A Good Country’s Bad Choice
And what I got wrong about the 2024
election
By David
Frum
November 22, 2024, 7
AM ET
Once she became the nominee, I expected Vice President
Kamala Harris to win the 2024 presidential election.
More exactly, I expected ex-President Donald Trump to lose.
What did I get wrong?
My expectation was based on three observations and one
belief.
Observation one: Inflation was coming under control in
2024. Personal incomes rose faster than prices over the year. As
interest rates peaked and began to subside, consumer confidence climbed.
When asked about their personal finances, Americans expressed qualms, yes, but
the number who rated their personal finances as excellent or good was a
solid 46 percent, higher than in the year President
Barack Obama won reelection. The same voters who complained about the national
economy rated their local economy much more
favorably.
None of this was great news for the incumbent party, and
yet …
Observation two: All through the 2024 cycle, a majority of
Americans expressed an unfavorable opinion of Trump.
Almost one-third of Republicans were either
unenthusiastic about his candidacy or outright hostile. Harris was not hugely
popular, either. But if the polls were correct, she was just sufficiently less unpopular than Trump.
Arguably undergirding Harris’s popularity advantage was …
Observation three: In the 2022 midterm elections, abortion
proved a powerful anti-Republican voting issue. That year in Michigan, a
campaign based on abortion rights helped reelect Governor Gretchen Whitmer
and flipped both chambers of the state legislature to the Democrats. That same
year, almost a million Kansans voted 59 percent to 41 percent to reaffirm
state-constitutional protections for abortion. Democrats posted strong results
in many other states as well. They recovered a majority in the U.S. Senate,
while Republicans won only the narrowest majority in the House of
Representatives. In 2024, abortion-rights measures appeared on the ballot in 10
states, including must-win Arizona and Nevada. These initiatives seemed likely
to energize many Americans who would likely also cast an anti-Trump vote
for president.
If that was not enough—and maybe it was not—I held onto
this belief:
Human beings are good at seeing through frauds. Not
perfectly good at it. Not always as fast as might be. And not everybody. But a
just-sufficient number of us, sooner or later, spot the con.
The Trump campaign was trafficking in frauds. Haitians
are eating cats and dogs. Foreigners will pay for the tariffs. The
Trump years were the good old days if you just forget about the coronavirus
pandemic and the crime wave that happened on his watch. The lying
might work up to a point. I believed that the point would be found just on the
right side of the line between election and defeat—and not, as happened
instead, on the other side.
My mistake.
Read: Donald Trump’s most dangerous cabinet pick
In one of the closest elections in modern American history,
Trump eked out the first Republican popular-vote victory in 20 years. His
margin was about a third the size of President Joe Biden’s margin over him in
2020. For that matter, on the votes counted, Trump’s popular-vote margin over
Harris was smaller than Hillary Clinton’s over him in 2016.
Yet narrow as it is, a win it is—and a much different win
from 2016. That time, Trump won by the rules, but against the expressed
preference of the American people. This time, he won both by the rules and with
a plurality of the votes. Trump’s popular win challenges many beliefs and
preconceptions, starting with my own.
Through the first Trump administration, critics like me
could reassure ourselves that his presidency was some kind of aberration. The
repudiation of Trump’s party in the elections of 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022
appeared to confirm this comforting assessment. The 2024 outcome upends it.
Trump is no detour or deviation, no glitch or goof.
When future generations of Americans tell the story of the
nation, they will have to fit Trump into the main line of the story. And that
means the story itself must be rethought.
Trump diverted millions of public dollars to his own
businesses, and was returned to office anyway.
He was proved in court to have committed sexual assault,
and was returned to office anyway.
He was twice impeached, and was returned to office anyway.
He was convicted of felonies, and was returned to office
anyway.
He tried to overthrow an election, and was returned to
office anyway.
For millions of Americans, this record was disqualifying.
For slightly more Americans, however, it was not. The latter group prevailed,
and the United States will be a different country because of them.
American politics has never lacked for scoundrels, cheats,
and outright criminals. But their numbers have been thinned, and their misdeeds
policed, by strong public institutions. Trump waged a relentless campaign
against any and all rules that restrained him. He did not always prevail, but
he did score three all-important successes. First, he frightened the Biden
administration’s Justice Department away from holding him to account in courts
of law in any timely way. Second, he persuaded the courts themselves—including,
ultimately, the Supreme Court—to invent new doctrines of presidential immunity
to shield him. Third, he broke all internal resistance within the Republican
Party to his lawless actions. Republican officeholders, donors, and influencers
who had once decried the January 6 attempted coup as utterly and permanently
debarring—one by one, Trump brought them to heel.
Americans who cherished constitutional democracy were left
to rely on the outcome of the 2024 election to protect their institutions
against Trump. It was not enough. Elections are always about many different
issues—first and foremost usually, economic well-being. In comparison, the
health of U.S. democracy will always seem remote and abstract to most voters.
Early in the American Revolution, a young Alexander
Hamilton wrote to his friend John Jay to condemn an act of vigilante violence
against the publisher of a pro-British newspaper. Hamilton sympathized with the
feelings of the vigilantes, but even in revolutionary times, he insisted,
feelings must be guided by rules. Otherwise, people are left to their own
impulses, a formula for trouble. “It is not safe,” Hamilton warned, “to trust to the virtue of any people.”
The outcome of an election must be respected, but its
wisdom can be questioned. If any divine entity orders human affairs, it may be
that Providence sent Trump to the United States to teach Americans
humility. It Can’t Happen Here is the title of a famous
1930s novel about an imagined future in which the
United States follows the path to authoritarianism. Because it didn’t happen
then, many Americans have taken for granted that it could not happen now.
Perhaps Americans require, every once in a while, to be
jolted out of the complacency learned from their mostly fortunate history. The
nation that ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 was, in important ways,
the same one that enacted the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850; the nation that
generously sent Marshall Plan aid after the Second World War was compensating
for the myopic selfishness of the Neutrality Acts before the war. Americans can
take pride in their national story because they have chosen rightly more often
than they have chosen wrongly—but the wrong choices are part of the story too,
and the wrong choice has been made again now.
“There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no
such thing as a Gained Cause,” T. S. Eliot observed in a 1927 essay (here he was
writing about the arguments between philosophical Utilitarians and their
critics, but his words apply so much more generally). “We fight for lost causes
because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our
successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight
rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will
triumph.”
So the ancient struggle resumes again: progress against
reaction, dignity against domination, commerce against predation, stewardship
against spoliation, global responsibility against national chauvinism. No
quitting.
