How in God’s name did the Democrats lose yet another election to Donald Trump, after defeating him somewhat comfortably four years ago?
If you go carefully through the exit polls and compare them to 2020, you actually see a fair amount of stability. Even a little modest improvement in some places. In 2020, Trump won the white vote 58–41 percent. On Tuesday, he won it by less, 55–43. Among white women, Kamala Harris did a bit better than Joe Biden: Trump won white women 55–44 over Biden and 52–47 over Harris. The result among white men wasn’t statistically different: Trump won them 61–38 over Biden and 59–39 over Harris. For all the talk of defections among Black men, the exit polls say otherwise. Biden won them 79–19, and Harris carried them 78–20. She also won among independents, although by a few points less than Biden did.
Only one group of voters really stands out. Biden had won Latinos 65–32. Harris won them by only 53–45. And the biggest change of all is among Latino men: Biden won them 59–36, and this time, Trump beat Harris outright, 54–44.
At the same time, the breadth of the Trump—and Republican—win doesn’t seem like it can be pinned solely on that. He won the popular vote by five million. He won every swing state that’s been called so far—not by huge margins, but also not by the razor-thin margins that characterized 2016 and 2020. He came closer in blue states—New Jersey, Illinois—than anyone in many years, going back probably to the previous century. And so far, all those MAGA senators have swept their Democratic opponents.
This is probably explained by the fact that the Trump vote, again, was underestimated by the polls—by around 3 percent, John Heilemann said Wednesday on Morning Joe. This was a huge debate during this campaign. I was among those who thought the pollsters, who had made that mistake in 2016 and 2020, were overcompensating this time around and undercounting Harris voters. I thought Harris would narrowly win white women, and win women overall by more than 15 points. I was wrong. (Her margin among women was just 10 points.)
So it wasn’t all Latino men, by any means, but in the exit polls, their vote is the only eye-popping shift. The “floating island of garbage” didn’t matter. May have helped, who knows. There’s no breakdown yet that I’ve seen of different Latino groups, but Trump’s Puerto Rican support apparently did not crater. He outright won heavily Latino counties in New Jersey, for example, that Democrats usually win on autopilot.
So the question is why. Cataclysmic as this result is, and what it’s going to lead to in this country over the next four years, I think people may have a tendency to get too hysterical in answering this question.
For example, Harris didn’t suck as a candidate. In fact, she ran a good campaign overall. I thought “We’re not going back” was powerful, and her optimistic tone made a good contrast to Trump’s darkness. She was overly cautious on some things. Israel apparently hurt her in Dearborn, but there was no widespread left-wing revolt against her. Jill Stein got a paltry 611,760 votes, versus 1,449,370 in 2016. Cornel West didn’t even register in the Associated Press tally I checked Wednesday morning. Likewise, few centrists ran away from her. Except for Latino men, and to a lesser extent Latina women, she held the Democratic Party together. Polls kept telling us that Democratic enthusiasm was through the roof.
I think she made two specific late mistakes—one was something she did, and the other was something she didn’t do.
The mistake she made was saying on The View on October 8 that she couldn’t think of anything she’d have done differently than Biden. Various exit poll results tell us that in a sense, she was seen as the incumbent, and she paid an obviously steep price for Biden’s 40 percent approval rating. That became a Trump commercial.
And maybe this was all that simple. As numerous people have now pointed out, every incumbent party in a developed country that had to deal with Covid and inflation, whether a party of the left or the right, has now been voted out.
But it also isn’t that simple. The thing Harris didn’t do: I kept wishing that I would see an ad by one of the prominent Black or Latino men who endorsed her that didn’t focus on praising Harris or even denouncing Trump in the normal, he’s-a-threat-to-democracy way. I wanted to see, say, LeBron James talking directly to young men of color about why Trump was not a tough guy at all; why he was a weakling and a bully, and explaining that a real man doesn’t lie or make excuses or disrespect women. Who knows, that kind of thing could have made a difference.
But millions of men bought Trump’s idea of masculinity. How much outright sexism and racism drove the vote? We’ll never know. But enough. This is another mistake I and probably a lot of people on the broad left made. Sexism and racism (the former undoubtedly more of a factor here than the latter) will never disappear, but there seemed reason to think that by 2024, they’d be minor factors. They may well have barred the door.
I might add a third mistake: not going on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Another exit poll result that surprised me was that late deciders were evenly split—completely not what preelection polls were suggesting. I wonder if the pro-Trump late deciders were influenced by Rogan’s endorsement of him.
And nothing Trump did mattered. None of the lies, the hate, the microphone oral sex, the musing about Liz Cheney facing bullets. Nothing. As Alex Shephard argued here, Democrats have spent nearly a decade trying to convince swing voters that Trump was a unique threat to the republic, and they’ve failed.
Now, we will live with that failure, and with a fully unleashed Trump, and his idea of masculinity, for the next four years. I fear for the people he’s going to round up (and we should definitely take him at his word on that); for transgender people; for Palestinians, for whom it can get worse; for Ukrainians, for whom it can get far worse; for a lot of people who’ll be on the receiving end of his brutish policies. And we’ll see, in a year or two, how different a country the United States is going to be.
