Why Donald Trump won

November 06, 2024??

An interesting perspective piece from The Knowledge, a free daily email from Jon Connell, founder of The Week.

Donald Trump’s victory really is “a political comeback for the ages”, says The Wall Street Journal.

Written off by everyone in the wake of the January 6 attack, “including by us”, he has become only the second president in US history after Grover Cleveland to be ousted from the White House and then win a second term.

Yet remarkable as this achievement is, it wouldn’t have been possible without the gross failures of the Democrats. Joe Biden beat Trump four years ago by promising unity and prosperity, only to veer wildly to the left in the mistaken belief that he could be “another FDR”.

His big spending stoked inflation, and for all the “media lectures” that the economy was booming (see Comment below), many voters were left feeling poorer. It’s no coincidence that the exit polls showed the economy as Trump’s “best issue”.

The Democrats also “dug themselves into a hole” on identity politics, says Matt Bai in The Washington Post. One of Trump’s most effective ads riffed on the battle over trans rights, with the tagline: “She’s for they/them, he’s for you”. That really landed with a lot of traditionally Democratic voters, who felt the party was prioritising cultural issues over fixing the economy.

There will be lots of talk about prejudice – will Americans ever vote for a female president? – as there was in 2016. But Kamala Harris, like Hillary Clinton, was a weak candidate who never offered voters a clear reason to elect her.

Instead, she geared her campaign entirely around how awful her opponent was. And “there was nothing she could tell voters about Trump that they didn’t already know”.

The truth is that the Democrats were on the back foot from the moment Biden originally decided he was going to run again, says David French in The New York Times. Not only did that end any possibility of a primary contest, which might have yielded a more effective candidate.

For him and his team to try to defy the “obvious effects of age” – and then scold anyone with the temerity to raise the issue – also fatally undermined the party’s anti-Trump message that “character matters”.

Yes, Biden’s eventual decision to drop out was necessary and selfless. But his selfishness before that may have scuppered Harris’s chances, “and permanently marred his legacy”.

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