What Happened

It took me a full 24 hours to recover from the shock of Donald Trump’s re-election and an additional week of analyzing the actual voting to try to figure out just what had happened. As you will recall, in my last article written back in September, I had predicted that Harris would win and that the Republican Party would have to rebuild itself. It now appears that it will be the Democrats that will have to rethink their game plan.

My assessment was based on the premise that Trump would only be able to appeal to essentially the same 74 million voters who supported him in 2020 and that both his personae and his agenda were so toxic that he wouldn’t be able to win the support of any additional voters. That premise was, in fact, largely correct. He received 76 million votes, while Harris matched the 74 million votes he had received in 2020, but a full 7 million short of the number of voters who had supported President Biden in 2020. In addition, 4 million more voters had been added to the electorate in the interim. Given the fact that Harris had quickly raised almost $1 billion in campaign contributions and had recruited a few hundred thousand campaign volunteers, I estimated that she would win roughly 75% of these 11 million votes and would achieve a comfortable margin of victory.

This meant that Trump’s strategy had to be to be to diminish Harris’ appeal to the electorate, which, in fact, is what his campaign accomplished. Considering the fact that roughly 1 million registered voters chose to vote for third-party candidates there were at least 8 million registered voters who chose not to vote. The sad reality is that almost 90 million eligible voters did not vote in the recent election. This brings me to an old adage: “If you vote you may or may not get the government you desire, but if you don’t vote you will surely get the government you deserve.”

The Trump campaign had also correctly assessed that there was wide-spread voter discontent over the economy and immigration which would override any misgivings voters might have harbored about Trump’s personality or behavior. This also turned out to be correct even though (a) Trump’s rally presentations were becoming increasingly unhinged and (b) individuals who had served in Trump administration, as well as a host of former national security advisors, had voiced the opinion that he was unfit to serve as our nation’s president. In addition, Trump’s pledge to VETO a national abortion ban seems to have allayed the concerns of many voters over the abortion issue which the Democrats had also expected would drive voter turnout their way.

How Trump managed to keep Harris from receiving additional votes is still largely unclear. To be sure, Trump had continuously attacked Harris, saying she was “dumb as a rock” and was “an extremist” who would destroy the nation.  Clearly there were many voters who never became comfortable with her and that can largely be attributed to the criticisms heaped upon her before Biden had even withdrawn from the race. Because Biden’s declining health had been an early focus of the Trump Campaign, there was widespread concern that he would not be able to serve out a second term. Thus, her character and competence had become a political issue well over a year before she had even become the Democrats’ presidential nominee. In short, she was handicapped by the fact that first impressions are difficult to overcome.

Many pundits have criticized Biden for not having  made good on his pledge to only serve one term. Had he done so the Democrats would have had an opportunity to test the political metal of a number of potential candidates. By the time he chose to withdraw the only viable path for the Democrats was to nominate Harris. At the very least, if  Biden  had withdrawn sooner, it would have given Harris an opportunity to define herself rather than having been previously defined by the Trump Campaign. It would have also opened the opportunity for the Democrats to have nominated a white male candidate as Harris’ ethnicity and sex undoubtedly hampered her efforts to win votes.

There has been no shortage of other suggestions from political pundits as to what the Democrats did wrong. The one criticism that has been most frequently voiced is that the Harris Campaign did not appreciate that many voters were hurting economically despite the fact that the U.S. economy in the post-pandemic period was the envy of all other nations. This is always a possibility as macroeconomic measurements focus solely on averages and not individuals. Thus, those living on fixed incomes who are facing higher food prices and rising interest rates could be hurting even if the nation as a whole was prospering. Part of the problem with this assessment is that Harris clearly recognized this and spoke frequently about what she planned to do about it. What she didn’t address was how it had come about; namely, that it was not the result of actions (or even inaction) taken by the Biden administration. Rather, it was a global problem that had resulted from economic disruptions that occurred during the pandemic and that the Fed’s cure for inflation (high interest rates) had only made things worse.

For his part, Trump boasted that these problems didn’t exist while he was president and wouldn’t have existed had he been reelected in 2020 which was total nonsense. Still, from the perspective of many, this message seemed to resonate because the nation’s economy had been propped up during the final year of his presidency by roughly $6 trillion of subsidies to individuals and businesses of all sizes. More importantly, prices remained stable during his presidency allowing many working class individuals to actually increase their net worths as a result of the generosity of the federal government. That was because Democratic members of Congress, unwilling to let the nation suffer in order to achieve a political advantage in the next election, had pressed for fiscal stimulus during the Covid pandemic.

The other principal issue which Trump and his acolytes harped on was the invasion of immigrants that had grown during the Biden administration. That problem had largely slowed to a trickle by early 2024. That, of course, didn’t stop Texas Governor Greg Abbott from publicizing the issue by sending busloads of immigrant to northern cities.  Added to that, Trump had requested that his allies in the Congress vote against the comprehensive bipartisan legislation that had been drafted in the Senate, all in an effort to keep the issue alive. From Harris’ perspective Trump’s action had made the immigration issue his problem, not hers as she had vowed to sign the immigration bill.

To be sure, Trump continued to campaign on the immigration issue claiming that every country in the western hemisphere was emptying its jails and sending their felons to the U.S. This was a reprise of the same fable he had peddled during the 2016 election when he said that Mexico was sending us its murders, rapists and drug dealers. His total message was that the U.S. was under siege and that strong and decisive action was required to change that. In that connection, he vowed to act as a dictator on “Day One” which appealed to many voters who had concluded that the federal government was so dysfunctional that it couldn’t be trusted to effectively protect the nation.

Another effective line of attack employed by the Trump Campaign was that the Democrats were a bunch of elitists who are more interested in protecting LBGTQ individuals than working class Americans. While Harris did express support for the LGBTQ community, the main focus of her campaign was on rebuilding the middle class and small businesses. Still a large percentage of her supporters were college-educated individuals who recognized that economic growth can best be achieved by enhancing the well-being of all Americans even if that offended white Americans who felt that they were rapidly becoming a minority.

The problem wasn’t that the Democrats didn’t raise enough money or develop enough enthusiasm. They had an abundance of both financial contributions and campaign volunteers. In addition, they recruited an unusually large number of former Republican leaders, many of whom had worked in the Trump administration and were willing to condemn Trump. Nor did they ignore the battleground states as Hillary had done in 2016. In fact, Harris and her husband, as well as Tim and Gwen Walz, were on the campaign trail every day and had a few others (like President Biden, the Obamas and Pete Buttigieg) helping them.

Still, their messages didn’t seem to reach a large number of registered voters. Their efforts largely consisted of knocking on doors (often annoying potential voters by sending multiple volunteers to a single house) and relying on advertisements posted on main-stream TV. By contrast, the Trump Campaign relied heavily on social media networks to disseminate its messages.

Political propagandists have long recognized the importance of repeating their message. The concept of the Big Lie was not originated by Donald Trump. It was popularized during the Nazi regime by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s ”chief propagandist,” and can be traced back to Nicolo Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” a classic primer for autocrats published in 1534. Social media has amplified the impact of political propaganda through its algorithms which are designed to steer readers to other articles voicing the same point of view. This causes readers to conclude that the messages they are receiving on social media represents a majority point of view. Thus, in large measure, social media as currently operated is inconsistent with democracy. Stated another way, social media is a veritable dream-come-true for would-be dictators.

Lastly, I credit the Trump Campaign’s victory to its efforts to excite the hates and fears of the American voters. Among the fears of many voters was that white Christians were rapidly becoming a minority in America. This message seemed to resonate with many working class Americans, including labor union members who had voted for Biden but had never become comfortable with Harris. In addition, the Trump Campaign sought to discourage (a) Jewish voters from supporting Harris arguing that the Biden administration was not fully supportive of Israel’s war in Gaza, (b) Hispanic men who were uncomfortable with the idea of a woman president, (c) Muslim Americans who were unhappy over the Biden administration’s lack of concern for the plight of the Palestinians and (d) black men who were told that the Harris Campaign was simply assuming they would be supporting her.

One of the principal lessons from the election is that there are still a great many Americans who have not come to accept the idea of having a woman be their president. While that will soon change as more and more women are being elected to the House and the Senate. Currently, 29% of the members of the House and 25% of the members of the Senate are women. By contrast, in 2000, 19% of the House members and 18% of the Senate members were women. While it could take another decade or two for the American public to overcome it misogynistic leaning, it will surely come.