Trump Wins The Presidency Easily, What Did We Miss?
Photo by Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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.”
The shift from 2020, in counties with >95% reportinghttps://t.co/2PfLbrOb0w pic.twitter.com/iED4r8nrpy
— Josh Wingrove (@josh_wingrove) November 6, 2024
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.