2 weeks ago

The best writing we're finding around the web on why Trump won, why Harris lost, and what it all means

Commentators and academics have been weighing in on why Donald Trump won the US election.
Explanations include his stances on immigration and the economy and a global trend against incumbents.
Here are some of the sharpest analyses we've seen about Trump's victory.

There's been an avalanche of analysis following Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election on Wednesday, 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.

Steve Hanke, Johns Hopkins University

The professor of applied economics and former advisor to President Ronald Reagan told Business Insider 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."

Nate Cohn, chief political analyst at The New York Times

"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 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.

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."

Eric Corellessa, national political correspondent at Time

"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."

Gerard Baker, The Times of London

"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

"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

"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."