Trump’s Victory Is Not As Monumental As It Seems To The Media

In the days before the US election, the major news media in Canada and the US (newspapers, TV networks, and cable channels etc., excluding Fox News) were saying that the US election was so close in the polls that they could not predict a winner. The polls for the 7 or so swing states had a difference of 1-2%, which is within the margin of error. The overall vote seemed to slightly favour Harris and the Democrats.

In past elections, the Democrats needed to be ahead around 4% or more in the polls to win, because of the Electoral College being skewed towards small states, which are mainly Republican. Polls since 2016 have supposedly undercounted Trump’s support too (though some pollsters were claiming to have solved this). So, the fact that the polls were so close meant a likely Trump victory, though an influential last-minute poll in Iowa seemed to suggest a potential Trump loss.

But within two or three days of the election, the same media were making it sound like the election was a resounding victory for Trump, with major shifts towards the Republicans.

What is monumental is that Trump and the Republicans are almost certain to control not just the Presidency, but have at least 52 Senators, and likely will have a majority in the House of Representatives too. The Democrats are effectively frozen out of power, unless the Republicans are split on an issue, which has frequently happened in the last few years in the House.

Trump also unexpectedly won not just the swing states, but probably a majority of the popular vote. As I write, Associated Press shows him with 50.5% of the vote, about 2.6% ahead of Harris. That being said, unlike any other state, over one third of the votes in California have yet to be counted, and so the gap will likely narrow. So, with around 4.0 million votes in California alone still uncounted, Trump has 74.4 million votes, while Harris has 70.5 million.

In 2020, Trump had slightly fewer votes, at 74.2 million, but then the US population has grown by 6 or 7 million people since 2020, around 1.8%. If we add 1.8% to his 2020 result, then that is 75.5 million. If Trump gets 40% of the remaining California votes, he should be at 75.9 million votes, so he gained only about 400,000 more votes than population growth alone would predict.

The real story of course is not that Trump did so much better, but that the Democratic vote collapsed so much, down from 81.3 million in 2020 when Biden narrowly won. Harris should get 2.4 million votes in California, which would mean a total of 72.9 million votes. Their vote total should have grown to 82.7 million when considering population growth.

Nearly 10 million Democratic voters just disappeared, and Trump only gained about 400,000 more voters than expected.

No doubt, the far-right voter fraud conspiracy theorists, and even Trump himself, might claim this is proof that the 2020 election was rigged against him, as he claims without proof and with 60 court cases finding no significant problems.

The fact that Trump gained among demographic groups like Blacks and Latinos is really more likely due to turnout in these groups dropping more than other groups. The Democrats supposedly did better this time around with white women, while losing with other groups.

According to AP, the top issue in 2024 was the economy, for 39% of voters, with immigration at 20% and abortion at 11%. The easiest explanation was that a lot of people voted against Trump in 2020, but the current feelings about the economy hurt the Democrats, and Harris essentially did not distance herself enough from Biden or offer up much in the way of change. Many voters stayed home in 2024, and a few did flip from Democrat to Republican, but not a huge percentage.

This is consistent with one trend the news media have been reporting: 2024 is a terrible year for incumbent parties. Certainly, this is also true in Canada federally with the dismal polling for Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. Even if Justin Trudeau were to quit, his replacement would likely need to come up with a major change in economic policy. 

Ironically, in races for the Senate, the House, and particularly in elections in many states, the Democrats did not do as badly as they did in the Presidential race. In the Senate, the Democrats were not expected to win in West Virginia, and Ohio and Montana both had Democratic Senators facing uphill battles in “Red” states (I hate that the US flipped colours for left and right to be opposite of the longstanding tradition).

If there was such a huge shift towards the Republican Party, then the Democrats should have done far worse in these races, though with the Gerrymandering of boundaries in many states, few House districts are actually likely to ever flip to the other party.

My view is that the Democrats lost the election, not that Trump won it. But then, this is a long-standing trend, and the 2000 election was another case where the Democrats should have won, but Gore blew it by doing things like distancing himself from Bill Clinton when the economy was strong and public support was high (Clinton actually had a 66% approval rating when he left office).

Trump won in 2016 because he and his team realized that the three “Blue Wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were close races, and he could win the Electoral College. Hillary Clinton ignored this, and even ignored Bill Clinton in not following Trump into campaigning in those three states.

Harris was actually ahead of Trump in the polls after the early August Democratic Convention, but she lost this advantage towards the end.

Biden should not have run for a second term – and Democrats are able to freely state this now that the election is over. It was an act of decency that in the end he put his party and country ahead of his own desires, but his family should have told him to not run at least six months earlier.

Biden was deeply unpopular, but was not very good at defending himself or his record. Much of his unpopularity was over the economy, despite the fact that unemployment had dropped from around 6.7% to around 4%, and inflation had also dropped since the 2022 midterms, from a peak of around 9% to 2.4% in September.

The US economic performance since 2022 has been better than other G7 countries and the US economy is actually now the best of any major economy – but the media never made this point until the final weeks of the election. Voters were mainly upset at cumulative price increases since 2020, which were not caused by Biden and were true of Canada and Europe too, and were not that different from inflationary periods after WW1 or WW2 when economies had to recover from a major disruption.

The real causes of inflation in 2021 were supply chain issues, the issue of shipping containers being in short supply and US ports not being able to process enough imports, and oil prices recovering from the lows of 2020 (they reached negative prices at one point) to the peak in early 2022 at the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Harris neither made the case that the economy under Biden was strong (though some were left behind), nor did she offer change. Voters looked back not to why they voted Trump out of the Presidency in November 2020, but back to 2017-19 when the economy was booming, and inflation was low – things that had not improved that much since Obama left office in January 2017.

Most importantly, just as Hillary Clinton ignored Trump going into the “Blue Wall” states in 2016, Harris ignored Trump’s strategy in 2024.

Trump tried to distance himself from his own 2016 and 2020 policies on abortion and his Supreme Court picks by taking a more moderate policy on abortion and making false claims that handing the issue of abortion to the states was the real goal and was popular. But Trump’s main policy was to target male voters.

Instead of offering change on the economy, which would appeal to male voters, or otherwise shifting her policy to appeal to males, Harris seemed to double down and make her main issue abortion and women’s rights – though she rarely mentioned the word abortion directly.

About the only decision Harris made to try to appeal to male voters was the choice of Tim Walz. He is a former coach, career military man, and an outdoorsman who loves to hunt.

Few people vote for President based on who is picked for VP, except maybe in the home state of the VP pick. The main job of the VP pick is to be an attack dog. Walz might actually be a front runner for the 2028 Democratic nomination – which might be the best thing the Democrats get out of losing the Presidency in 2024.

Harris ended up doing worse than expected with the under-30 voters, a demographic that Democrats usually dominate, because she focused on young women while ignoring that Trump was targeting young men – and succeeding by being so puerile and associating himself with such things as crypto, Hulk Hogan, and Elon Musk.

Many members of traditional Democratic voting blocs like Latinos and Blacks are somewhat socially or economically conservative, and do not totally agree with Democrats on many issues, so of course some might drift over to become Republicans (this has long been the case in Florida, with Cubans and many Venezuelans). They might also have simply stayed at home in an election where they lacked a strong motivation to vote against the Republicans. Of course, in Canada, we never speak of Latinos or Hispanics. We lump these US definitions in with other immigrants or just classify them as non-white, though many Latinos are actually not visible minorities or treated separately from other Southern European ethnic groups.

Some Democrats are lamenting that they might have done better if instead of Biden essentially crowning Harris as his successor, they had had a proper competitive convention. But Biden did not leave enough time by delaying until June to finally quit the race – and frankly, would any of the other potential candidates done much better?

Pete Buttigieg might have run. Gretchen Whitmer and Josh Shapiro would have been good candidates, but likely would not have entered the race for President this year, and Bernie Sanders is too old.

What is odd is that Harris was so unprepared to be President or run for the office, given Biden’s age and the likelihood that he might become seriously ill suddenly, like by having a major stroke. Harris seemed particularly ill equipped to defend the economy or offer up how she would run things better or differently.

Trump’s “Unfavourability rating” has long averaged between 50% and 60%, and is around a 52% average according to one polling agglomeration (and is only 43% favourable) yet he got over 50% of the vote.

A lot of people held their noses and voted for Trump. Harris’s favourability was actually higher once she was confirmed as his opponent. But Biden’s ratings are still worse than either.

Harris was smart to delay taking major interviews at the beginning of her campaign, but in effect her key interview moment was the appearance on “The View” on October 8^th, when she was asked what she would have done differently than Biden.

Harris had several choices. She could have ducked the question by saying “I am still Vice President and am a team player, and my disagreements with Biden are private until he leaves the job”. But she seemed unprepared to answer a question that was sure to be asked.

Had Harris chosen to criticize Biden, then she would have needed to give specifics of where Biden had gone wrong, particularly over the economy. Issues like Israel or Ukraine would have come up too.

Harris was in a tight spot, but the only option was to push back and defend the unpopular “Bidenomics” opinion and offer a critique that inflation was not Biden’s fault, and that inflation would have happened if Trump was President in 2021, and that electing him will not reduce prices, and that nostalgia for the pre-COVID economy gives Trump credit for Obama’s economic management (a point Obama himself made repeatedly and effectively when he spoke during this campaign).

Harris also blew it when it came to her failed 2019 campaign for the Democratic nomination, by not admitting that her nomination campaign had to compete with Sanders, Warren, and others on the left of the party, and that she had changed her views since then. That being said, her viewpoint changes have been far less pronounced than those of Trump, who went from being a Democrat to becoming a far right Republican.

Trump lost his one debate with Harris, and was a terrible candidate for the most part. He was undisciplined as a speaker. What he did do right was go after the male vote, and go on podcasts where young males would hear him in conversation with hosts they respected – Trump even won Joe Rogan’s endorsement. Harris failed to counter his strategy in any way, and instead focused on the traditional Democratic base (most notably, women) and tried to seem moderate to appeal to independents.

Most of the people who were angry or upset over the overturning of Roe v Wade were in Harris’s camp already – it was the male vote that was up for grabs, and particularly young males.

Because Trump and the Republicans will essentially have the ability to ram through bills, pass orders, and make appointments for the next two years, there will be some monumental changes made under Trump. But the political landscape of the US has not changed, and likely many of those voters who voted against Trump in 2020 and then disappeared in 2024 will return.