The best writing online about why Trump won, why Harris lost, and what it all means
Donald and Melania Trump at an election-night event in West Palm Beach, Florida.
There’s been an avalanche of analysis following Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, as experts sought to explain how the former president won a second term.
They’ve offered a range of reasons, including a populist revolt against the elites and Vice President Kamala Harris’ shortcomings as the Democratic candidate.
Here is some of the best commentary we’ve seen in the days since the election.
Sarah Baxter, The London Standard
Wokeness has been comprehensively defeated in the US election
It’s not good enough to cry sexism. Yes, Trump has won against a woman candidate — twice. Perhaps in the US that means he’s lucky. But my son is right about the impact of wokeness. It has poisoned liberals and Democrats for a generation. Young people are big-hearted and open-minded, but don’t want to be lectured about their pronouns or transgender rights. There will be no comeback for the Democrats until they absorb these lessons.
For too long Democrats have relied on an imaginary cavalry to save them from Trump. The Mueller report into Russian interference. The Cheneys. Various judges and generals. Nothing has worked. They can’t change the voters, so they’ll have to change themselves.
Francis Fukuyama, Financial Times
What Trump unleashed means for America
The blowout victory of Donald Trump and the Republican party on Tuesday night will lead to major changes in important policy areas, from immigration to Ukraine. But the significance of the election extends way beyond these specific issues, and represents a decisive rejection by American voters of liberalism and the particular way that the understanding of a “free society” has evolved since the 1980s.
Ankush Khardori, Politico
Trump Got Away With It — Because of the Biden Administration’s Massive Misstepsa
“The most obvious explanation for Trump’s win despite his considerable legal problems is that a critical mass of voters were willing to set aside their concerns about Trump’s alleged misconduct because of their dissatisfaction with the Biden-Harris administration. Fair or not, this was absolutely their right as voters.
But if the system had worked the way it should have, voters would never have faced such a choice. If Trump had actually faced accountability for his alleged crimes, he may not have even appeared on the ballot.”
Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan, The New York Times
How Trump Won, and How Harris Lost
How he won in 2024 came down to one essential bet: that his grievances could meld with those of the MAGA movement, and then with the Republican Party, and then with more than half the country. His mug shot became a best-selling shirt. His criminal conviction inspired $100 million in donations in one day. The images of him bleeding after a failed assassination attempt became the symbol of what supporters saw as a campaign of destiny
How Mr. Trump won is also the story of how Ms. Harris lost.
She was hobbled by President Biden’s low approval ratings and struggled to break from him in the eyes of voters yearning for a change in direction. She had only three-plus months to reintroduce herself to the country and she vacillated until the end with how — and how much — to talk about Mr. Trump.
John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times
Democrats join 2024’s graveyard of incumbents
The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records.
Ultimately voters don’t distinguish between unpleasant things that their leaders and governments have direct control over, and those that are international phenomena resulting from supply-side disruptions caused by a global pandemic or the warmongering of an ageing autocrat halfway across the world.
Voters don’t like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when inflation hit. The cost of living was also the top issue in Britain’s July general election and has been front of mind in dozens of other countries for most of the last two years.
Alexandra Ulmer, Gram Slattery, Reuters
Trump did it his way in White House run. How he proved his advisers wrong
Reuters spoke to more than 20 Trump allies, advisers, donors and Republican operatives for a detailed account of how Trump managed to pull off a stunning comeback, becoming the first former president in more than a century to win a second term after leaving the White House.
The interviews reveal how he forged key alliances, including with tech billionaire Elon Musk, who spent at least $119 million on canvassing for Trump in the seven battleground states. He also resisted calls to fire senior campaign staffers, choosing to keep together a team that avoided the internal chaos of Trump’s previous bids. And he kept the spotlight on immigration, rather than abortion, where Democrats have an edge with voters.
Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, Axios
Behind the Curtain: The most powerful Republican president of the modern era
Don’t underestimate the damage Democrats did to their brand by promoting political correctness. Democratic strategists told us it’s a huge problem for the image of the party, not just Harris. Trump saw this as vital to turning independents and apathetic voters into Republicans — or at least Trump Republicans. The campaign was only the beginning.
David Weigel, Semafor
Democrats ask: Why didn’t anything work?
There’s no consensus about what would have worked this year, other than ‘don’t be the incumbent party when people are angry about inflation.’ (You might think that “don’t run an 81-year old nominee for most of the race” would build a consensus, but I found some Biden defenders today, still angry about the donors and Democrats who convinced him to quit.)
Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic
Voters Wanted Lower Prices at Any Cost
Voters 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.
Prices spiked more during the Biden administration than at any point since the early 1980s. In some categories, they remain unsustainably high.
Home prices have jumped an astonishing 47 percent since early 2020. This has made homeowners wealthier on paper, but has priced millions of people out of the housing market. The situation with rented homes is no better. Costs are up more than 20 percent since COVID hit, and have doubled in some places. The number of cost-burdened renters is at an all-time high.
Gerard Baker, The Times of London
Trump’s populist appeal is a wake-up call for Democrats
Consider this for a moment: The man dubbed a ‘fascist’ by his opponents is likely not only to have won an outright majority of more than 150 million voters but did so by attracting the votes, for the first time, of millions of Black people, Latinos, Jews, and young people.
While legitimate concerns about the man’s disdain for the niceties of law and order will be tested in a second Trump term, the sheer scope and scale of his appeal should force his critics to rethink so many of their worst assumptions.
Instead of constantly seeking to portray him as the next Hitler, Democrats and the media need to ask themselves why he manages to appeal to such a wide and diverse audience of regular Americans — many of whom used to vote Democrat. Trump has managed to attract a multiethnic working-class constituency to the Republican Party as its populist economic message begins to resonate. The 2024 election offers emphatic evidence for that appeal.
Laurel Duggan, UnHerd
Why white women stuck with Trump
The abortion issue had seemingly little impact on Republicans’s performance with white women in this cycle. Trump’s lead for this group was the same in 2024 as it was prior to Roe’s overturning; in red states considering abortion ballot measures, Florida and South Dakota, the former president still won both the female vote and the white female vote. In the swing state of Arizona, where abortion was also on the ballot, Trump leads the white female vote by 9 points and the total female vote by 1 point.
In part because of the abortion issue, white suburban women were long seen as a promising group for Democrats to make up for the loss of working-class white men. Sen. Chuck Schumer claimed in 2016 that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” That expectation did not come to pass in the 2016 election, nor in 2024. The enduring Republican tendencies of white women have proven difficult for Democrats to combat.
Todd Landman, professor of political science at the University of Nottingham, in The Conversation
How Donald Trump won back the keys to the White House
In a contest with razor-thin margins and toss-up polls, the Trump campaign pursued a strategy that did not seek to expand support significantly beyond his traditional base. Instead it successfully energized and mobilized new voters within his core demographic — especially young male voters, who turned out in huge numbers.
The Trump campaign also hammered the economy. It ignored the reality of the positive aggregate indicators presented by a buoyant stock market, high levels of employment and rates of GDP growth. Instead Trump and his surrogates and campaigners focused people’s minds on the day-to-day hardship wrought by many years of high inflation, which had eroded household incomes and purchasing power.
A wild card feature of this election is the concerted support Trump enjoyed from billionaire Elon Musk, who provided a huge number of followers through his control of the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). This helped the Trump campaign amplify and reinforce his message and deliver it directly to millions of followers.
Elon Musk appeared at an election rally for Trump.
Steve Hanke, Johns Hopkins University
The professor of applied economics and former advisor to President Ronald Reagan told B-17 in an email: “The American voters have reacted negatively to the American elites who run the show in Washington, the media and so on and so forth. The election outcome was a revolt against the elites.”
Steve Hanke was an advisor to President Reagan.
Nate Cohn, chief political analyst at The New York Times
How Trump Won, Again
Trump gained across the board — including among the voters who seemed most skeptical of him eight years ago, from Hispanic voters in New York City to technology workers in San Francisco.
None of this is what Democrats would have imagined a decade ago, when many of them assumed that demographic and generational change would bring a new Democratic majority. Instead, many of the voters whom Democrats viewed as the bedrock of their coalition grew so frustrated with the status quo that they decided to back Mr. Trump instead.
Tina Fordham, independent strategist and advisor
Trump’s victory is the most powerful example this year of a political and economic environment that has been brutal for incumbents around the world and brought home the fact that inflation is political kryptonite.
This lesson will not soon be lost on governments — growth is not enough if prices are high and wages perceived to not keep pace. The dividing lines in US politics remain bright along geographical, educational, and gender lines, with Trump’s strongest support coming from working-class men. This result will leave many Americans not only angry, but fearful.
On a global level, there is no getting away from the fact that Trump’s victory will be transformational for both the US and the international system, with geopolitical and economic risks heightened.
Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight and author of the Silver Bulletin newsletter
Silver republished a lengthy blog post from late October with the new title “24 reasons that Trump won.”
Those reasons included inflation, negative perceptions of the economy and nostalgia for Trump’s first term, sluggish wage growth, a cultural shift to the right, disillusionment among male and minority voters, and Harris’ late nomination.
Among Silver’s other reasons were Trump’s skill at convincing voters he’s on their side and success in appealing to marginal voting groups; the Israel-Hamas war dividing the Democratic base; the assassination attempts on Trump boosting his favorability; and Harris’ failure to explain her shift from left wing to moderate or articulate a clear vision for America.
Nate Silver offered up 24 reasons why Trump won.
Matthew Yglesias, author of the Slow Boring newsletter
“I think ‘don’t nominate women’ would be the worst possible takeaway from this,” Yglesias wrote on X. “Lots of women overperform electorally, and since most Democrats are women if you become biased against nominating them you will cut the party off from talent. Learn from the ones who win!”
“Trump has made a lot of impossible and oft-contradictory promises and will have problems,” Yglesias said in another X post. He added in a follow-up: “One obvious one is that Trump managed to both reassure a healthy slice of people about abortion rights while also retaining the enthusiastic support of people who really want to ban abortion. Hard needle to thread!”
Dominic Sandbrook, historian, commentator and author
Sandbrook told the “Rest is Politics” podcast that Harris failed to win sufficient support from female, Latino, and Black voters and noted Trump’s history of outperforming polls “particularly in rural areas and the South and the suburbs.”
He argued that Harris and Hillary Clinton had similar weaknesses, with a proportion of the electorate unwilling to consider a female commander in chief.
He said many voters were also “suspicious” of a multiracial woman from California who he said “appears to be the embodiment of, for want of a better expression, the metropolitan liberal elite.”
Vice President Kamala Harris lost out to Trump.
Eric Cortellessa, national political correspondent at Time
How Trump Won
The Democrats’ hasty replacement of the first-term president with Harris deprived them of a better-tested candidate who could potentially have rallied broader support. Voters took Trump’s own advanced age and increasingly incoherent trail rhetoric in stride. Much of the country read Trump’s legal woes as part of a larger corrupt conspiracy to deny him, and them, power. And he benefited from a global restiveness in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that has ousted incumbent leaders around the world.
Whenever abortion came up, Trump insisted the issue was now up to the states, and pivoted as much as possible to the economy, immigration, and crime — issues the campaign believed triggered anxiety with well-to-do suburban women who were open to backing him.
Musk also turned X, his social-media platform, into a cauldron of conspiracy theories and characterized the stakes of the race to his more than 200 million followers as existential.
