Weekend reads: 12 reasons why Trump won

More than 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck; Brat Summer was never going to fly

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In what’s being described as a landslide victory, Donald Trump won the American presidency this week, capturing all seven battleground states and the Senate, and is likely to win the House. This, despite the fact that Kamala Harris vastly outspent him. According to The New York Times, Trump “made gains in every corner of the country and with nearly every demographic group,” most notably with Black and Latino men. The polls and the mainstream media had predicted a dead-heat election. But they got it wrong. Again. Trump won, and won big, securing a sweeping mandate.

The legacy media and the Democratic Party now find themselves in an awkward position. For years, both have been warning about the threat Trump posed, and positioning themselves as the defenders of democracy. How will they contend with a democratic outpouring of support for Trump? The will of the people has been expressed. Will there be any soul-searching about how they could have so misunderstood the public they’re meant to serve?

Early indications suggest not. In the Guardian, columnist Rebecca Solnit captured the mood in many corners: “Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do.” Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi is already scrambling to reframe Trump’s decisive victory, insisting to The New York Times that it was not, as the paper put it, “a crushing electoral rebuke” of the Democrats.

However you feel about Trump (and I’m no fan), understanding the will of the people is an urgent task in any democracy — and we should take it seriously.

In that spirit, here are a dozen potential reasons why Trump triumphed. (No doubt there are more. Feel free to weigh in in the comments section.)

1. Kamala Harris was a weak candidate.

   Until Joe Biden withdrew under enormous pressure, Harris was widely considered to be a weak candidate. She favours word salad speeches and does not think well on her feet. Her political track record does not reflect any discernable governing principles. She was not particularly visible during the Biden presidency — the comedian Aziz Ansari joked there was more footage of Big Foot than Harris — and she had low approval ratings. Add to that, she had already been tested in 2020 and had failed spectacularly, polling at 4 percent or lower when she pulled out of the presidential race. As I pointed out back in August, Brat Summer was not going to change any of that.

2. Kamala Harris was selected in an anti-democratic way. The Democrats should have held a primary, which would have revealed her lack of electability. Instead, they simply anointed her the nominee. That was a mistake, and I suspect the backroom dealings didn’t play well with the American people.

3. The Democrats covered up President Biden’s ailing health. When the debate smashed any illusions that Biden would be capable of governing for another four years, the public (including Democrats) was angry that this knowledge had been concealed from them. Choosing Biden’s vice president as the presidential nominee was unwise for that reason alone.

4. Kamala Harris ran a weak campaign. Despite what Joy Reid may insist on MSNBC, Harris did not run a flawless campaign. While she may have drummed up plenty of fawning puff pieces (“Welcome to Kamalot,” anyone?), she provided very little information about her policies, waited too long to start doing serious media interviews, and did a poor job of distancing herself from the Biden administration’s agenda — not to mention reading the public mood.

5. Kamala Harris is associated with an unpopular border policy.

   The Biden years saw soaring numbers of migrants crossing the southern border, placing strain on many communities. “There is no constituency left in this country that favors large-scale immigration,” Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, recently told The New York Times. Yet the administration did not correct course until very late in the game. Harris campaigned on tighter border control measures, but she did a poor job of explaining her role in Biden’s policies (see the border Czar debate) and failed to articulate her reasons for reversing position.

6. Many Americans are struggling under the weight of a cost-of-living crisis, a housing crisis, and an opioid crisis. In a time when more than 60 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, and anti-elite sentiment is soaring, the Harris campaign’s glitz and glamour (and celebrity endorsements) didn’t land.

7. The Democrats have abandoned the working class, a large swath of the electorate. Bernie Sanders said it best: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.” As Lean Out guest Batya Ungar-Sargon argues at American Compass: “It is at this point undeniable: There has been a realignment in American politics. The Democrats are the party of the rich and poor, winning with Americans making less than $30,000 a year and over $100,000 a year, while the Republicans are the party of the working and middle class, winning everyone in between … The GOP under Trump has cobbled together the multi-ethnic working-class coalition that the Democrats used to brag about.”

8. The Democrats veered too far left on cultural issues in 2020, and are out of step with the American people. The progressive left — which is, according to Pew research, highly educated and majority white — amounts to just 6% of the public and 7% of the registered voters. As the journalist Andy Mills notes this week, “Pew polling has been clear for the last several years that the ‘progressive left’ is a very, very small amount of the American population, even as they seem much larger in social/legacy media,”

9. The Democrats labelled masculinity as “toxic,” while Donald Trump acknowledged men’s struggles. American men are in crisis, with declining employment and education rates, and rising suicides and overdose deaths. Many, particularly in the working class, are lonely and disconnected, and are feeling fed up with the “toxic masculinity” discourse. “Many young men believe they live in a liberal-leaning society that actively despises them, treating them with disdain rather than empathy as their struggles have mounted,” the journalist Lee Fang writes this week. Into that cultural moment stepped Trump, who affirmed traditional masculinity. The Democrats responded by dispatching the Obamas to hector men, and sending AOC out to champion Doug Emhoff as a model of masculinity (a man who cheated on his wife, impregnated another woman, and has been accused of domestic assault). As Lean Out guest Zaid Jilani writes this week, “On the morning of the election, Trump posted an ad that I suspect would resonate with many male voters. ‘There was no prize for the guy who got up every day to do his job,’ the narrator said as audiences are greeted with video of men from various ethnic backgrounds working at their jobs. What Trump was doing was saying: look, men, I see your pain.”

10. Donald Trump understands the power of independent media. When Harris finally started doing press, she threw almost all her chips in with the mainstream media, a dying industry. But Donald Trump understood where the audiences are. He did appearances on Joe Rogan (more than 48 million have tuned in) and Theo Von (14 million and counting). Harris, by contrast, declined to do Rogan’s podcast, making her look fearful (and snobbish) — and missing out on a huge opportunity to reach undecided male voters, the constituency she most needed to persuade.

11. Donald Trump is anti-war, and so, increasingly, is the American public. Support for the U.S. playing global policeman is low, and Americans are tired of sending their children oversees to fight forever wars. Recruiting Liz Cheney to the Democratic cause, then, was a big misstep. To fully understand the emotional impact on military families, read this Free Press essay from a Democratic fundraiser who cast her ballot for Trump: “Through the loss of my brother, I knew enough about the military to realize what a mistake it was for the Kamala Harris campaign to trot Liz Cheney all across the Rust Belt. The campaign fundamentally misunderstood all of the middle-class and working-class families who had sent their sons and daughters off to fight the wars of Cheney’s father.”

12. The Democrats are increasingly pro-censorship, and are aligned with political correctness — and it turns out the American people do not particularly like being told what to say or think. The journalist Matt Taibbi said so back in September. But they didn’t listen.

    For more on what this election means for American politics, check out Lean Out guest Ruy Teixeira’s Substack essay “The Progressive Moment Is Over,” Lean Out guest Sohrab Ahmari’s essay for The New Statesman “Why Kamala Harris’s gambit failed,” Lean Out guest Rob Henderson’s essay for City Journal, “Twilight of the Elites?.” Plus: An excellent episode of the Reflector podcast, The Comeback of Donald Trump.