On election night, November 2024 – the night that will bring Trump back to power with a thumping victory, confounding critics, commentators and pollsters – I will find my memory dragging me back to an evening I spent in an airport bar in Georgia. It is exactly a year earlier and we have struck up a conversation with a bunch of local lads – all late teens or mid twenties.
They have been to college – two in Atlanta, one in neighbouring South Carolina. They have decent jobs; one is training to be a pilot. They are digital natives, born after the advent of the iPhone. They share TikTok videos as we chat. And they are broadly politically unengaged. They cannot name the contenders for the Republican ticket.
But they can each tell me why they would vote for Donald Trump. At the time their words lap over me. ‘He is a man of strength,’ they say. A man they would fight for. ‘Look at Joe Biden,’ one tells me. ‘You’re not going to war for a guy like that.’ We laugh. Swap numbers. And go our separate ways as our flights are called. But I see now why they have become lodged in my head. Because they told me – there and then – the story of the presidential race to come. I just hadn’t realised at the time what I was seeing.
The story of the 2024 race can be easily told in numbers. Not the numbers of who won and who lost. But of how the country was feeling as it went to vote. Nearly two-thirds of Americans would tell pollsters that
they felt the country was on the wrong track. That their own lives were not heading in the right direction.
Democrats tried to convince voters that things were getting better – inflation was falling, employment figures were rising, and prescription medicine like insulin was getting cheaper. All that was true. But they were fighting a feeling. And the feeling won over the macro economics.
But numbers don’t get you the whole way. And now the postmortem is firmly underway there is a SWAT forensics team picking over the Democratic corpse. We are all political vultures, choosing the explana- tion that consolidates our own views. So on one side stands the ‘blame Joe’ contingent. These are the folk who think Biden left it too late to pull out of the race. Or that he lied to the electorate about how ill and frail he was. The people who understand that those young men at the airport didn’t see the figurehead of a great American President. They saw a shuffling old man.
Then there’s ‘the economy, stupid’ camp. These people believe – with some reason – that the Democrats have stopped being the party of working folk and become the party of the rich. The share of the vote that Kamala Harris grew the most was those earning $100,000 or more. The firebrands like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren or the ‘Rajin’ Cajun’ James Carville will tell you that any campaigning that doesn’t put bread and butter issues at the centre is a day wasted. The priority has to be the economy first, the economy second and the economy third. That simple.
Since that crashing defeat, there’s also been a clamouring to blame the identitarians. Those who prioritise pronouns and protest and concepts like ‘white privilege’ over every- thing else. Some will try to convince you that the advert Republicans made saying ‘Kamala is for they/them – Trump is for YOU’ was the most successful political ad in modern history as it spoke to ordinary folk who felt left out of the conversation, who didn’t want to be made to feel guilty about things they didn’t understand. They will fudge over the fact that Harris herself rarely, if ever, referred to identity politics on the campaign trail. She didn’t even push back on Trump referring to her as ‘newly Black’.
It will raise questions for the Democrats. Are women’s rights an identity issue? Is racial reckoning? Will those conversations now be quietly submerged by a party being told that ‘woke is dead’. Because all of these ‘blame ’variations have some truth. But all are ultimately useless as they fail to address one crucial thing : Trump won because Democrats have still not worked out how to respond to him. Even after a decade of trying. Trump’s victory is now complete – unassailable.
But his ground game was not forged in the swing states in October. It was established four years ago, when he gaslit a nation to believe his lies – that he’d won an election he’d lost. That his alleged criminal activity was nothing more than a witch-hunt. That the real criminals in America were foreigners coming to eat your pets.
Trump lied about stolen votes. He lied about losing. He lied about sexual abuse. These lies became ossified, petrified into a solid, unrec- ognisable sturdy base. Upon which he stood. Once the Democrats accepted that and moved on, the battle was already lost. Trump was fighting an asymmetric war, by different rules that he would ignore at will. And his opponents let him.