Eight years later, we are right back at square one: Donald Trump has convincingly defeated a seemingly popular—and far more qualified—woman candidate. This despite raising serious red flags about his mental competence. Yeh kya hua, kaise hua…
Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of Big Stories we’re doing this week on the US election. Part one looked at why the election is so close—despite Trump’s innumerable, umm, deficiencies. Part two had everything you needed to know about the key battlefields in the election.
First, the numbers
According to the latest count, Trump has comfortably scored 295 electoral votes—to Harris’ 226. More importantly, he won every so-called swing state: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia, and is leading in Nevada and Arizona. Harris lost everywhere except in deep blue territory.
More importantly, this was a comfortable win. Trump may become the first Republican to win the popular vote since George Bush in 2004. But as Nate Cohn points out in the Times, this is not a landslide—not even as large as Obama’s reelection in 2012—leave alone his 2008 runaway victory.
The broader picture: Republicans have seized control of the Senate—and increased their numbers in the House. It gives Trump the freedom to push through any item on his agenda—however extreme. Also important: He is serving a second term—and cannot run for reelection. In other words, he has nothing to lose.
Here’s the kicker: Yes, Trump won. But many voters who picked him don’t even like him. According to the CNN exit poll, 54% had an unfavourable view of him—and 55% said his views are too extreme. In other words, the decisive portion of the vote reflects their view of Dems—and Harris—not so much Trump.
So what happened? There are plenty of reasons being bandied about. Take your pick.
Blame the Biden White House
The most charitable version—to Harris—goes something like this: Joe Biden was deeply unpopular, and Harris could not shake off his legacy. Seven out of ten Americans said they wanted change in the exit polls. Two-thirds said the country was headed in the wrong direction. Many say the tipping point for her campaign occurred on The View—when this happened:
“What, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” co-host.. Sunny Hostin asked Harris, looking to give her a set for her to spike over the net. “There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she said.
That was an expensive blunder—at a time when most Americans are unhappy with their lives. Yes, Biden kept the US out of recession—but 45% of voters in exit polls said they were worse off than four years ago. One big reason: chronic inflation. 80% of them voted for Trump.
Adding to the burden: Biden took way too long to step aside. As a result, Harris didn’t get enough time to warm up. More importantly, the final choice was not tried and tested by the Democratic primaries: “Candidates’ kinks could have been worked out – or not. Almost certainly whoever emerged as the nominee would have gone into the final weeks without so many Americans complaining they didn’t know enough.. about Harris.”
Harris’ big mistake: Since she couldn’t separate herself from Biden, she wasn’t able to make a case for herself—often flip-flopping and floundering—leading some to label Harris an “artless dodger.” She was far more effective making a case against Trump, but, but, but… Americans already know everything about Trump—and know how they felt about him. OTOH, they didn’t have a clue about a Veep who’d been invisible for most of the Biden years.
Blame the minorities… or is it men?
Minorities cost Harris the swing states—in places like Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee. She got less of the Black vote—86%—and Latino vote—53%—compared to Biden. He won 92% of Black voters and 65% of Latinos in 2020. There was a historic Hispanic swing away from the Dems:
Mr. Trump appeared to make his largest gains among Hispanic voters, whether in the exit polls or in the results of counties with lots of Hispanic voters. Miami-Dade County in Florida voted for Mr. Trump by 11 points, compared with Mr. Biden’s seven-point victory in 2020 and Hillary Clinton’s 29-point victory in 2016. The once reliably Democratic bastions along the Rio Grande in Texas were all red — an astonishing shift from eight years ago, when Mrs. Clinton won 70 to 80% of the vote.
Or is it really the men? Trump made his gains in the Black vote among men—scoring 24% compared to only 9% among Black women. This made the difference in places like Georgia—where a landslide Black vote helped Biden seal the state. But the truly astonishing shift is among Latino men. Trump only managed 36% in 2020 vs Biden—but jumped to 47% against Harris. That said, 38% of Latino women picked Trump—that’s not a small number either.
Read the sexist subtext: When asked to rate the two candidates on their leadership quality, Trump beat Harris by 31 points in exit polls. One is a convicted felon with four criminal indictments—the other the vice president of the United States with a distinguished legal career.
The bigger picture: Hillary Clinton lost the white male vote to Trump by a staggering 30 points. Joe Biden brought that margin down to 17—but it has shot back up to 20 points against Harris. It is still smaller than Clinton—but Latino men seem to have stepped in to make the difference.
Something to see: To cheer you up, here’s the Onion’s take on the minority blame game:
Blame the women… or is it white women?
According to the exit polls, Harris even got less of the women’s vote than Biden—dropping from 57% to 54%. But she still outdid Trump by ten points…except when you look at white women. 53% voted for him—not all that less than white men (59%). To be clear, this isn’t new: White women picked Trump in 2016 and 2020, as well.
But their refusal to budge—despite losing their abortion rights, despite a woman candidate—is astonishing. The reason: most of them named inflation and the economy as their top issue. Abortion came second. More notably, Harris lost states where measures to protect or expand abortion rights won by comfortable margins—like Arizona and Missouri.
Data point to note: There is a clear generational split among white women. Only 36% of Gen Z voters went for Trump. The jumps to 41% among women 30 to 44—and 48% for those aged 45 to 64.
Whither the ‘shy women’? Toward the end of the campaign, Harris supporters started to claim that conservative women will secretly vote for Harris—defying their Trump-loving husbands. The campaign also made direct pitches urging them to do so—using Julia Roberts, no less:
The strategy seems to have failed—and it's the liberals own damn fault, or so Anna Rollins argues in Slate:
Assuring white women that they could “secretly” vote for Harris—that no one had to know—was incredibly condescending rhetoric. It assumed that white women feared their husbands and their larger communities… The rhetoric of victimhood is both insulting and ineffective when appealing to conservative white women. When I share a beer on my Republican neighbour’s porch.. If I could convince her that Harris would help her household maintain a reasonable cost of living and keep her family safe, she may be talked into voting blue.
Quote to note: Trump recently told his supporters: “There’s a group called ‘White Dudes for Harris, but I’m not worried about them at all, because their wives and their wives’ lovers are all voting for me.”
The bigger takeaway: Intersectionality proved to be a b***h. Obama was part white—and male. Hillary was white and female. Harris, however, was doubly a person of colour—and a woman to boot. Hence, everything was doubly hard for her. She lost support of men because she was a woman—and of white women because she was a person of colour. OTOH, Trump held on to his base: 65% of whites without a college degree—even gaining conservative voters since 2020. And he won more white women than 2016 or 2020.
Back to culture wars?
Too woke for America: A number of pundits say that the economy didn’t matter. Harris, in fact, lost on cultural issues—again, among men:
The upshot was that, despite a platform focused on winning back the working class economically, Biden and Harris lost too many of them culturally, especially when it came to a blue-collar rebellion against so-called woke issues such as preventing bans on transgender athletes in public schools, defunding the police, and so-called cancel culture.
The worrying bit: Harris lost ground in blue collar bits of blue America, as well—including New York City and New Jersey.
The bro whisperer: In contrast, Trump had a highly effective ‘bro whispering’ strategy—leveraging the likes of Joe Rogan:
Many of these target audiences were young white men who felt sidelined by progressive causes that tend to favour women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and minorities, and who weren’t as responsive to Harris’s relentless focus on reproductive rights… Trump won many of this group “by weaving a hypermasculine message of strength and defiance into his broader narrative that undermines confidence in democratic institutions.”
It may be why she shed five percentage points among young voters—despite all those cool TikTok reels. Or maybe it’s about Gaza.
Not left enough on Gaza? In Dearborn, Michigan—which has the greatest number of Arab Americans—Trump had 46.8% of the vote compared to 27.8% of the vote for Harris. In 2020, Joe Biden won the city with a 74.2% of the vote, compared to 24.2% for Trump. Trump is also now only the second Republican candidate to win Michigan since 1992. And he won comfortably—by over 80,000 votes.
The bigger takeaway: Rude electoral setbacks usually push the Democratic party to the right. It’s most likely that Harris’ loss will do the same. For example, the number one task on top Harris’ adviser’s list is this: “I want to have a serious conversation about how we’re talking to and trying to bring back non-college-educated white men. I want to talk about rural voters. I want to talk about going into hostile spaces and trying to win folks back.” No one is raring to woo those protesting college students.
The bottomline: In the Washington Post last month, Fareed Zakaria argued that we are witnessing the beginning of a new era. Markers of class and race are less reliable predictors of voting behaviour:
The great divide in America today is not economic but social, and its primary marker is college education… So the new party bases in America are an educated, urban, secular and female left and a less-educated, rural, religious and male right. These new divisions are even overwhelming that deepest of divides: race and ethnicity. More and more Black and Hispanic men are finding themselves comfortable with the Republican Party — and it’s especially pronounced with young people.
Reading list
Foreign Policy (paywalled), CNN, and US News & World identifies the key reasons that cost Harris the election. New Republic has the downer numbers on white women. Anna Rollins in Slate offers a stinging rebuke of the campaign to win conservative women. NBC News has more on the abortion rights measures that won across various states. Nate Cohn in The Tilt offers his take on the ideological erosion of the Democratic party. Fareed Zakaria offered a more thoughtful version of the same in the Washington Post (splainer gift link).
