Donald Trump’s re-election was not how I would have bet or what I predicted yesterday morning, but I’m surprised only by the magnitude of the win. He’s almost certain to sweep the swing states and may well win the popular vote as well.
I’ll post more on the likely policy implications of the outcome in the coming days but here are some thoughts about how we got here.
We have a binary system and Trump, as the nominee of the out party, represented change from the status quo. I know it’s hard for political junkies like ourselves to grasp but Americans overwhelmingly don’t pay that much attention to politics. And, as fundamentally awful as Trump is as a human being, it was either him or another four years of what we have now. When the public thinks the country is going in the wrong direction, the other guy usually wins.
I’ve voted for the Democratic nominee in three straight cycles. That doesn’t mean that I supported all of their policies; it just means that I preferred them over the alternative. The same is true for Trump voters. Are many of them racists and misogynists? Sure. But that doesn’t explain the huge number of women who voted for him. Or the fact that he’s drawing more Black and Hispanic voters than past Republican candidates.
Campaigns just don’t matter. This has been a truism of the political science literature for a very long time but we—including we political scientists—routinely ignore this in real time. Trump ran an unhinged, hateful, undisciplined campaign. Harris ran as nearly flawless as a campaign as I can remember. Yes, it was very short, giving her less time to stumble. But the flip side is that hit the ground running with essentially no notice and killed it on the stump, killed it in the debate, and staged a phenomenally on-message convention. It. Just. Didn’t. Matter.
Blame Biden. I voted for Biden last go-round and genuinely like the guy. But he hung around far too long out of selfishness and foolish pride. Had he stepped down a year ago rather than after embarrassing himself in the first general election debate and being forced out, the Democratic Party could have held a primary campaign and crafted a new message. Instead, they were stuck with defending an unpopular status quo and running on Trump’s awfulness.
While I have a lot of sympathy for my colleague Steven Taylor’s view that having party elites pick candidates is preferable to the primary system, the way this was done made it impossible for Harris to be her own woman. She may well have emerged victorious in a legitimate contest for the nomination whether to the nominating electorate or the party elites. She’s a much stronger candidate than I’d given her credit for. But because she was anointed in the wake of Biden’s endorsement, she was unable to differentiate herself from her boss.
Trump is Sui Generis. Ronald Reagan was viewed as “the Teflon President” and Bill Clinton survived a sex scandal that would have ended any other presidency. But I’ve never seen anything like Trump. He has spent nine years saying and doing bizarre, outrageous things that would have killed any other candidate in the primaries. Instead, he’s not only won the nomination three times and the Presidency twice but increased his popularity levels considerably. We’ve never seen anything like it and hopefully won’t again.
