Election Reflections

With the US presidential election more than two weeks behind us, the question of why Donald Trump won is still being examined—new polls analyse voting patterns in more detail and new articles discuss the lessons Democrats need to learn from their defeat. As we move past the election and into what promises to be a tumultuous second Trump term, it is still important to review those lessons.

I say this as a Kamala Harris voter with centrist, libertarian/conservative politics who is strongly opposed to the so-called “woke” Left—a position that I believe was compatible with a vote for Harris. Aside from my belief that Trump represents a brand of identity politics and illiberalism at least as toxic as the “woke” kind, the paramount issue for me in 2024 was Trump’s attempt—through spurious lawsuits, the misuse of his office, and finally the instigation of a mob to storm Congress—to disrupt the transfer of power and overturn the results of the 2020 election. I still believe that this alone should have been disqualifying and that his election in itself degrades the American system of governance.

Nevertheless, I strongly disagree with fellow Trump foes, including people I like and respect, whose response has been to pass harsh and sweeping judgment on the Americans who voted for Trump. To say that nearly 77 million voters knowingly endorsed democracy subversion, authoritarianism, and bigotry is both counterproductive and incorrect. People cast their vote for Trump for many reasons, and often with very limited knowledge of his disqualifications. As Adam Serwer notes in The Atlantic, his voters tend to rationalise or ignore—or genuinely not know about—his negative traits and extreme rhetoric.

In any case, as former Justice Department prosecutor Ankush Khardori has argued in Politico, preventing Trump’s return to the White House was up to Congress (where Senate Republicans foiled his conviction after his second impeachment by the House, in part because then-majority leader Mitch McConnell believed that Trump’s political career was finished anyway). Failing that, it was up to the Justice Department, which could have pursued election interference charges against him sooner and more aggressively.

If this sounds like an argument that the “elites” should have thwarted the will of the people, there is nothing undemocratic about holding a former president accountable for a brazen assault on the constitutional order he was sworn to uphold. (Indeed, author and podcaster Sam Harris makes a strong argument that failing to hold Trump accountable for this act already damaged democracy.) After Trump’s election victory, many conservative pundits have dismissed anxieties about the integrity of democracy as elite concerns, in contrast to the economic issues motivating ordinary people. But surely a healthy political order must incorporate both. Conservatives are usually the first to point out that the American republic was not meant to be a direct democracy, which its founders associated with mob rule; the will of the majority has always been mediated not only by protections for minority rights and individual rights, but by the stewardship of elites, in particular the judiciary.

When the justice system and the political class let Trump off the hook, it was neither fair nor realistic to expect voters—many of whom pay little attention to political news and have a low level of engagement with politics—to deny him legitimacy. For millions of Americans, he was simply another politician (albeit a maverick one) whose refusal to recognise the 2020 election was not substantively different from other self-serving election disputes.

Once Trump was seen as acceptable, the problems plaguing Harris and the Democrats became more salient. These problems have already been extensively discussed elsewhere. Statistician and writer Nate Silver has summarised the four principal factors as: “the global backlash against incumbent parties in an era of high inflation and failed promises for a quick return to normalcy after COVID”; inflation itself; Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second term at the age of 81; and immigration, specifically the border crisis created in part by Biden’s decision to drastically expand parole for asylum-seekers.

Stepping in for Biden after the first presidential debate gave Harris a brief boost—people were clearly happy and relieved to see the change—but it also put Harris at multiple disadvantages. Not only did she have to run a truncated and untested campaign, but she also found herself in the no-win situation of either cleaving to the very unpopular president she had served or throwing him under the bus after he put her on the Democratic ticket in 2019 and then endorsed her 2024 candidacy. Harris chose the first option, and it cost her dearly (although it’s hard to say how a more aggressive attempt to distance herself from Biden would have been perceived).

Harris’s run was also damaged by the radical persona she adopted during her disastrous primary campaign in 2019 and, to a lesser extent, during the 2020 campaign when she was Biden’s running mate. Among other things, she praised the “defund the police” movement and suggested that putting more cops on the streets in disadvantaged communities was not the way to safety. (In fact, members of those communities overwhelmingly want a strong police presence.) She declared her support for slavery reparations, albeit in the race-neutral form of tax credits for low-income Americans. She enthusiastically endorsed transgender advocacy, even introducing herself with pronouns—“she, her, and hers”—during an appearance at CNN’s “LGBTQ town hall” in October 2019. During the summer of 2020, she repeatedly praised the racial-justice protests that followed the murder of George Floyd while making no mention, until late August, of the violence and looting that accompanied those protests in many of America’s largest cities.

This baggage hurt Harris in two ways. First, it made it easy for the Trump campaign to paint her as an extremist, despite her pivot toward more centrist politics in 2024. Second, it made her seem inauthentic, since she abandoned or reversed many of her earlier positions—on policing, for instance, or on fracking—without explaining why. This contributed to a general sense that no one quite knew what Harris stood for. When she talked about freedom, an opportunity society, and America’s legacy of liberty, it was certainly a welcome change from the Left’s politics of victimhood, anti-capitalism, and claims that America’s legacy is one of white supremacy. But stirring rhetoric is still just rhetoric. Talk-show host Bill Maher urged Harris to explicitly repudiate the far-left, but she never did. Indeed, the day before the election, she passed on a chance to express support for a California ballot measure to toughen penalties for drug offences and shoplifting (which ended up being approved by an overwhelming 68.5 percent of the vote).

Overall, during the campaign, I found Harris to be more impressive than I had expected based on my memories of her 2019 run and her stint as vice president. I thought the claims that she was unable to produce anything other than “word salad” without a script and a teleprompter were egregiously unfair, and often based on out-of-context snippets. Even so, I had a bad feeling during a CNN town hall when she responded to a question about mistakes she had made with this:

I mean, I’ve made many mistakes, and they range from, you know … if you’ve ever parented a child, you know, you make lots of mistakes. In my role as Vice President—I mean, I’ve probably worked very hard at making sure that I am well versed on issues, and I think that is very important. It’s a mistake not to be well versed on an issue and feel compelled to answer a question.

This debacle was not about incoherence or stupidity, as some Harris detractors have suggested, but it did sound like an evasion of a question that Harris felt she couldn’t answer without alienating some segment of her potential voters. Since the question was easily anticipated, it’s baffling that no one on Harris’s staff could have come up with some good suggestions, so perhaps this was also a sign of a poorly run campaign.

This brings us to the extent to which “wokeness” was an issue in the 2024 election. One post-election poll found approximately two-thirds of all voters agreeing that “Democrats are too focused on identity politics” (65 percent) and “Democrats have extreme ideas about race and gender” (62 percent). Respondents weren’t asked how important these issues were to their choice, but if crime and illegal immigration are “wokeness”-related issues, they rank very high on the list of Trump voters’ reasons for their vote.

An aspect of “wokeness” that turned out to be very prominent in this election is transgender advocacy. In the above-mentioned poll, nearly three out of four voters—72 percent—agreed that “Democrats want to promote transgender ideology.” In another poll, 22 percent of Trump voters—and 24 percent of swing voters who went for Trump—said that protecting children from being “endangered or confused by transgender ideology” was among their top five reasons for voting for Trump. Another analysis found that a Trump ad highlighting Harris’s endorsement of taxpayer-funded gender-reassignment surgery for prison inmates shifted the vote toward Trump by 2.7 percentage points among those who watched it. That doesn’t mean this ad actually cost Harris 2.7 percent of the vote—we don’t know what percentage of voters saw it, or how lasting its effect was—but it almost certainly had an impact. As David Wallace-Wells points out in the New York Times, such surgeries are extremely rare and arguably not a great cause for concern. But for many people, this minor issue served as a reminder of a much wider range of craziness around gender. The ad also highlighted Harris’s support for transgender inclusion in girls’ and women’s sports—a policy opposed by a majority of Americans.

Democrats Must Pick Fights with Woke Activists

Ignoring the far-left’s identitarian agenda is not enough.

QuilletteRichard Hanania

Harris didn’t run on a pro-transgender platform and avoided the issue during the campaign. But as Helen Lewis has detailed in The Atlantic, the Biden/Harris administration consistently and forcefully embraced the agenda of transgender activists in every area from gender youth medicine to sports. (One of the four executive orders Biden signed on the first day of his presidency directed all federal agencies to enforce the ban on gender-identity discrimination and explicitly stressed “access to the restroom, the locker room, [and] school sports” as a basic right for students.) The Harris campaign reportedly struggled with how to answer the trans-focused Trump ads and ultimately didn’t answer them at all, most likely because alienating the pro-transgender rights progressive base was too risky.

Pro-Palestinian protests in the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 attacks in Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza became another “wokeness”-related issue that hobbled Harris. The ugliness—and, in many cases, outright antisemitism—of anti-Israel protests on college campuses and elsewhere brought the spotlight on the general issue of left-progressive extremism in particularly vicious forms. To her credit, Harris harshly condemned the protesters who burned the American flag and defaced statues with pro-Hamas graffiti in Washington, DC in late July, in one of her first public acts after replacing Biden at the top of the ticket. After that, however, she found herself hobbled by the need to walk a tightrope between declaring strong support for Israel—the majority position despite some recent erosion of pro-Israel opinion in the US—and keeping pro-Palestinian progressives in the tent. The result was more evasions and more disenchanted voters in both the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian camps.

Finally, Trump opponents and/or Harris supporters made at least three errors that may not have affected the outcome of the election, but boosted many people’s expectations of a Trump defeat and left others mystified and enraged by his level of support. (I must plead guilty to some of these.)

1. Underestimating economic discontent

Many people have assumed that good macroeconomic indicators—high growth, low unemployment, inflation rate down—meant that complaints about the economy were either a cover for uglier reasons for voting for Trump, such as anti-immigrant sentiment, or the result of Trump-stoked hysteria. There is no doubt that partisanship and tribalism affect perceptions of the economy (some Republicans already think the economy has improved). But in exit polls, only a third of voters thought the economy was good, and nearly a third of those who thought it was poor were Harris voters. What’s more, as Harvard economist (and former chair of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors) Jason Furman explained in an X thread, the focus on positive indicators overlooks the continuing impact of inflation and other negatives, such as high mortgage rates.

In The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey has pointed out that while inflation rates are down, “prices spiked more during the Biden administration than at any point since the early 1980s” and “remain unsustainably high” in some categories. House prices are up 47 percent since 2020, while rental prices are up 20 percent. Food prices also remain considerably higher than they used to be. As Lowrey put it:

[V]oters do not make their decisions at the polls on the basis of price-adjusted time series. Nor do they seem to appreciate pundits and politicians telling them that their lived experience is somehow incorrect—that they are truly doing great; they just don’t know it.

Obviously, none of this means that Trump can fix the economy. The tariffs and large-scale deportations of illegal migrants, if enacted, are far more likely to wreck it. But the signs of large-scale economic discontent—and the fact that people gave Trump a slight preference over Harris when it came to the ability to manage the economy—should have prepared Democrats, and others who favoured Harris, for the likely outcome of the election.

2. Underestimating Trump

Trump was underestimated in several ways, often related to cherry-picked evidence. Anti-Trumpists eagerly seized on video clips that showed Trump rambling, stumbling, and looking and sounding exhausted, disoriented, or downright demented. But there were plenty of other moments when he looked vigorous and coherent (admittedly within the bounds of the usual Trumpian weirdness now widely viewed as part of his freewheeling public persona).

I was among those who questioned Trump’s mental fitness when he abruptly called off questions at a Pennsylvania town-hall meeting in October, told his staff to play music from his favourite playlist, and spent the remaining forty minutes of the meeting on the stage swaying back and forth to the music. My view of this incident didn’t substantially change once I learned that the impromptu concert was due to two attendees having medical issues, but many people in attendance thought it was spontaneous and charming.

Many of us have also under-appreciated the fact that Trump’s persona as an entertainer and stand-up comedian allows him to get away with saying things that would quickly destroy any other politician: “Trump says crazy shit” is part of the brand. (I’ve heard even Harris voters shrug off things like Trump’s threats to yank TV stations’ broadcasting licences or suggestions that his political enemies should be executed for treason.)

Also underestimated: Trump’s ability to calibrate his message to different groups, both via surrogates and in person. One striking case in point: his success at courting large segments of the Jewish community while also syphoning Arab-Americans voters away from Harris by playing to their anger about the war in Gaza. Another: his ability to get credit from his right-to-life base for the repeal of Roe v. Wade, which protected abortion rights nationwide, while signalling enough support for abortion rights to avoid blame for the downfall of Roe in the eyes of many pro-choice voters and mitigate the expected backlash.

More broadly, many observers have been mystified by Trump’s ability to win nearly half of the female vote and expand his base among nonwhite (especially Hispanic) voters while running a campaign that was widely decried as misogynistic and racist. That accusation is certainly not without substance. Trump’s denigration of Harris as weak, “dumb,” and lacking in leadership undoubtedly played, at least for some in his target audience, to sexist prejudices. He even shared social-media memes with lewd jokes accusing her of trading sexual favours for career advancement. Likewise, it would be difficult to deny that some of Trump’s anti-migrant rhetoric pandered to xenophobic and racist animus, such as his recycling of the unfounded rumour about (legal) Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town eating local residents’ cats and dogs.

But many female and minority voters prioritised other issues—or were vaguely, if at all, aware of Trump’s rhetoric and likely dismissed it as trash talk. And, perhaps no less important, the Trump campaign’s signalling on gender and race was far more multilayered than is often recognised. Campaign events showcased capable women in his entourage such as campaign manager Susie Wiles (the next White House Chief of Staff) and lawyer and advisor Alina Habba. His last rally in Pennsylvania on the eve of the election featured podcaster and former TV journalist Megyn Kelly as a living rebuttal to a comment by pro-Harris businessman Mark Cuban accusing Trump of not liking to be around “strong, intelligent women.”

Likewise, the racial and nativist ugliness of some of Trump’s rhetoric about immigration coexisted with statements like, “It doesn’t matter if you’re black, or brown, or white, or whatever the hell color you are... We are all Americans.” Obviously, such messaging doesn’t negate the Trump campaign’s retrogressive statements about race and sex, but it does help to explain Trump’s ability to connect with segments of the population that he was widely expected to alienate.

3. Over-reliance on legal tactics

Some of Trump’s and his supporters’ accusations of witch-hunts by “lawfare” were absurd, particularly with regard to the cases involving the attempted election theft in 2020. But it is also now clear that the overall “effort to vanquish Donald Trump in court,” as Yale law professor Samuel Moyn puts it in the New York Times, “was a dismal failure.” This was particularly true of Trump’s felony conviction in the New York case involving hush money to adult film star Stormy Daniels. When the case went forward, a number of commentators unsympathetic to Trump warned that it was a weak case based on a new and questionable legal theory. In March 2023, when the charges were about to be filed, Time magazine warned that the case could boost his presidential campaign by allowing him to mobilise his supporters’ sense of grievance. It’s likely that even some people outside Trump’s hardcore base, including independents, were put off by what they saw as the legal targeting of a political opponent. 

The same probably applies to the civil judgment against Trump in the lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll, the writer who came forward to accuse Trump of sexually assaulting her in 1995. Whatever one thinks of Caroll’s account (partly corroborated by testimony from friends about her contemporaneous statements), the case was made possible by the New York state legislature, which has a Democratic supermajority, taking the extraordinary step of creating a one-year window for lawsuits over allegations of sexual assault outside the statute of limitations. Imagine the reaction from Democrats if, in the late 1990s, a Republican-dominated state legislature in Arkansas had engaged in such tactics to enable Juanita Broaddrick to sue Bill Clinton for an alleged rape twenty years earlier.

Many people (myself included) were inclined to see Trump’s legal defeats as more evidence of his unfitness—and, let’s be frank, as satisfying comeuppance given his efforts to avoid accountability for a brazen assault on America’s constitutional order. We should have listened to people like Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle who argued that legally shaky cases against Trump could not only undercut the solid ones but undermine the system.

None of these points, of course, alters my opinion that Trump is a dangerous demagogue with no political ideas besides a reflexive admiration for autocrats. I don’t think he will become an American dictator because the American political system has too many guardrails and Trump lacks the necessary discipline. However, I do believe that, as Yascha Mounk has written in Persuasion, Trump will try to impose his will on the weakened structures of American democracy, resulting in constant friction that is likely to degrade them.

Indeed, one of Trump’s first acts has been to attempt an unconstitutional power grab to bypass the Senate’s “advice and consent” function to get his cabinet picks confirmed—though this episode has also demonstrated that even a majority-Republican Senate can muster the will to resist him. More perniciously, some prominent figures on Team Trump are pushing the idea that legislators, especially Republican legislators, who disobey Trump are “undermining” him or thwarting “the will of the people.” (This would be a fundamentally un-American idea, even if Trump had won a genuine electoral landslide rather than 49.85 percent of the popular vote.)

I also stand by my criticism, made shortly before the election, of “anti-woke” writers and pundits who have embraced Trump—or at least taken an “anti-anti-Trump” stance—as a remedy to the depredations of the “social justice” Left. While I believe that the illiberal Left remains a danger to a free society, Trumpian populism represents the opposite problem—the illiberal Right—and the second Trump administration may yet see a “woke” backlash the way the first one did. However, I am now cautiously optimistic that the “anti-woke” pushback of the past couple of years will persist and perhaps even intensify, as many Democrats attempt a genuine soul-searching about the role of identity politics in their defeat. But the corollary is that, if critics of “wokeness” are serious about their dedication to freedom, reason, the value of the individual and other aspects of the Enlightenment legacy, they need to oppose the threats to these values from the now-empowered Trumpian Right as much as the progressive Left.

The lessons of the 2024 election are complicated, and there are many reasons to find them discouraging. But they certainly don’t foreclose the possibility of a sane, pro-freedom centre, with both liberal and conservative elements, emerging as a viable alternative to the vicious cycle of left-wing and right-wing illiberalism.