—a vision that pretends to be left-wing but in many ways parallels the tribalist worldview that has historically characterized the far-right—has gained tremendous influence over the last years. And even those institutional insiders who were able to keep this influence at bay through clever rearguard actions were rarely willing to oppose them in explicit terms.
This was one of the most consequential vulnerabilities of Kamala Harris’ campaign. While running for the Democratic primaries in 2019, she wedded herself to a slew of identitarian positions that happened to be deeply unpopular. Sensing that the political winds had shifted, she did not reprise her flirtations with the idea of defunding the police or decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But neither did she have the courage to explicitly call out the ideological foundations for these deeply unpopular positions—or to reassure millions of swing voters that she would be willing to stand up for common sense when doing so might risk inspiring a little pushback within her coalition.
Donald Trump is far outside the American cultural mainstream. (Yes, I believe that to be true even after reckoning with his unexpectedly strong showing tonight.) But the problem is that Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party, and the wider world of establishment institutions with which they are widely associated are also far outside the American cultural mainstream.
Harris’ campaign had many opportunities to address that problem. She could have asked her supporters not to self-segregate by race and gender the moment she became the official nominee. She could have defended a woman’s right to choose without condoning late-term abortions and stood up for the value of vaccines while acknowledging pandemic-era overreach by public health authorities. She could have chosen to make her case to the millions of swing voters who listen to the most popular podcast in the country. But she did not do any of that.
I don’t know whether Harris’ failure to mitigate Democrats’ glaring political weaknesses was due to fear and indecision or due to ideological conviction and a distorted perception of reality. But I do know that the price that she—and the rest of the world—is paying for that failure goes by the name of Donald J. Trump.
Pundit Konstantin Kisin, meanwhile, argues that Trump appeals to core elements of the American identity such as strength, prosperity and freedom, while the Democrat’s embrace of EDI and ‘woke’ history repels them8:
While going back to root causes, back in 2022 Jonathan Haidt was arguing that social media is at the root of the forces driving polarisation and destroying trust in shared civic institutions:
It’s not just the waste of time and scarce attention that matters; it’s the continual chipping-away of trust. An autocracy can deploy propaganda or use fear to motivate the behaviors it desires, but a democracy depends on widely internalized acceptance of the legitimacy of rules, norms, and institutions. Blind and irrevocable trust in any particular individual or organization is never warranted. But when citizens lose trust in elected leaders, health authorities, the courts, the police, universities, and the integrity of elections, then every decision becomes contested; every election becomes a life-and-death struggle to save the country from the other side. The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer (an international measure of citizens’ trust in government, business, media, and nongovernmental organizations) showed stable and competent autocracies (China and the United Arab Emirates) at the top of the list, while contentious democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and South Korea scored near the bottom (albeit above Russia).
Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. A working paper that offers the most comprehensive review of the research, led by the social scientists Philipp Lorenz-Spreen and Lisa Oswald, concludes that “the large majority of reported associations between digital media use and trust appear to be detrimental for democracy.” The literature is complex—some studies show benefits, particularly in less developed democracies—but the review found that, on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.
It’s the campaign, stupid
Political Editor of Unherd, Tom McTague, argues that while 2016 was a tremor, we are now entering a new Trump era - and blames Harris for running a lacklustre campaign devoid of policy:
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, Canadian style.
Harris was a poor candidate with almost no discernable message, parachuted in to save an unpopular administration on the unbelievable basis that she did not offer continuity but, apparently, change. It was a fundamentally bogus offer.
It seems remarkable to say it, but Trump was the substantive candidate in this election offering a critique of the incumbent’s record. What was the Harris message of this election? What was the substance of her trade, immigration or foreign policy? What was it that she offered other than the fact she was not Donald Trump? She was an actor, a cypher. By the end, her offer amounted to a single issue: abortion. It wasn’t enough.
CNN, meanwhile, tells the story of a more disciplined, focused Trump campaign9 that reached out to build a broader coalition, moderated on policy issues where necessary and ruthlessly exploited Democratic weaknesses.
Trump’s victory, years in the making, is as notable for its breadth as for its method. His campaign aimed from the outset to remake the political coalitions that have underpinned American elections for generations. Trump reached out to constituencies traditionally loyal to Democrats: union households, wage workers, and Black and Latino men.
At the same time, he courted the disillusioned — men scattered throughout America’s forgotten places who had long given up on electoral politics altogether. And his allies exploited rifts between Democrats and their base of support. A Republican-tied super PAC, for example, aired ads on Detroit radio urging the area’s Arab voters to support Green Party candidate Jill Stein over the Democratic ticket due to the Mideast conflict.
Simultaneously, the Republican Jewish Coalition spent $15 million targeting Jewish voters anxious over the administration’s support for Israel and the left’s embrace of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses.
I’m sure there are subtleties that will only become apparent in the weeks and months ahead as we get the full data. But the factors above seem to capture it pretty well. As Harrison put it: inflation, immigration and identity politics - likely in that order - carried the day.
If you have been then you do you.
Deeply angering the ghost of Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th President who will no longer be the answer to pub quiz questions on ‘Who was the only US President to be elected in non-consecutive terms?’
Trump was actually marginally closer to winning New York than Harris was to winning Florida.
He doesn’t say this, but I’d put them in this order of importance, too (i.e. inflation most important).
Technically speaking he said Harris had a ‘50.015% chance of winning’.
It’s true that the US economy is now doing well, with a performance that most European countries would love to have. But memories of the increase in prices appears to be long.
Something that Rob Ford systematically documents here.
I think it would be reasonable to say Harris made a very deliberate attempt in the campaign to pivot away from this and embrace patriotic messaging. But three months of this can’t outweigh four years of governing and ongoing wider campaigning by Democrats and their allies. As Ed West said, it feels significant that representatives from the two main parties appeared to be celebrating entirely separate festivals on a recent public holiday.
I realise this sounds like an oxymoron. But it really seems as if it was - even if the same couldn’t be said of any of Trump’s own speeches.
Are there any good rocks available? Living under one might be the smart choice if Trump does to American Democracy what he's said he will.