Tuesday’s results suggest he underperformed in 2024.
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Even many of Trump’s harshest critics will argue that he has some sort of
special charismatic hold on the American people. They will say he is funny, or
that his career on reality television has made him good in front of the camera,
or that people find his coarseness and cruelty on the stump effective. They
will point to the fact that he did better in 2016, 2020, and 2024 than the GOP
has done without him on the ballot, and argue that he brings something special
when his name appears before voters. (Trump has made this claim himself.)
A large part of the
Trump myth over the last year has centered on the 2024 election, which Trump
won narrowly by about a point and a half. Pundits, however, argued that this
bare victoy was something more—a massive political realignment based on Trump’s
personal oomph. Trump, we were told, had had unprecedented success with the
core Democratic constituencies such as the working class, the young, and (most
shockingly given Trump’s racism) with non-white voters. Trump’s violent fascist
populism seemed to appeal to those who should hate it most. Meanwhile,
Democrats had become the party of out of touch gerontocratic elitists.
Tuesday proved all of this to be nonsense. As election analyst G. Elliott
Morris explains at some length, every single demographic
group on Tuesday shifted left. More, the traditional Demoratic groups that
Trump was supposed to have realigned shifted the most left. The young, the non-white and the working class moved towards
Trump by 12 points in 2024, Morris says. But they moved back
towards Democrats on Tuesday by 25 points.
There was no ideological
realignment; Trump did not have a unique appeal to core Democratic
constituencies. Instead, the most boring analysis looks like the right one;
Trump won for the same reason out parties beat incumbents across the globe,
which is to say Republicans did well in 2024 because people were angry about
inflation and lingering Covid economic dislocations. Trump has (to say the
least) failed to bring down prices or stabilize the economy, and now all those
voters who were disenchanted with Biden are doubly disenchanted with him.
More, it seems likely that any Republican could have won in 2024, and
that a more moderate and less indicted Republican might have done a good bit
better. Kamela Harris and the Democrats outperformed most incumbent parties in
2024, and Harris kept swing states closer than states in which the
parties did not compete. That suggests that where people heard her message and
Trump’s message most loudly, they moved towards her and away from him.
This isn’t to say that
Trump has no political strengths. His decades of branding as a successful
businessman and fun reality television character allowed him to spout extremist
rhetoric for the Republican base while still being perceived as relatively moderate
by many less engaged voters. His connections with Putin and with tabloid
billionaires allowed him to run a somewhat functional campaign based on dirty
tricks and bullying, making up to some extent for his utter lack of discipline
on the campaign trail and his shoddy campaign infrastructure. These assets were
critical in allowing him to seize control of the GOP in 2016; they have helped
him to continue to control it for a decade.
But do these same assets actually make him an especially competent
general election candidate? After all, if Trump did worse than a generic
Republican in 2024, it’s reasonable to question whether he has ever don’t better than a generic Republican. Hillary Clinton has long
been a quite unpopular politician, and it’s always difficult for a party to win
a third term—it seems likely that the 2016 election was only as close as it was
because Trump was a very unpopular and flawed candidate. Similarly, in 2020, a
moderately competent president could quite possibly have parleyed Covid into a
rally-round-the-flag event and swept to a solid victory, instead of polarizing
the country and letting victory slip away.
You can’t rerun
elections; there’s no way to know for sure if Marco Rubio might have done
better in 2016, or if Nikki Haley could have led Republicans 60-40 Senate last
year. What we do know, though, is that Trump is, and has always been very
unpopular. We know that he has not succeeded in some amazing political
realignment; we have every reason to believe that his victory in 2024 was
almost, or just, entirely due to factors beyond his control, and that to the
extent he personally factored into the election, he hurt his party rather than
helped it.
It is shameful that
Americans elected this racist, fascist, nincompoop to the presidency twice. But
we do not have to compound the error by convincing ourselves that he has some
sort of unique, authentic rapport with Americanism, or by insisting that he is
a savant when we can all see that he’s a doddering racist grandpa who doesn’t
know how tariffs work. It’s time to stop treating him like he’s some sort of
genius who Understands Things and start working to destroy his movement and
everything—and I do mean everything— it stands for.
