Trump Wins The Presidency Easily, What Did We Miss?

By Jacob Weindling  |  November 6, 2024 | 9:30am
Photo by Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Elections 2024 Election
Trump Wins The Presidency Easily, What Did We Miss?

Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris handily last night, winning Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, while it looks like he is on track to win Michigan, Nevada and Arizona. Republicans will win the Senate with 55 or even a shocking 56 seats that no Republican expected before last night. Trump even has a good chance to become the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote, an outcome the betting markets that were bullish on Trump’s chances did not even believe. This whole election caught everyone by surprise, even the Republicans.

This was a realignment election.

I got it wrong. In my prediction column yesterday I thought this would be a close election and I noted that “I would not be surprised to see the final margin in every single swing state be under one percent,” but I still thought the blue firewall would hold because of more women shifting to the Democrats, and I saw enough trouble in the North Carolina data to believe that Harris could steal it from Trump being dragged down by one of the worst candidates ever. While those predictions were buttressed by results backing up the logic behind them (Harris might wind up being the only Democrat who loses in North Carolina), I failed to see basically the entire rest of the country shifting right, which more than offset any gains the Democrats made with women and older voters.

It’s going to take a while to fully unpack what happened in this election, but so far, there are some clear reasons why Donald Trump is going to be the next President of the United States.

The Country Shifted Right in their Candidate Preference

This is the most simplistic explanation and one that liberals are loath to hear, but when you see Trump gaining with practically every demographic group except for older women, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than the obvious one. Trump promised Americans a revanchist form of conservatism and Americans across all socioeconomic groups became more amenable to it. As Californian journalist Matt Pearce noted, California voted against prop 6, which would have prohibited slavery “in any form” and voters rejected it, indicating that “voters everywhere were in a mood this November.”

But I qualified it with “candidate preference,” because measures like Missouri’s minimum wage increase passed and voters voted to protect abortion rights across the country, even in Florida where their measure “lost” with more than fifty percent of the vote, but less than the sixty percent threshold needed to win. When liberal policy was put on the ballot yesterday, voters generally supported it. It’s the Democrats they did not support.

Democrats Lost Latinos to the GOP

Don’t you worry, I have a column coming later just for this useless group of fundraisers who think they’re a political party, but it’s important to note here that the Democrats’ longtime habit of taking their base for granted has finally come home to roost. Trump won Dearborn, Michigan, the largest Arab American city, as Kamala Harris was more competitive with Jill Stein than she was with Trump. Since 2012, Democrats have taken identity politics as their governing principle and assumed that Latinos, the most religious voting group in America, would vote for Democrats forever.

Latinos broke hard for Trump yesterday. We are now living in the world where the consequences of Democratic inaction to serve their base are manifesting, and this election has made it crystal clear that the Democrats are now the party of old, rich, white people.

Voters Rejected Biden and Harris More than the Democrats

As bleak as this morning feels, and as much as it is a strange thing, to not understand one’s neighbors, there are actual signs of hope in this election for Democrats. It just requires the party learning a lesson they have so far proven constitutionally incapable of learning to date. Every Senator ran ahead of Harris, some well ahead of her, and it is clear as day that running as a carbon copy of Biden was about the worst choice the Harris campaign could have made.

Her “I won’t do anything different than Biden” quote from The View might wind up being the most consequential moment of the election, as it crystallized how wholly out-of-touch national Democrats are with the electorate. Every poll showed voters dissatisfied with the economy, and instead of addressing it forcefully, the Democrats gave milquetoast proposals of tax credits and spoke about an amorphous “opportunity economy,” all while promising more “Bidenomics” that voters said time and time again they associated with high inflation. There is a path back to relevancy for the Democratic Party next election, but it requires an entirely different national party than the one they currently have.

Inflation Kills

Now that Harris has lost, every single Western government that inherited COVID inflation has been unseated, save for Emmanuel Macron’s party in France who lost power and is struggling to figure out a way to regain it. Historically, there is no better indicator that a ruling party will be voted out than high inflation, and this trend continues to hold. This is why running on Bidenomics and telling people that the economy was actually good was such a disastrous and idiotic strategy. Kamala Harris had a golden opportunity to separate herself from an unpopular incumbent, and instead she basically ran as one. As shocking as this result is, in retrospect, we should have seen this coming the moment it became clear she wasn’t going to separate from a man who very clearly would have lost in a Reagan-esque landslide last night had he gotten his wish and stayed in the race. Harris’s smaller margins of victory in theoretically deep blue states like New Jersey, New York and Illinois make it pretty clear that Biden would have made at least one of those states competitive and possibly even lost it.

The Democrats have now lost two elections to Donald Trump, and it is a provable fact that Trump understands America far better than the Democratic Party does.

 
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