Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
It’s now more than 48 hours after the election, the dust has settled, and the results are in except for a late counting in the state of Arizona–the outcome of which won’t affect the results of the election. Trump has won an undeniable victory, both in the electoral college and in the popular vote.
Political pundits, pollsters, and over-paid political strategists who seem to get it wrong repeatedly every election cycle are now concocting all manner of explanations and mightily spinning their excuses. Some say Harris lost because the Democrats’ ‘ground game’—i.e. get out the vote efforts—failed; or that the $1 billion in campaign contributions she received during the summer was ill spent; or her TV ads were poorly focused; or her ‘politics of joy’ theme grated on the mood of voters who were anything but happy. But all these tactical explanations of the Democrats’ devastating defeat—which was across the board and not just for Harris—are obviously irrelevant.
The pundits and political strategists who forecasted the election wrong are now failing to understand its results as well. Here are the more important takeaways from the election:
A Popular Vote Anomaly?
The electoral college result thus far, with Arizona’s 11 votes pending, is 301 for Trump and 226 for Harris (270 needed to win). Trump also won the popular vote with 73.4 million vs. 69.1 million for Harris—as of the popular vote count late November 8.
Perhaps the most glaring indicator of what went wrong for Harris, however, is the big shift in the popular vote away from Democrats in 2024. In 2020 the Democrats polled 81 million votes in the presidential race. In 2024 so far only 69.1 million. That’s 12 million fewer votes for Democrats! How to explain that fact?
Did all the 12 million cross over to Trump? Apparently not. Trump’s 2024 popular vote was not that much different from 2020. He received 74 million in 2020 and in 2024 so far about 73.4 million.
These contrasting numbers raise two interesting questions:
Where did Harris’s missing 12 million popular votes go, if not to Trump? The corollary question also arises: did Biden and the Democrats really receive 81 million votes in 2020?
Whichever the explanation, the mainstream legacy media (CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, WAPO, etc) are conspicuously avoiding any analysis of this missing 12 million or the apparent vote count anomaly.
But one thing is irrefutable in the official vote tally: roughly 13 million fewer turned out to vote for either candidate in 2024 and 12 million were Democrat voters. The only logical conclusion therefore is that 12 million Demorcrat voters apparently stayed home and did not vote. So why?
Whatever the popular vote, it is irrelevant for US presidential elections. Only the archaic electoral college vote matters. Why the USA keeps that institution when it allows ‘one person one vote’ for all other voting for members of Congress is interesting. Two-thirds of voters have indicated in multiple surveys recently that they want a direct vote for the president and an end to the Electoral College. Why both parties continue with the system says much. Nevertheless it’s a question—like a Florida 2000 election ballot ‘chad’—that will be left hanging for now.
Electoral College Vote Repeat
Trump’s 301 (eventual 312) electoral college votes confirms this writer’s prediction this past summer that the swing states would flip back to 2016 numbers and Trump. 2024 would be a 2016 swing states déjà vu election.
In the 2020 election, Biden’s electoral college vote was 306 to Trump’s 232. In 2016 Trump won 304 electoral college votes to Hillary Clinton’s 227. The winning margins of 304 (2016), then 306 (2020), now 301 (312) in 2024 is not merely coincidental.
The largely similar electoral college counts in 2016, 2020, and 2024 suggests strongly that deeper forces in the US political system created a shift beginning 2016 and have continued ever since.
Trump’s election in 2016 was therefore not the aberration as many Democrats and mainstream media argued in 2020; Biden’s in 2020 was.
Events of the past decade suggests the fallout from the economic crash and crisis of 2008-10 is still having its longer term political impact. Voters’ overwhelming concern with economic issues in 2024 reveal it is still reverberating. In 2024 it was manifested in inflation. In 2020 it was massive Covid job loss. Since 2008 it’s been the steady decline in real income and living standards for tens of millions of American households—amidst the accelerating income and wealth for the 1% or 5% households largely attributable to accelerating financial asset markets and values. As one famous pundit said more than three decades ago: “It’s the economy, stupid!”
One might clarify that: “it’s the lopsided economy, stupid!” Economic conditions have deteriorated much further since the 1990s when that statement was made, especially after the 2008-10 crash and crisis followed by the Covid induced crash. Some political elites apparently never learned the economic lesson.
Throughout this past summer this writer has been predicting Trump would win the electoral college vote by slightly more than 300—by 302 to 236 to be exact. This forecast was based on the assumption he would win all the seven swing states, except for Michigan. In retrospect he has won the latter state as well. (see my piece “November 2024: A Swing States Déjà vu Election?” at the LA Progressive website last week).
Inflation and other economic conditions during the Biden years were firmly established by opinion polls since the start of 2024 as the primary concerns of voters, thereafter strongly confirmed again in the September Gallup poll.
Put in a long term perspective, Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and her loss of the ‘blue wall’ states in the north can be largely attributed to the weak GDP economic recovery after 2010 and the even weaker related job recovery during the Obama years. GDP grew around only 60% of normal after 2010 when compared to the prior nine US recessions since 1948. More importantly, jobs lost after 2007 due to the 2008-09 crash did not recover to 2007 levels until 2015. It took six years just to get back to pre-recession job levels. Add to this Hillary Clinton’s well known approval of free trade treaties and its offshoring of jobs effect—as well as her strategic error of not even bothering to campaign in the blue wall states—and the result was a predictable 2016 Trump sweep of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and victory. It was still ‘the economy, stupid’.
In 2020 Biden also largely won for economic reasons—specifically the severe recession and job losses of 2020 due to the Covid pandemic economy partial shutdown. Biden swept back the blue wall states and won handily—almost exactly with the same electoral college votes that Trump had won with four years earlier! That stupid old economy had not gone away.
In 2024, the Covid induced mass layoffs in 2020 no longer prevailed but were replaced by another Covid induced economic consequence: inflation which erupted in fall of 2021. Prices for goods started abating by 2023 but inflation in the much more ubiquitous services sector of the US economy remained chronically high throughout 2023 and into early 2024.
Official government statistics estimate the price level rose 24% over the four Biden years but real inflation adjusted take home pay for tens of millions of households was impacted more severely than the statistics or politicians and media suggested during the recent election.
Actual inflation impact on family budgets was more like 30%-35%, especially after considering the sharp rise in interest rates starting March-June 2023 and rise in taxes, neither of which are included in calculations of the government’s price statistics. Households also pay for interest out of their take home pay and family disposable income. Mortgage rates rose 114% under Biden. Credit card average rates rose from 16% to 23% and households carried over record level of that debt monthly. New student loan rates rose from 4% to around 7%. And new auto loans from4% to 9%. And that’s not considering local taxes and fee hikes. Or problems with the methodologies and assumptions in government price calculations that tend to under-estimate actual inflation.
Households and voters knew what the real picture of affordability was the past four years—even if politicians, media, and mainstream economists did not!
This background of the voting outcomes since 2016 and longer term economic causes raises the more immediate question ‘why Harris’ lost in 2024. It certainly wasn’t due to irrelevant tactical explanations as the media and pundits now argue. And while jobs and inflation were the critical, even key, longer term causes determining election outcomes, in themselves they still don’t explain it all.
There were strategic failures for Harris’s defeat’; nor indeed defeat for the Democrat party in general since its losses in November were across the board in both houses of Congress, governorships, and other local elections. In addition, Trump’s strategy targeting disaffected you males, mostly working class and across racial lines, proved effective in turn.
Why Harris & Democrats Lost
Failure to Differentiate from Biden…
High on the list of why Harris lost must be her failure to differentiate her proposals from those of Biden, especially on economic issues. When directly asked in an interview during the campaign what she would change from Biden’s policies she replied: “nothing”. That was perhaps the turning point of sorts in the campaign. Voters weren’t looking for ‘nothing new’. They wanted economic change that directly affected their declining real take home pay that had been slashed by 30%-35% inflation since 2020.
Harris this past week experienced what might be called the ‘Hubert Humphrey’ effect. In 1968, Democrat Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for re-election. His policy for escalating the war in Vietnam, combined with the inflation of the late 1960s, meant it likely would not win. His VP was Humphrey who became the Democrat party presidential candidate that year. But Humphrey would not break with Johnson’s war policy nor did he offer any answer to the rising inflation of the mid 1960s. War and inflation doomed his campaign in 1968, which he lost convincingly to Richard Nixon. Similarly, Harris’s refusal to break from Biden war policies in 2024 or to offer any answer how she’d lower prices for households played a big role in her defeat. Both she and Humphrey were convincingly defeated.
The Hubert Humphrey Effect should consequently be renamed the Humphrey-Harris Effect.
US voters wanted to hear specifics on how the candidates proposed to reverse the decline in their living standards. Harris gave them mostly platitudes. The Democrat party leaders may have removed Biden as their candidate over the summer, replacing him with Harris, but they left his policies intact. Voters understood they were still voting for Biden. Especially Democrat voters as 12 million of them stayed home.
Some traditional Democrat constituencies jumped ship. Election data already show that many more black male voters voted Trump than in prior elections. So too did Hispanic voters in key swing states like Pennsylvania. Even Puerto Rican voters—who the mainstream media hyped would turn on Trump because of some comic at one of his rallies made disparaging remarks about Puerto Ricans—voted Trump in key constituencies. And there were the white suburban women who the Democrats bet would vote Democrat based on the reproductive and women’s rights issues. In key swing states like Pennsylvania it appears they too voted by narrow margins for Trump.
Identity Politics Themes No Longer Resonate….
What all this may mean is economic issues and questions of class trumped identity issues of gender, sexual orientation, and race on which Democrats had based their campaigns in recent years had become of secondary at best importance to voters. Legitimate polls like Gallup were shouting this message all year and especially in latter months of the campaign. Democrat leaders were deaf, however. They apparently believed just changing the face of their candidate and throwing billions of dollars into the race this past summer would ensure re-election. It was another big strategic error.
If Harris failed to differentiate herself from Biden, then the Democrat party leadership kept her largely campaigning on issues of identity—gender, race, and sexual orientation.
January 2021 Is Not the Issue…
A third related strategy failure was the Democrat elevation of the January 6, 2021 events and Trump’s often out of context rally statements as a key issue. It wasn’t. It ranked well down the list in almost all voter opinion polls. Just as in 2016 allegations that the Russians were interfering in the election and had Trump in their pocket had little influence on voters choices. In 2024 did voters didn’t believe the charge that Trump was the destroyer of American democracy incarnate, a felon, or closet fascist—or just didn’t care even if true—any more than they believed in 2015 Trump was the puppet of Putin.
Both the Democrats pushing of identity issues and the personality attacks on Trump as either foreign agent or a felonious fascist gained much traction. The economy was paramount in both 2016 and 2024, as it was in 2020. But Harris and the Democrats just couldn’t let go of the old saws and themes that no longer worked, and get focused on the economy.
Emerging Electorate & Party Realignment…
Another strategic reason why Harris and Democrats lost has to do with the shift in constituencies in the past decade. It’s now clear that Trump has been able to start building a base in the working class, especially among young male voters. This is now being called the ‘Bros Vote’. But it’s mostly young, non-college, males who have been among the most disaffected segments of the voting population in recent decades. They are young millennials and GenZers who have experienced the most negative effects of low wages, housing unaffordability, low paying jobs at which they must work two and sometimes three to get by, and other related issues. Democrats appear to have abandoned them, as the party has drifted steadily away from the traditional working class since the 1990s and toward suburban women, LGBTQ voter constituencies, professionals, and college graduates. This is a cultural thing that sometimes gets expressed in elites’ slips of the tongue—like Hillary’s calling them ‘deplorables’ in 2016 and Biden recently referring to them as Trump’s ‘garbage’.
Not all of Harris’s lost is attributable to her failures or Democrat party leaders failures. Some of the loss is explainable by Trump’s own personal appeal, his policy initiatives during the campaign, and his political strategy in general.
Trump Talks & Appears Like They Do…
Part of Trump’s appeal is evident when he speaks. He’s crude, sometimes incoherent, makes off the wall statements, insults people he doesn’t like, embarrasses himself. In other words, he often sounds like them in their own every day conversations. It makes him appear authentic to them. Democrats and their intellectual, educated supporters are often shocked by this behavior. They find it abhorrent. They are turned off by the crude working class ‘banter’ that is part of normal communication for this constituency. But they live in a different cultural world than the Bros constituency as well as the working class black and Hispanics.
The difference could be viewed in Harris rally speeches and even her final concession. It was all too perfect. Not a missed phrase. Straight from the teleprompter. As if she’s reading her comments, which of course she was. Too many platitudes, canned metaphors, and planned anecdotes. In other words, not natural or authentic.
Trump’s Working Class Policy Proposals…
Overlaid on this class cultural divide is the fact that Trump appealed to working class voters with policy measures that should have been Democrat, and often were in decades past but no more. Trump proposed no taxes on tip income, which Harris quickly copied; he proposed no tax on overtime pay and to remove taxing of social security benefits—which Harris conspicuously did not copy. Trump’s proposal for child care credits were more generous than Harris’s. And his proposals on tariffs as way to force corporations to relocate jobs back to the US seemed more convincing than Harris’s which was ‘no different’ than Biden’s which was to shower grants of tens of billions on companies to bribe them to ‘onshore’ back to the US. Even Trump’s immigration proposals were often stated as job creating, even if somewhat questionable in that effect.
In short, Trump at least verbally turned toward working class voters in the election, while Harris and Democrats seemed to further champion suburban women, identity issues, and push the worn out hackneyed line ‘Trump is a Russian pawn and closet fascist who’ll destroy democracy, the country and civilization itself’.
Widening Generational Divide…
But for the tens of millions of new younger voters who came of voting age a decade ago, the Democrats’ leading election themes tying Trump to Russians and autocratic behavior are dead. Perhaps not dead but dying as well are the various themes associated with identity politics. Identity issues will not go away but they will no longer be predominant. The focus on identity does not resonate with the Bros swing vote and has even become antagonistic. Nor do they elicit the same tacit approval within the Hispanic and Black voting constituencies in a period when the economic stress for tens of millions of working class households is approaching a breaking point after decades. A quarter century later it’s still ‘the economy, stupid!’. In fact, more so than ever before.
Some Likely Consequences
It’s somewhat early to define what Trump will now do as president in a second term. But there are outlines from the campaign and his own issues focus in his statement.
Most likely the initial actions will be associated with what he can do without Congressional legislation by means of his own Executive Orders.
At the top of his initial list will be EOs related to illegal immigrants’ deportations and rebuilding his border wall. EOs related to alternative energy matters and the environment will also take an early hit. Oil drilling permits are included in the latter action list.
Deregulation in general will also appear early. Elon Musk will make recommendations cutting government regulations to save spending and Trump will act more or less perfunctorily on Musk’s recommendations. Much of that can be done via EOs as well.
A third area is tariffs. Trump’s promise to raise tariffs 10%-60% (latter on China imports) will come quickly. It’s not coincidental among his first appointments already is Robert Lighthizer as Trade commission.
Trump believes that an increase in government revenue from raising tariffs and a big cut to social programs spending and deregulation will result in a major offset to US budget deficits, which rose last year to $1.8 trillion and is currently running at a $2 trillion estimate for 2025. Tariff revenues, deregulation and even general Austerity social spending program cuts (coming in the spring by Congress) will not even come close to cutting the deficit by a $1 trillion!
Trump believes the fiction that cutting business taxes further in 2025 will result in stimulating economic growth and thus tax revenues. He believed that when he cut taxes in 2018 by $4.5 trillion. It didn’t have the effect on economic growth then. Continuing his 2018 tax cuts (estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to cost the government $5 trillion over the next decade) and even adding to more cuts in 2025 will not even come close to resolving the fiscal crisis and economic train wreck that’s around the corner in 2025 and after. But tax cutting will again be his and his Republican Congress’s priority in 2025 nevertheless. That too will come this spring.
Voters who put their hopes in a fundamental change in direction for the country voting for Trump and Republicans may be therefore disappointed. Not that that’s anything new. The economy will therefore continue as the number one issue of voters come the 2028 election.
