Understanding What Happened and Why Trump Won

The Democratic Party establishment has colossally failed us and ushered in a fascist Trump administration in the process. The only answer is a bottom-up working-class movement.

After the most expensive, tumultuous, and eventful election year in recent history, Donald J Trump has won and will return to the White House this upcoming January. Early this year, incumbent Joe Biden faced a steeply declining approval rating with no reversal in sight, making his reelection campaign dead on arrival. Ultimately, after the worst debate performance in American history and internal polling suggesting a landslide loss, Biden finally dropped out of the race and immediately endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris on July 21st. It took the Democratic Party establishment three weeks to convey how necessary it was for Biden to drop out even though voters overwhelmingly wanted Biden to step aside. It took an alarming amount of in-fighting and lobbying to convince the President to take this obvious and necessary action. Nancy Pelosi led the effort, dealing the final blow in a private phone call, making a polite threat, laying out the consequences for him not dropping out. With Biden out of the way, Harris started her campaign strong. Being a younger face, her presence revitalized hopes of change, especially with younger people disillusioned with the American gerontocracy. Harris ran a relatively progressive campaign in the 2020 primary, and people hoped that it would continue. These hopes seemed to be affirmed when she picked mildly progressive governor Tim Walz for Vice President over the boring establishment option, Josh Shapiro. Off of this optimism alone, Harris took the lead in the polling aggregate around late August. However, as the weeks passed, this desire for a break with the status quo never came. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Harris, instead of drawing distinct contrasts and sharp policy answers, her campaign decided it would be better to capture moderate Republicans by diluting her message and trying to act as the ‘reasonable’ candidate, abandoning her progressive past. The defining failure of the campaign became her refusal to rebuke Biden’s failures, causing her lead in the polls to evaporate, coming down to a near tie in the final week. Clearly, the people in her camp had not witnessed the last decade of Trumpism, where he slashes through establishment figures with crass arrogance and barrages of lies. Not to give credit, this was by far Trump’s sloppiest, weakest, and most directionless campaign. To some extent, many like myself felt there had to be a limit to the fear-mongering, the circus of lies, and the hollow promises. We know now that Americans demanded a change, even if the vehicle for change is unappealing and the change has a chance of harming them.

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What the Numbers Tell Us

Once again, for the third time in a row, polls drastically underestimated the shy Trump vote but simultaneously overestimated turnout for Harris. Trump would win all seven swing states and the popular vote, receiving nearly 2 million more votes than in the last cycle. Republicans massively underperformed in congressional races in relation to Trump’s victory as Democrats were able to hold onto Senate seats in 4 of 5 swing states (Pennsylvania still pending recount) where Trump won decisively. In the House, Republicans are currently projected only to have a slim 3-seat majority, a much weaker showing compared to Trump’s 2% popular vote delta. This seems to suggest an abnormally large amount of split tickets and voters who only filled in for Trump. With Trump’s radical personality and no party platform behind him to help down the ballot, this seems to make sense.

According to the projected data, overall turnout was 2.3% lower than in 2020, with approximately 3 million fewer total votes. This was despite this election having the most access to mail-in ballots and early voting in our country’s history. At least for the critical swing states, this wasn’t necessarily just an issue of voters not showing up for Harris. In all seven swing states, there was actually increased turnout compared to last election. This suggests that either Trump was able to maintain his base while reaching new voters or a lot of Biden voters flipped to Trump. 

Nationwide, key demographics like Black men, Latino men, and young men under thirty shifted away from Democrats in dramatic fashion. While pretty much every demographic shifted right, there was an apparent blind spot in the campaign for these male voters. It certainly didn’t help that Harris pretty much offered nothing to Black men, only making empty gestures like promising to legalize weed, ‘protecting Black cryptocurrency owners,’ and inviting Barack Obama to scold Black men for not voting for a woman. 

The genocide in Gaza also had a significant effect; it was not enough to change the election, but still an essential part of the story. Muslim voters dramatically abandoned Harris for her complicity in arming Israel and failing to condemn Biden’s vile, racist disregard for Palestinian life. In what can only be described as astonishing, Harris managed to lose 73% of the Muslim vote compared to 2020, going from 93% to 20%. Jill Stein was able to capture 53% of the vote as she was one of three national candidates who condemned the genocide. In August, YouGov polling showed that Harris opposing Israel could have boosted support in multiple swing states. Post-election opinion polling showed that her stance on the issue, for or against Israel, was among the last motivations for not voting for her, meaning this change would’ve had little effect throughout the rest of the electorate. This misstep by the campaign was partly motivated by funding from the Israel lobby and the resistance to breaking with President Biden. This stubborn position likely had a broad cooling effect on mobilizing young people and volunteers, let alone the fact that it is morally abhorrent to support a genocidal regime. With around ten thousand people showing up to protest the DNC and many Uncommitted Movement delegates inside trying to lobby change, there’s no doubt this made a dent.

Interestingly, Latino voters shifted toward Trump despite his platform again being built on cruel anti-immigration policy. Something to keep in mind is that polling Latino voters is difficult to analyze since our census data does an awful job of categorizing race. Any two people within the ‘Latino race’ category likely have vastly different social, class, and cultural identities. For example, a working-class darker-skinned Mestizo person has an entirely different identity and life experience compared to a fairer-skinned upper-class Cuban person. Outside of the United States, the term “Latino” pretty much doesn’t exist and is only used in this country to generally mean a non-white person with Central and South American ancestry. Polling shows that this immigration ‘crisis’ was the second biggest issue this cycle. Mind you, this ‘issue’ is almost entirely fabricated by reactionary right-wing media and then perpetuated by liberal media. The only legitimate problem with immigration is the system failing to process people efficiently, but the media would rather sensationalize the racist narrative that immigrants are ‘taking over.’ Harris had an extremely rough time trying to grapple with this, staying moderate on this issue (which she didn’t have to do) while trying to dispel Trump’s bigoted lies. The best response she had to this was feebly pointing out the hypocrisy that Trump didn’t deliver on his promises regarding deportation and the border wall. Overall, Harris more often talked about being harsh on immigration than she did about ethically and efficiently fixing the real issue. Unfortunately, we are living through a global reactionary wave of backlash against immigrants, which is fueling the campaigns of many far-right leaders. Harris could not distinguish herself on this enough; she was left as a moderate on a particularly zealous issue that rewards extremism. Without a robust explanation for this shift, liberals have been engaging in some particularly disgusting finger-pointing despite 62% of Latino voters voting for Harris. After election day, it would not take you too long on Twitter to find liberals echoing fascist, Trump-like rhetoric celebrating the deportation of Latino men. Not only is that a disgusting racist stereotype but there’s a good chance that the shift came from Latino people who don’t socially identify with the struggle of immigrants.

While more robust data has yet to come out, it is clear the most significant demographic shift was white men. This is a product of both white men just not showing up to vote in general and also Biden voters flipping to Trump. Just on the face of it, from a policy perspective, Trump was offering essentially nothing to white men. Problem is, neither was Harris. The vacuum of neither campaign being able to offer anything to this historically privileged group led them to tune out. What Trump did offer to fill part of the vacuum was a strongman persona and rhetoric that seemed anti-establishment. Bernie Sanders, in the 2020 primaries, was able to fill this vacuum with authenticity– a policy to make people’s lives better and a willingness to take on the smug rich assholes in Washington. While we know better that Trump essentially did nothing during his first term to disrupt the status quo, the white male demographic undoubtedly prefers someone who talks like they’re going to shake things up over a generic politician.

Of all of the significant issues this cycle, the economy was far and away the number one issue. According to exit polling, high inflation was the most common reason voters didn’t vote for Harris. A different exit poll showed a direct correlation between experiencing hardship due to inflation and voting for Trump. This sentiment was confirmed by a recent consumer data report, which shows a disconnect where Americans feel economic pains, but the economic indicators show a healthy recovery. Again, Harris did not break with Biden on this issue; she was too afraid to tarnish his legacy and was unable to empathize with average Americans. Instead, she attempted to push small tax incentives and inconsequential tweaks rather than ambitious public programs, which were wildly popular during the Sanders coalition. 

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What Happened In One Chart

The defining failure of the Harris campaign was her focus on moderate Republicans. It was not only a strategic failure but one that, on its face, made no sense. To capture these moderate Republicans, Harris had to adopt the inherent contradiction of explaining why the Republican Party and the conservative agenda were bad while trying to bribe them with diluted centrist policy. One could even question whether an ‘undecided voter’ even existed in this election cycle. It would be virtually impossible for someone not to have heard of Trump, and if Harris cannot win low-propensity people over with sharp populist messaging, they will tune out.

On top of that, Harris was simultaneously alienating her base by going after these moderate voters, and it’s unclear what data showed her team that they were even necessary to win. On paper, all Harris had to do was mobilize and turn out the same people who voted for Biden in 2020, so she didn’t need to make this ‘big tent.’ The tent got so big, in fact, that it started to include neocon war criminals like Dick Cheney. They also made room for the walking corpse of Bill Clinton, who spoke at the DNC and again at a Michigan rally where he scolded Palestinians for being upset that their people are being slaughtered by the thousand. For some reason, Harris decided late in the campaign it would be a great idea to have Liz Cheney on stage at a campaign rally, someone who is not even a sitting congresswoman and is from one of the reddest states in the country. Not only is it bewildering that they would rally around a conservative, but Liz Cheney is utterly irrelevant in modern politics and probably doesn’t even have that much appeal with any Republicans, let alone moderates. Campaigning with Liz Cheney may have marginally helped Nikki Haley in the Wyoming Republican primary, not the literal Democratic nominee in the general election. 

Meanwhile, the campaign sidelined Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz for most of the campaign. Not only was he an immensely popular governor in his home state, but his character resonated with many people as he centered progressive common sense policy with a unique kindness in his rhetoric. Instead, they had him recite the eyeroll inducing line in the debate, “I’m as surprised as anybody of this coalition that Kamala Harris has built. From Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney to Taylor Swift and a whole bunch of folks in between there.” The thing is, Bernie Sanders was only supporting the campaign because he was dedicated to defeating Trump, and many of his supporters feel betrayed that Bernie would support her unconditionally.  Most confusing is that Harris could have reached a centrist audience by taking free interviews like the Joe Rogan podcast, but she declined. Similarly, the DNC refused to invite the Teamsters union leader on stage because he spoke at the RNC, which could’ve signaled a bipartisan posture to apolitical union members.

This strategy’s incoherence shows when Harris has the sisyphean task of distinguishing herself from conservative politics while also catering to and coddling conservatives she wants to win over. Effectively, she is trying to be Trump-lite while running against Trump. This disastrous strategy resulted in a 1% loss in registered Republican voters.

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A Quick Caveat About Identity

I would like to acknowledge the popular sentiment regarding the personality contest in this election. Harris undoubtedly had to overcome inherent sexism and racism that Trump or Biden did not have to contend with. For a part of the population, Harris had to first prove herself as a strong leader because she is a woman, and for a smaller portion, she would never be seen as such, no matter what she did. But I don’t think this is the whole story.

Yes, Harris did receive an entire media cycle for the crime of having a boyfriend twenty-three years ago, while Trump being found liable for rape in court hardly phased most of his voters. If we use Obama as an example, he was arguably the greatest politician and naturally gifted speaker in American history, allowing him to surpass this identity hurdle considerably even after racist attacks against his birth certificate, of all things. For Harris, this came in the form of her laugh, which was too much according to the sexist people who live among us. Another prominent lie was apparently that she ‘slept her way to the top’ even though there was zero evidence of this and even though she was elected to the Senate. Even more bizarre, this lie was repeated by many conservative women in the media who fail to see how spreading a disgusting false stereotype perpetuates sexism. Some of the most vile internalized misogyny came out on full display this election, and when allowed to fester, it can make a small difference on the margins.

With all of this said, it would be completely wrong to blame this election on sexism and racism alone. Generally, these character attacks resonate most with older conservatives who were never voting for Harris in the first place. Remember that when right-wing pundits made disgusting sexist remarks about Harris, like when Jesse Waters suggested she be raped in a war cabinet meeting, we felt that these things would firmly push people away from the right. It clearly made little impact. This sort of proves that centering campaign messaging on pointing out hypocrisy and bigotry is a losing strategy. There was a time when hateful comments or scandals would ruin a political career, but that time has long passed. There’s a limit to how much you can run negative messaging when the candidate you’re going against is a rapist, a felon, and is in countless photos with Jeffery Epstein. Scrolling through the KamalaHQ Twitter account, you’ll find hundreds of clips from right-wing pundits saying erroneous or hateful things, but you won’t find hundreds of videos of Harris talking about how she will improve the lives of regular people. When neo-liberal philosophy begins and ends with identity politics to the exclusion of class politics, it robs the possibility of material change from marginalized people.

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The Underlying Truth

I hope what has happened is obvious. The establishment Democratic party has failed us. How did this come about? You could say this started in 2008 with Obama who, despite running a change campaign, delivered almost nothing: propping up Wall Street banks, passing mediocre subsidized healthcare with a gigantic majority in both Houses and elevating Biden to Vice President. You can say this started with Hillary Clinton, who ran an embarrassing, lazy, and toothless campaign that allowed Trump to gain power. You could say this started with Biden in 2020, who barely won and provided the false promise that centrist politics could work. But even after all of that, the Harris campaign was a colossal failure in and of itself. It’s true that she was dealt a bad hand, but that cannot account for the incompetence and disconnection between the campaign and voters. After spending $1.5 billion, Democrats lost the popular vote.

After record-breaking grassroots donations, one could assume Harris didn’t have to lean on rich sponsors as much. Instead, many precious campaign stops were wasted courting elite donors in navy blue states. Her campaign burned cash on luxurious fashion parties, concerts, and celebrity appearances, most notably $1 million to go on Oprah Winfrey and $100k on the Call Her Daddy podcast. It doesn’t take a statistician to figure out that undecided people don’t change their minds based on what celebrity parades with what candidate, and of the people who care about these celebrities’ opinions, most are already voting for Harris. The most egregious is the campaign running adverts on the Las Vegas Sphere, which cost $450,000 per day, a sum that could have paid for about 2,600 canvassers to work eight hours. 

The other half of this is the blame on Joe Biden. Effectively, Biden’s presidency was a four-year vacation for Trump. It turns out that Biden’s ‘return to normalcy’ plan didn’t do anything to reverse the regressive policies Trump put in place. The country didn’t get any less hawkish on foreign policy, the government did not get any closer to slowing climate change, and he didn’t repeal the tax cuts for the wealthy that Trump put in place while not raising the minimum wage. Since Democrats lost the House in the midterms, Biden could not pass anything to benefit the economy, and his plan to cancel student debt never went through. Most damning of all, he set his White House up in a particularly insular way, where none of his aides could objectively see that Biden’s unpopularity and age would make it impossible to be reelected. Luckily, Biden did drop out eventually but did so after the primaries, after it was too late to narrow down the best candidate. With hindsight, plenty of media figures questioned whether Biden should run again with a negative favorability more than a year and a half before the election. Much of this comes from liberal media refusing to discuss this fact, especially MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who had direct access to Biden’s ear. This sentiment was under the surface for years, and there were rumors as early as 2019 that he was only planning to run for a single term. As we now know, the massive inflation we experienced in 2021 was the issue of this cycle. It is true that Biden successfully fixed inflation rates after passing the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, but it took far too long to take full effect, and too much pain had already been inflicted on Americans. Ordinary people don’t look at inflation charts and see that inflation is back to normal; they see that their groceries cost significantly more than they did just a few years prior, so they want answers. 

When the campaign was abruptly handed over to Harris, she had a choice to make: to tarnish Biden’s legacy and bring the country in a new direction, or pretend that Biden’s economic failures don’t matter and gaslight the country into thinking tax breaks are a solution to wealth inequality. I don’t think it was impossible for Harris to win with the hand she was dealt. Biden made it just about as difficult as he could’ve for her, but that doesn’t mean her campaign couldn’t have broken away from Biden, focused on working-class issues, and fought Trump on the popular front. Wherever the failure originates from, I hope we can realize that the party of FDR is long gone, and it has been replaced with spineless bourgeois politicians who do not understand the struggles of the working class. 

In the aftermath of the election disaster, Bernie Sanders issued a statement that perfectly summed up the whole thing. He said, “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.” Bernie is one hundred percent correct. It makes you wonder: did Harris even once say that she would raise the minimum wage? Seriously, could you ask for an easier slam dunk? The minimum wage hasn’t changed in fifteen years. Fifteen. Think about it: when Trump pulls out his phony populism, “No-tax on tips,” what if Harris says, “Not only will we, not tax tips, but we will double your wage to $15 an hour, why not $20?” We live in a time where young people are projected to have less wealth than their parents, and they are dealing with rising costs of living, unaffordable rent, and massive student loan debt. For working families, their lives have slowly gotten worse as neo-liberal policies have exploded productivity but simultaneously moved jobs overseas and stagnated wages. Harris and the Democrats have offered nothing to remedy this. Instead, they have bent the knee to corporate interests and allied with the Republicans in shifting wealth to the top one percent. It is now abundantly clear that we must uproot the political establishment and build a working-class coalition.

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How Bad Can It Get?

Plenty of ink will be spilled over the Trump administration and the slow dismantling of our government. It’s pointless to analyze every minute way that Trump can fuck up our way of life, but here’s an overview. The one silver lining from the last administration was that his utter incompetence spared us, as his cabinet seemed to have a turnover rate similar to that of an Amazon warehouse. So far, with his cabinet selections, Trump has been wise in picking loyalists, but the downside for him is that they’re all fairly unqualified. On the other hand, qualification and competence mean nothing if your goal is to do as much damage as possible. 

What was never really discussed with Trump’s potential second term was really what his goal really is. First and foremost, he planned to win to pardon himself. Beyond that, it’s not clear what his motivations are. For an establishment Republican, your goal is to hand more power to your corporate donors, prevent the state from functioning against corporations, and maintain America’s hegemonic military influence abroad. For Trump, he likely isn’t running again, and if he wants to support the party’s future, he shouldn’t do anything drastic, just tow the party line. He can’t gain much more power than he already has, and the Supreme Court has already granted him immunity for any action as president. If he does pursue drastic changes, we can expect more centralization of power with the executive branch, a fundamental dismantling of the administrative state, and more unfettered corporate power. Trump could usher in the slow amalgamation of the government and corporations, ending the antagonism between the two and creating a legitimate corporatocracy. At the same time, Trump may be prone to the same stress and frustration that came with the first administration if he doesn’t get his way. Time will tell if he goes forward with enacting revenge on the people who he villainized during the campaign or if he sits back and golfs like any sane eighty-year-old.

If the government as we know it stays intact, Democrats can expect to perform well in the 2026 midterms. Depending on how the counts finish, they only need to flip three House seats and three Senate seats. In 2018, Democrats flipped a whopping 40 seats because, without Trump leading turnout, Republicans performed poorly. At least we can expect only to endure two years of Trump’s unfettered power, with only the Senate filibuster to stop him until then. So far, the Democrats in power have done pretty much nothing to prevent or protest the rise of Trump. In fact, Democrats and Chuck Schumer seem to be getting along with him just fine despite Trump sending a mob to kill them at the Capitol building four years ago.

For the next couple of years, we will be finding out just how closely Trump follows Project 2025, which, with no hyperbole, is legitimately a christo-fascist agenda. We can pretty much bet on violent mass deportation, unfettered support for Israel’s genocide, the annexation of Palestine, the suppression of the administrative state, the reversal of climate initiatives, and more tax breaks for corporations. 

The gray area is a national abortion ban. The Heritage Foundation backing him has wanted a nationwide ban for decades, but at the same time, as incompetent as Trump is, even he knows it would be political suicide for the midterms. We could see access to things like birth control, Plan B, and gender affirming care obstructed through federal agencies. We can expect as well to see an even more aggressive response to any protest movements that arise. Even as despicable it is that Democrats opt for violent protest suppression, we can expect even more aggressive responses for lesser protests under Trump. We can remember that Trump was itching to use the military to quell protests in 2020 and has openly said he would do so this term. 

For the working people who only care about politics so much as it affects them, Trump’s tariff proposal could effectively destroy the economy. Trump has proclaimed that his government would make revenue mostly from tariffs, which only make up 2% of total revenue currently. Substantial tariffs are nearly universally known to slow an economy drastically, something a first-semester college student would understand. When used correctly, tariffs can protect domestic industries, but when misused, it is effectively like sanctioning your own country as domestic manufacturing costs increase, affecting the rest of the economy. Trump has championed a trade war strategy against China for years, something Democrats got on board with instead of offering an alternative. Rather than making policy to socialize and take full advantage of your country’s human resources, Trump opts to make a boogeyman out of China, saying they are maliciously ‘taking jobs’ away from hard-working Americans. If expanded, such a trade war would lead to more economic downturns and inflation in America, while China would simply pivot to the rest of the global market, maintaining its 5% annual growth rate. There’s no telling how aggressive this administration will be. Still, even for people who buy the ‘big government bad’ myth, it’s hard to deny that suddenly stripping government agencies and moving to a tariff economy will come with economic pain.

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Putting It In Perspective

Leading up to election day, I was already mentally prepared for Harris to lose. But even then, I tried to maintain optimism, looking at the few paths to victory she had in terms of increased turnout for what reason. Nothing could’ve prepared for living it out in real time. It’s tragic to watch your country regress. And we’re all valid to feel some grief, knowing what’s to come.

With that said, there’s a bigger perspective. This year, I’ve already watched a genocide unfold on livestream day after day in Gaza. I watched a man self-immolate in protest of that genocide, then heard deafening silence. I cried watching videos from Gaza of children missing limbs, buried under rubble, and bleeding out, unable to be saved. I watched a young man, just a couple of years younger than myself, burn alive in a hospital bombed by Israel, supplied by the Biden-Harris administration. I knew Harris deserved to lose this election. In a more just world, the candidate abetting a genocide ought to lose… but also, in a more just world, they wouldn’t be contending with a candidate that is going to accelerate that genocide. All said and done, as upsetting as it is, no matter how bad our life may get under Trump, nothing can compare to having your family starved and bombed.

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Now What?

After the grief settled, I think politics have now become very clear. We now know first-hand that the Democratic establishment is untenable. We know that the people of this country are in dire need of change and are willing to take drastic measures to find that change. They are even willing to allow themselves to be gaslighted into voting for an overt fascist, a convicted felon, and a rapist for just the chance of change. So, going forward, we need to orient our political actions toward progressive, anti-establishment people and organizations. No more excusing Democrats because they are the lesser evil. For the apolitical person, this means something as small as voting for anti-establishment people in primaries, donating, and getting to know your neighbors. For activists, this means getting people you know to join leftist organizations and participate in protests or mutual aid. We should be prepared to help each other when necessary because no one knows how bad it can get. We must lead with empathy and hold back from vengeful ‘I told you so’s.’ Instead, look to educate and provide the necessary leftist alternative. We are fighting systems, not people. Our primary pillar needs to be the rejection of capitalism because there is no other way out.

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