An overdue catharsis: Why I think Trump won

At this point it’s taken me over a year to process Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. In 2020, I felt that Biden HAD to win but in 2024 I didn’t quite feel that way and perhaps that was part of a broader subtext of shift in emotion over the four years of his term. Through much of the year I had a deep sense of foreboding as if the country and our future was slipping away. My head told me that the country would not repeat the mistake of 2016 but in my heart, I had a feeling that something had changed, that too many had forgotten about Trump’s first term or were generally unsatisfied with the stable, yet predictable malaise of the Biden administration. For four years, I didn’t really think much about who was the president or what they were doing. With Trump there is no such thing as overexposure. He’s in the headlines every day and there’s a general sense of anxiety at all times. To both his supporters and opponents, that’s often the point.

Before getting into the multitude of reasons that underpinned the emotions I’ve described, let’s talk some high level numbers. Trump’s win wasn’t the result of a vast change in the US electorate that the media would lead you to believe. Whether it was a collective exhaustion of the Clintons / Democratic rule, a strong economy, Russian Interference, Social Media manipulation and the X-factor, unknown business executive features that appealed to many about Trump, it was very easy to write off 2016 as a weird election where the country voted against the establishment without understanding the consequences. 2024 WAS different, but not THAT different. We are still a very divided country with two large political parties, calibrating their platforms and attracting interest groups with enough potential to win a majority. This requires each party must be a “large tent” holding together people who don’t always get along. While the perception has traditionally been that every major candidate will win 40% of the vote just for showing up and the remaining 20% of undecided voters are up for grabs, the reality at the national level is that the margins are much narrower and that even showed up last year where for the first time, Trump won the popular vote. But not decisively. Trump’s popular vote win was much lower margin than Biden in 2020 with lower turnout. In effect, for every 100 people who voted for Biden in 2020, 2 voted for Trump in 2024 and another 1-2 stayed home. This is still a very small margin.

Watching the TV on election night and thereafter — which I did not do a lot of — I heard a lot of reasons why Trump won and Harris lost. But to me, it was pretty simple: he was the more desperate candidate. He worked harder, broadened his appeal beyond his traditional base and delivered a more authentic message. For Biden, Harris & the Democrats the contested the 2024 election as if it were as important as any other presidential election, but for Trump, his back was against the wall already convicted in one criminal case with three additional pending; it was the difference between life and death. And he ran like a candidate for whom it meant that much. But there was more to it.

The Democrats screwed up their succession plan

The seeds of defeat started with Biden’s 2020 nomination when he pledged to nominate a black woman to be his running mate and later hinted at being a “transition” president. But he never explicitly made a one term pledge which felt prudent because no one wants to enter the presidency as a lame duck — which explains why (hopefully) Trump frequently teases a third term. Once in office, Biden turned on his pledge, virtually ignoring Kamala Harris rather than positioning her as his natural successor, perhaps in the same way that Obama kept things open to allow Clinton contest & win the 2016 nomination. But Biden went even further in marginalizing Harris; he didn’t give her much of a clearly-defined portfolio. It also didn’t help that everything she was associated with seemed to go poorly. While she and others have pointed the finger at Biden, she was also at fault. At the top level things aren’t perfectly presented: you have to take something and run with it. A great example: immigration (more on that later) where he gave her broad latitude over policy, but she was not the “Border Czar” as Republicans claimed. As a result, Harris was about as unpopular a VP as we have ever had, which is hard to do because the VP job by its nature generally involves working on low-stakes issues and breaking ties in the Senate. Though the timing of her nomination proved to be a surprise, the Republicans were playing the long game and making her “Hillary Clinton Jr.” in preparation for 2028. It just so happened this also made her vulnerable for 2024 as well.

Meanwhile, Biden aged and his mental acumen degraded in office. Like many in advancing age, he had his good days and his bad days, but there were enough bad days those around him should have gotten that message. He should have given up on re-election in time for an open primary. If not, his advisors never should have let him on the debate stage with Trump until after both had been nominated which has been the tradition, though it’s fair to say that could have resulted in a landslide defeat for Democrats as well. Nonetheless, I’ve long believed that the American people have wisdom in their collective decision making and by that fateful night in June, it was impossible to refute that Biden was no longer able to capably serve. By allowing such duplicity to fester, the Democrats allowed the more energetic candidate (who seemed dead a month before during his NY criminal trial) to emerge.

For a brief moment in time, Biden’s resignation gave the Democrats a much needed jolt of enthusiasm, leading to a brief glimmer of hope for a quick, intense campaign into a contested convention. Within hours however, Biden endorsed Harris and the Democratic establishment convinced themselves & the media that without a seamless rallying around a Harris nomination to benefit from Biden’s formidable campaign cash and infrastructure, they wouldn’t be able to put up a fair fight. But the timing just seemed too perfect. All the money & campaign infrastructure couldn’t make up for the perception that she was an illegitimate candidate.

Young White Men

White Women typically drive national elections, but one of the most fascinating takeaways from 2024 was that for the first time in my lifetime, it was the Republicans, not the Democrats who pinned their hopes on “broadening their base” and did so by appealing to low wage workers (e.g. Teamsters who stayed neutral & tipped employees based on the “No Tax on Tips” pledge) and young white men. To this point, Democrats traditionally appealed to the youth vote, where they typically dominate, featuring young women, LGBTQ and minorities. But Trump saw an opportunity with young, straight white men who are typically conspicuously excluded and exploited it. He spoke to the frustrations of many who had grown up in a generation of race-based admission preferences and DEI programs that spoke to everyone except them. To young white men, it feels that the “system” is geared to helping everyone else get ahead and are tired of being portrayed as “the problem.”

But it wasn’t just a lingering sense of resentment that Trump used to appeal to Young White Men, he was everywhere they were. He made grand entrances at WWE events, nearly every major UFC Main Event and many major football games, whether in college or the NFL. Trump became a guilty pleasure. If there was a big event, he was there with authentic enthusiasm that made millions of young men feel “he’s just like me.”

All of these efforts had a huge payoff. Even though Biden still won, these efforts and an overall decline in turnout resulted in a 9 point swing to Trump and the shift was even more pronounced in the swing states. In fairness it wasn’t just Trump’s appeal to young white men; Gaza was a major problem for the Democrats and likely led many in their traditional youth base to stay home.

All of this came to a head near the end of the campaign when Trump went on Joe Rogan’s podcast. No one will ever know what went down between Harris and Rogan or why she never appeared but she stuck with playbook of appealing to middle-aged women and instead taped an interview Brenee Brown, a podcaster with a much smaller audience. Trump’s inroads to a demographic, long ignored, had a major impact and will require both parties to adjust their approach moving forward.

Democrats can’t win elections with fear

Frequently discussed in politics but rarely understood are emotions and how those emotions motivate different types of people. To simplify a lot of emerging academic research, there is a view that political beliefs are driven by genetics and to a certain extent how people respond to fearful stimuli. Generally speaking, since the time of McCarthy, a core election strategy of Republicans is to scare people. And generally speaking, when we as a populace are afraid and do not directly blame who is in the White House for it, (1968, 1972, 1980, 1988, 2004), Republicans do quite well. Conversely you can look at the failed campaigns of Nixon, Goldwater, Ford, Bush, Dole, McCain & Romney to draw the parallel conclusion that none of the above successfully tapped into the emotional anxieties of much of the country.

Strip away the substance of Trump’s policies and focus on their key emotional appeal — and that of all fascists — it comes down to playing on people’s fears. That was how he won in 2016. Though his anti-immigration & hard on crime agenda were still in his 2024 appeal, the script flipped; it was Harris, not he who tried to appeal to the fears and insecurities of Americans by labelling Tump a Fascist and lining up centrists & Never Trump Republicans on her side. It was a factually honest and compelling argument backed by solid polling data but polling data gets unreliable when turnout is unpredictable and that’s often driven by emotions on the margins. Democrats have rarely run on fear and learned a hard lesson there’s a good reason why. In the future, Democrats need to stick with their emotional appeal of hope & unity. Perhaps this is why an inspiring speaker like Zohran Mamdani has gained so much traction.

Immigration

Immigration splits both parties which naturally puts the incumbent party on the defensive. On the right, there are pro-business constituencies that support immigration for access to cheap labor and religious conservatives support welcoming refugees based on scripture. There are fierce immigration activists on the left, many of whom are relied upon to win elections but there are also union and working class minorities who fear immigrants will take their jobs that form the core of the democrat turnout machine.

At the outset of his presidency, Biden reversed nearly all of Trump’s immigration policy and adopted policies that led to an unprecedented surge in immigration. This policy, amplified by Republican messaging on the message and transport of illegal migrants to “blue states” turned a generally largely border issue impacting southern states to a national issue that didn’t just work for Republicans in their traditional strongholds, but created an impression that Biden had lost control of the country and they felt real fear — albeit somewhat racially motivated — in areas of the country that traditionally did not have high rates of illegal immigration. It also didn’t help that Harris seemed both uninterested and ineffective at managing it.

In the second half of his term, Biden & the Democrats heard the feedback from the mid-terms and reversed course, even trying and failing to pass a tough immigration reform law, but the Democrats’ duplicity on the issue was clear. As illegal immigration became a more apparent issue felt in communities across the country, it was also an area where Trump had a significant polling advantage.

It’s the economy stupid

James Carville, Bill Clinton’s chief communications strategy coined the term “It’s the Economy Stupid” to narrow and disciple Clinton’s campaign, which many believe was a key factor in 1992 election win and his re-election in 1996. By all accounts, the economy under the Biden administration improved. Unemployment returned to the historical pre-pandemic lows within his first year in office and GDP rebounded as well.

But there was one issue that bedeviled the administration: inflation. In retrospect the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 was one of the first times in history the government had been overly generous with stimulus payments and it led to the highest inflation in nearly 40 years. Everyone felt it and it was impossible to ignore.

Rather than running on the strong economy they created with one big problem, Democrats conspicuously avoided the issue and sought to demonize the private sector at every turn. In meetings with business leaders, Biden refused to be photographed with them and conspicuously snubbed Elon Musk from an event celebrating electric vehicles. Such divisiveness alienated the administration even from supporters like Jamie Dimon. As a result, most voters were negative on the economy and didn’t favor Harris on the issue.

America has sexists & racists

As I noted at the top, the margins in this election were incredibly fine. And while we have demonstrated ourselves capable of electing a black president, we haven’t gotten there with women. Does that mean as a country we are sexist? And have we gotten over our historical issues of racism?

There is no way to know but in a close election where a candidate like Joe Biden won in a similarly contested tight, but decisive election, there were enough voters who were uncomfortable voting for a female and / or African American candidate. Leaving all other issues aside that we’ve covered, the margins may have been fine enough to tip the scales. It’s a sad state and it shouldn’t define us as a country but when the margins are this fine, identity politics can still swing a close election.