There still are ballots out there remaining to be counted, but it looks like Trump will win the popular vote by a little more than one point. That’s better than his last two outings, but hardly the biggest win in history. In fact, the only presidents who won the popular vote by a smaller margin than that since 1888 were Kennedy in 1960 and Nixon in 1968. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by about two points.
A win is a win, but the size matters. Narratives are frequently set based on how big the win was. On election night, because the presidential race could be called, the story was one of a big red wave. Democrats certainly did not have a great night, but they have had much worse ones, i.e., 1980. When you break even (or gain a seat) in the House, win most of the competitive Senate races and not much changes at the state level, that’s not spectacular, but it’s a long way from a wipeout.
Trump’s win was wide but shallow. It was wide because he won all seven of the swing states. It was shallow because his margins were small.
As is customary for the winners of presidential elections, Trump is claiming a mandate. Leaving aside the validity of it, believing they have a mandate has a great history of getting presidents and their parties into trouble. I remember after Bush won in 2004 when he said he gained political capital and intended to use it. He used his political capital to push for a partial privatization of Social Security. It flopped, his approval rating tanked and the rest of his second term was all downhill. A Democratic Party that was declared dead was very much alive.
Obama fared better, but he still struggled plenty. His win in 2008 is the biggest of the century and he had huge majorities in Congress. His biggest legacy was the passage of the Affordable Care Act. It was the right thing to do and it’s now popular and here to stay. It’s wrong, though, to say he had a mandate to do it. The backlash was very intense and Democrats got crushed in the 2010 midterms. Like with Democrats after 2004, the Republican Party was declared dead after 2008, but came back to life very fast.
Trump came into office promising everything from bringing back manufacturing jobs to getting an infrastructure bill through Congress. He was too busy bragging about the size of his win to get into the mandate talk, but Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan decided it was their mandate to repeal the ACA. That effort was toxic and failed. Democrats came roaring back in 2018 and Republicans have wanted nothing to do with the ACA ever since. Just as the Democratic Party was declared dead again after 2016, it turned out to be very much alive. Notice a pattern?
In fairness, Trump could plausibly claim that he has a mandate to lower prices. That is far and away the main reason he won. Based on everything he says he wants to do, that’s not his priority at all.
Electoral mandates in general are largely made up, but especially so in presidential elections. Tens of millions of people vote for both major party candidates. Figuring out what all of them want is impossible. It’s fair to say that you get what you vote for, but that’s not the same thing as saying you’re getting what you want.
What you can say is having control of the White House and Congress at the same time is an opportunity to do things. Since midterms almost always go against the party in the White House, the opportunity window is two years at most. How much of an opportunity is available depends on how big the majorities in Congress are. Even if a majority is big, it’s no guarantee of things going smoothly.
Watch out for the hindsight judges
After every presidential campaign, there are plenty of hot takes about decisions made during the campaign. With 20/20 hindsight, many of those in the politics business will look at everything the winning and losing campaigns did and judge them solely based on the election’s outcome. Every decision the winning campaign made is considered brilliant while every decision the losing campaign made is considered a mistake. We’re getting plenty of that now with people declaring every move by Trump to be genius and every move by Harris to be a screwup. There is probably some grain of truth to that, but it’s wrong overall.
What I have found is that when people complain about the Harris campaign and say she should have done X, Y and Z, odds are she did those things. As I have said before, I think she ran a good campaign. She climbed out of a deep hole and kept the race competitive. The country as a whole shifted rightward compared to 2020, but less so in the swing states.
Most of the things I think she did wrong are things that happened in 2019 when she first ran for president. Very little of her loss is because of her, but the small part that is has nothing to do with the campaign she ran this year. It has everything to do with her going way out into left-field the first time. I wish she hadn’t taken so many unpopular positions and provided fodder for ads against her. Still, even if she hadn’t done that, she probably wouldn’t have won.
She had a chance of winning, but it’s not obvious what she could have done that would have carried her over the line. One common criticism of her campaign this year is that she didn’t give people a reason to vote for her. I have heard many argue that but have never heard the same explanation for what she should have done differently twice. Maybe there’s truth to it, but she did put out detailed policy positions and talked about it in her ads and on the campaign trail.
I wish she had gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast, but I don’t think that would have made much difference either. I wish she had given a better explanation for how she would differ from Biden, but I don’t know how much mileage that would have given her. By virtue of being VP, she was tied to the president as any VP would be.
Harris’ situation is different from 2016 and 2020. There, it was obvious what the losing candidate could have done to change the outcome. Had Clinton used email like everyone else at the State Department was, she likely would have won. Had Trump not acted horribly and permanently alienated half the country right out of the gate, he almost certainly would have won.
While I think Harris made the best of a bad situation, she’s not a great candidate. That’s part of why she was picked for VP. Biden wanted to run for reelection and she was seen as weaker than him. If he had a VP who was seen as stronger than him, there might have been more pressure on him to not run again. Maybe if Amy Klobuchar had been VP she would have been a stronger candidate than Harris in the general election.
I like her a lot and am inclined to somewhat agree with that. If nothing else, she didn’t make the mistake Harris did of taking so many unpopular positions. Still, the idea that she would have crushed Trump is wrong. She may have had a better chance of winning, but not necessarily much better. The reality is whoever was VP would be tied to Biden and hobbled by inflation. Maybe someone like Klobuchar would have been better able to demonstrate independence from Biden and/or maybe she would have done other things that helped her, but we don’t know. Anyone who is confident she or some other VP would have won easily is telling you not to take them seriously.
Since Trump won, every move he made is now seen as playing three dimensional chess. His working at McDonald’s for a day? Amazing! Brilliant! His dressing as a garbage man? Sticking it to the elites! His Madison Square Garden rally? Bringing down the rigged system! A voice for the forgotten man!
The hot take from the hindsight judges that has gotten the most attention concerns the attacks against Harris on transgender issues, particularly on transgender surgery for illegal immigrant inmates. Since the election, pundits, commentators, writers and others have fallen over themselves to assert how effective Trump and other Republicans’ transgender ads were. That includes plenty of Democrats. It has even been argued that transgender and other cultural issues were a bigger deal than inflation.
I would be wary of any take asserting that the ads were effective and the salience of transgender issues in general. Unless there is some solid data backing it up, I would view any claim like that with suspicion. People get emotional after elections and say all kinds of things. I understand that and we should cut them some slack. Others have self-serving narratives to tell and an audience to please. There is a cottage industry of people who make a living off of railing against anything they think is woke and so, of course, they’re going to claim it was what decided the election. When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything is a nail.
Once again, with feeling, Harris did not lose because of your pet issue!!!!!! If you find yourself thinking something other than inflation was decisive, there is a way you can figure out if you’re on the right track. Ask yourself this question: if Harris did what you wanted her to do on [insert your pet issue], would that have reduced inflation? If the answer is yes, you might be on to something. If the answer is no, and it is for almost everything, then it’s a red herring.
Anyone claiming the transgender ads were effective needs to explain some things. They need to explain why it stopped being effective below the presidential level. Republicans ran plenty of ads of about transgender issues in congressional races, but it doesn’t seem to have worked as Democrats largely held their own, especially in the House. They also need to explain why similar ads didn’t work in previous elections.
We can be quite confident that transgender ads didn’t help Republicans in 2022 and 2023. The best example is Andy Beshear. He was attacked repeatedly on issues like gender affirming care in his reelection bid last year. He won fairly comfortably and this is Kentucky we’re talking about.
Maybe voters who only show up in presidential elections care more about transgender issues than regular voters. My imagination might be limited, but that’s the only way I can reconcile claims that transgender ads mattered this year with their not mattering in the last two years. Call me highly skeptical that that’s what is going on. Occasional voters are disengaged from politics and rarely pay attention to it. I’m hard pressed to think many of them know what the transgender controversies even are, let alone have strong feelings about it.
Going forward, I’m not worried about future presidential candidates making the mistake Harris made in 2019.1 There is a lot of anger at the left-wing advocacy world and most everyone in Democratic Party circles recognizes that the identity politics of the 2010s was bad. The 2019-20 cycle was unusual in so many ways that thankfully are unlikely to repeat in 2028.
I doubt any aspiring future Democratic presidential candidate is reading this, but, just in case, there is an easy way to avoid sabotaging yourself like many candidates did in 2019-20. When any left-wing advocacy group sends you a questionnaire, throw it in the trash. When they call you, don’t answer. When they yell at and protest against you, take it as a badge of honor and boast about it. There is no better way to prove that you’re not a leftist than by ignoring leftists and having them get mad at you.
While the evidence for the high salience of transgender issues is scant, we do have tons of evidence for the high salience of inflation. That’s true not just in polls and surveys, but in plenty of articles looking at why so many people shifted rightwards this year. Inflation affected everyone no matter where they lived and was something people saw all the time.
As I have discussed before, you can’t look at our election in isolation. Inflation has killed incumbent parties around the world, regardless of their ideological leanings or any other things that were going on. The one constant since 2021 is inflation has been a global problem and incumbent parties have almost always done poorly in elections. To believe it’s all just a big coincidence and culture war fights matter more requires Olympic level credulity.
In the UK, the Tories had their worst election ever. That’s not because Rishi Sunak had a sex change operation. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s party lost seats in the snap elections this year and he’s very unpopular. That’s not because his pronouns are they/them. In Canada, Justin Trudeau is very unpopular and his coalition is poised to get crushed soon. That’s not because he tries to compete in women’s sports leagues.
What I can say with a very high level of confidence is the only reason we’re talking about transgender ads being effective is because Trump won. I can assure you, if he had lost, everyone claiming those ads were effective would be saying they were a huge blunder. Trump would be bashed for having wasted money on things nobody cares about when he could have spent it talking about inflation.
The same hot takes would be given about his other moves during the campaign. His working at McDonald’s would have been seen as turning people off. His dressing as a garbage man would have been seen as empty pandering. His Madison Square Garden rally would have been seen as the October surprise that sunk him. He would have been criticized for not defining Harris or not doing it soon enough and for holding rallies in states that weren’t competitive.
The Obama coalition has been gone for a while
Plenty of those in the politics business have observed and/or lamented that the Obama coalition is no more. It didn’t carry over to Clinton, Biden or Harris. Trump made inroads with many groups that were a critical part of it. Democrats are now at a crossroads. Two questions that have been asked, explicitly or implicitly, is who can recreate the Obama coalition and what steps Democrats should take to do it.
Sorry folks, but that’s not how it works. The Obama coalition ended in 2012, the last time he was on the ballot. There is a reason it’s called the Obama coalition. The key word is Obama. It was his coalition and nobody else’s.
That’s how it works in presidential elections. Each candidate has to assemble their own coalition. It will overlap plenty with previous candidates from their party, but not entirely. Presidential elections, like the one we just had, tend to be decided by disengaged voters who only vote every four years. Many of them are attracted to candidates as individuals, not to the parties they’re a part of.
Winning candidates tend to be those who do a better job of connecting with disengaged voters. Obama was very good at it. Trump is also good at it although not nearly as good as Obama was. Like with Obama, Trump has an appeal that’s unique to him. Just as Obama’s appeal didn’t carry over to other Democrats, Trump’s appeal doesn’t carry over to other Republicans.
As I have written about before, Obama was unusual in how great a candidate he was. His first popular vote win and both of his electoral college wins were the biggest of this century. Presidential elections have become extremely polarized over the last three decades. Landslide wins like Reagan in 1984 don’t happen. Compared to how narrow presidential elections have been decided since 2000, Obama’s wins look like blowouts.
We have had seven presidential elections this century. In five of them, Wisconsin was decided by less than one point. Pennsylvania was decided by four points or less in four of them as were Michigan and Nevada. Obama won all of those states decisively. He was a magician. Nobody since has come close to replicating his success.
Candidate quality is a big deal, but so is the cycle. Obama was fortunate to run in 2008 and 2012. He got to run as the change candidate the first time and against a weak opponent the second time. Clinton had to run in 2016 after Democrats had been in the White House for eight years. Biden had to run against an incumbent. Harris had to run in the worst macroeconomic environment for Democrats as the incumbent party since 1980.
It’s hard to know what the future holds, but anyone who is thinking about how to reassemble the Obama coalition is doing it wrong. 2028 could be a great year for Democrats. They could nominate someone who is an electoral powerhouse and benefits from Trump being unpopular. Even if that happens, his/her coalition is going to look different from what Obama put together.
Since 2016, there have been some big shifts in the parties’ coalitions. Non-white non-college educated voters have moved right while college educated white voters have moved left. Some of that could reverse, but my guess is a lot of it will be enduring. There are plenty of non-college educated non-whites out there who are conservative and now vote that way. Conversely, there are plenty of college educated whites out there who are moderate or center-left and now vote that way. If a Democrat wins in 2028, his/her coalition is going to be diverse, but it will be whiter, more educated and suburban than the one Obama won with.
Party coalitions are always changing. It’s not obvious year by year, but looking at where the two parties are now compared to the 1990s, the change is huge. That will continue to happen, but most likely it will be an electoral wash. I’m a big believer in the continuity of both parties frequently changing power. Durable national majorities like what existed from the New Deal through the Great Society are not a thing anymore.
I expect Democrats to have a great year in 2026, but beyond that it’s anyone’s guess how things go. What I do know is Trump won’t be on the ballot again, assuming he doesn’t become leader for life. He has been a constant presence since 2016, but he will (maybe?) leave the scene in 2028. Just as Democrats have been unable to recreate Obama’s coalition, Republicans will have the same problem trying to recreate Trump’s coalition.
The source of her problems on the issue of transgender surgery for illegal immigrant inmates is her filling out a questionnaire from the ACLU stating that position. There was also footage of her saying that’s where she stood.