The Morning After...

Trump Won...Barely. We Dive into How in our Snap Analysis

Donald Trump achieved what nobody else has been able to do since Grover Cleveland; he won back the Presidency after losing it. This time around he even got a majority of the vote, so there can be no “The Electoral College sucks” arguments about his win. It goes without saying that Trump’s win last night has far reaching implications not just in America but around the world.¹

If the Democrats are ever going to mount a winning coalition again, it’ll help to dive into why they lost here. It wasn’t because of Kamala Harris. She ran about as good a campaign as anyone could have. She managed to take a solid lead around Labor Day and worked hard to appeal to the middle of the electorate. She ran as disciplined a campaign as anyone I’ve seen, against someone who is notoriously undisciplined on the campaign trail. She was as good a candidate as the Democrats could have hoped for; so why did she lose?

1. Before we get too far down the rabbit hole, we should be reminded the last two elections were exceptionally close. People forget that Biden won by only a handful of votes across three states, and that Trump won 2016 in the same manner. This was always going to be a close election and many of us lost sight of that (including me).

2. Less people voted than in 2020. Democratic wins depended on turnout. It didn’t materialize. The net effect?

3. Branding. Before we get into the specifics, we have to understand that the Democratic Brand is an exceptionally weak one. You can read what I wrote about political branding here. Political branding is very hard to crack. Once you become a Republican voter, you tend to stay a Republican voter for life. Many of the people Democrats won in 2020 that both Harris and Hillary lost were old school cultural “Reagan Democrat” conservatives they weren’t going to win.

4. The Gender Gap didn’t materialize as big as expected. I’ve been harping for awhile that Harris needed to get to about 39% of white men to have a chance. This is what Biden got in 2020. Guess what—she got it. But you know who didn’t come along? White Women. Harris didn’t get a majority of them. On top of that, which groups saw the biggest slide towards Trump? Black and Hispanic Men.

So what is the cause for this phenomenon? If you say “its because of sexism” you’d be only half right. Generally, men are looking more and more at the Democratic Party and saying “They don’t represent me, there is no place for me there,” and Democratic women are giving them every confirmation that that is correct. This transcends race. For as much as Democrats worked to turn out the women’s vote, much of the rhetoric towards men were alienating and condescending. Here’s Professor Scott Galloway describing it.

5. The anti-Trans ads worked. I saw a lot of these. Their wording were deceptive, the actual impact of the policies were neglectful and the priority of this issue over others was a joke. You know what though, they were effective. Much of politics is about keeping your voters in line and making the other side seem unacceptable. To a lot of voters, particularly in suburbs, the rhetoric and policy of the Democrats on this issue seemed a bridge too far. To be sure, Democrat grandstanding on it (as more of a nod to the LGBTQ community) did not help much. But take for instance the ad about Harris securing gender affirming treatment for prisoners while Attorney General in CA; that policy impacted only 2 people in the CA penal system and appealed to absolutely nobody outside of that, but it raised an eyebrow to suburban voters everywhere. Once that image is planted in the mind of the public, Republicans could broadbrush it far and wide, and did so.

6. The realignment based on education is continuing, and Democrats still think its based on racial identity. I wrote about this a week before the election and was lambasted by MANY progressives for it. Guess what—it’s happening whether they like it or not. The realignment is occuring around education, gender, geography (as in rural, suburban, urban) and religion. Note how race is not among these? Look again at the demographic chart above, you’ll see that hispanic and black men, who are less likely to go to college, more likely to work manual labor jobs and more likely to live in rural areas, are trending toward the GOP. Democrats tended to take these votes for granted, locking them up as assured, when in reality, they were leaking them in droves. Biden won back some of them in 2020, due to the pandemic and the fact that Biden understood how to talk to union workers. But otherwise, this trend continued unabated. Democrats have work to do talking to a non-college educated electorate.

7. As long as we’re talking about education, progressives on college campuses did themselves no favors with their protests. Yes, Gaza is a horrible situation. Yes, Palestinians deserve a seat at a table to negotiate peace. Yes, Israel may have exceeded itself with its disproportionate response in leveling Gaza. Locking yourselves in campus administration buildings, and camping out in quads made you look foolish though and served absolutely zero purpose. In fact, Republicans pointed it out as liberal activism run amok and most of American swing voters agreed. You know what the end result of those protests are? They got rid of a thoughful and smart President who crafted good relationships and foreign policies and replaced him with a guy who wants the US to withdraw from the world and let every other country do what they want. This isn’t a solution, and it’s counterproductive to everything you protested for.

8. Democrats continue to focus on funding and supporting Democratic candidates only in the Atlantic Northeast and the West Coast, and letting those in the middle of the country languish.

9. Democrats also have a reinforcing media silo problem as well. They need to get out of the metro areas and relate to those outside of urban strongholds and college campuses.

10. Out of all the analysis I’ve seen this morning, this one seems the most apt:

But you may say “Wait a minute, the economy is going great right now and during COVID it sucked. That doesn’t seem right.” You know what? During COVID people got checks for doing nothing, had nothing really to spend it on because everything was closed and could make their basic payments on things. During Biden’s term, the untangling of the supply chains (which was going to happen regardless of who was in office) sparking inflation meant they couldn’t afford it, and had to actually work to make ends meet. Sometimes, the simplest explanation is the best.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

“God help us.”

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. One note from someone I know visiting Poland right now said “People over here are losing their shit! They think Russia is invading them next and that Trump will allow it.”