Why Did Trump Win? These Dems Have
Discovered a Very Disturbing Answer
Are you sitting down? Turns out it
proved very hard to persuade swing voters that Trump was a bad president.
Chip
Somodevilla/Getty Images
There
are 1,000 convoluted theories floating around on social media that purport to
explain why Donald Trump won the presidential race. But some Democrats and
people on Kamala Harris’s campaign have concluded that one very significant
reason is a straightforward one: It proved disturbingly difficult to persuade
undecided voters that Trump had been a bad president.
Internal
testing in all the battleground states over the course of many months yielded a
result that unnerved the campaign, according to a senior Harris campaign
operative who has seen the data. It was this: Undecided voters didn’t believe
that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s
presidency—even if they saw these things negatively—were his fault.
This
was the case on two of the biggest issues in the campaign—the 2020 economic
crash and demise of reproductive rights, the operative told me. The result: The
good pre-Covid economy during the Trump years largely defined undecided voters’
impressions of him, and no message about his first term could persuade them to
the contrary.
To
be clear, this assessment does not mean voters are to blame. Rather, one
culprit here might be President Biden. Because he stayed in the race too long,
undecided voters viewed the post-Covid status quo and the very real pain of
inflation only through the prism of their dislike of Biden, which blotted out
hopes of attuning them to arguments about Trump’s culpability in all of it, the
operative said.
Some Democrats believe that the leading
pro-Harris Super PAC, Future Forward, failed to spend enough of its enormous
budget on advertising early on that might have reminded voters of the horrors
of the Trump presidency. That perhaps allowed him to slowly rehabilitate himself
and edge up his favorable numbers while Democrats weren’t looking.
“There
was a calculation among Democrats after 2020 that Trump was disqualified and
wouldn’t be back,” Democratic data analyst Tom Bonier told me. “That evolved
into a calculation that he would be disqualified by his legal troubles and
could end up in jail. Democrats undeniably failed to disqualify him. The result
was that by the time the Harris campaign started, it was too late.”
Trump
did this in part by shrugging off specific national cataclysms that voters
disliked and were undeniably a direct result of his presidency, and
Harris campaign internal data illustrated how successfully he did this, the
campaign operative notes.
For
instance, the campaign regularly tested messages—with undecided and only softly
committed voters in the battleground states—about the country’s massive hemorrhaging of jobs during
2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The disaster was made far worse than it had
to be by Trump’s pathological refusal to take it seriously.
But
these swing voters did not hold Trump responsible for the job losses. “People
gave him a total pass because of Covid,” the operative says.
“There
was frustration inside the campaign that voters turned the massive job losses
into a non-issue,” added a second Democratic operative privy to internal
data. The same thing happened with undecided voters’ views of
Trump’s efforts as president to cut Social
Security programs: Voters didn’t believe he had done that, making it harder to
make the case that he’d do so again.
And
even on abortion, in all this testing, voters didn’t hold Trump responsible for
appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade,
something Trump openly boasted about
during the campaign.
That’s
because they didn’t believe Trump himself was sincerely anti-choice. “They
didn’t find him personally responsible for the fall of Roe,” the
first operative said, adding that these voters thought “he’s ambivalent” about
abortion, perversely enough, because many didn’t think he had “core
principles.” Perhaps partly as a result, a sizable subset of voters who supported robust
abortion rights voted for Trump.
The
result of all this was that these voters associated Trump’s first term with the
economy before Covid, which they understandably remembered as a time of lower
prices, and nothing else. “We needed to make the case that Trump was a failed
president,” the Harris operative told me. “But by the time we got to Biden
getting out and Harris being the nominee, that cake was too baked.”
None
of this means there weren’t other big reasons for the outcome or other failures
by Democrats. The loss was broad, as The Atlantic’s Ron
Brownstein explains: The whole
electorate shifted toward Trump in all types of counties; Harris maintained
Democratic strength in affluent, educated suburbs but slipped a bit even there
relative to Biden; she didn’t put up good enough numbers with women; and
Trump gained among Latinos and non-college educated whites.
Much
of this, as Brownstein notes, was driven by deep unhappiness with the status
quo among these groups. While reproductive rights and the threat posed by Trump
both weighed on voters’ choices, it wasn’t enough to offset that deep
dissatisfaction.
A
lot of factors contributed to this, undoubtedly. Incumbent parties across the
world have been falling like dominoes, in
part due to the deep trauma many societies experienced in the aftermath of
Covid, which was then exacerbated by inflation everywhere. As Zach Carter writes at Slate, Trump’s
“raw anger” resonated with this dissatisfaction, even as Democrats failed to
sufficiently harness voter emotions for their own ends.
Indeed,
one might add that Trump’s vicious attacks on democracy and his authoritarian
threats might have simply coded him to some swing voters as an outsider and
disrupter of the status quo once again—despite having been president once
already—just as he came across in 2016. Only this time, this posture exploited
a level of dissatisfaction with a more hated status quo than anything voters
saw in Obama’s comparatively placid and successful second term.
But
surely a key part of this is that Trump was permitted to rehabilitate himself
and his presidency relatively unchallenged, after running the economy into the
ground and presiding over countless needless Covid deaths,
then inciting a violent coup and facing an array of serious criminal charges.
Trump and his media allies launched years of propaganda designed to erase 2020
from voters’ memories entirely while hammering Biden’s recovery as a
catastrophe despite it actually proving a largely successful one,
which Trump will now undoubtedly take credit for as president.
All
throughout, this effort from Trumpworld met little resistance from Democrats
and woefully inadequate scrutiny by the news media. That the unpopular Biden
remained in the race so long—keeping voters focused on him as the target of
blame for inflation and the awful post-Covid hangover—may have further enabled
Trump to shake off association with those national wounds, slowly rewrite the
story of his presidency and burnish retrospective approval of it.
“One
of the peculiar things of this campaign cycle was the fact that Biden got the
blame for Covid,” GOP strategist Mike Madrid, a critic of Trump, told me. “He
had to deal with the residual mess of it: the economic crash, the inflationary
pressures, the societal pressures. People don’t even remember that as a Trump
phenomenon.”
All
this amounts to a truly shocking failure that deserves its own reckoning, one
that Democrats must learn from and never allow to happen again.
