That half this country could willingly restore Donald Trump to a position of power is a sickening thought. For most liberals, moderates, or people who closely follow news sources not controlled by the Republican Party, it is almost unfathomable.
The incomprehension often leads either to despair or denial. Because Trump is so abnormal, so grotesquely narcissistic and cruel, his success seems to upend conventional political assumptions and render his triumph into a kind of black magic. Reality is more banal. The American public has not embraced Trump. The decisive bloc of voters always evinced deep misgivings about Trump’s character and rhetoric, even if they didn’t fully recall all his crimes and offenses (who could?). Trump didn’t win by making people love or even accept him. He won because the electorate rejected the Biden-Harris administration. It is important to clearly discern the sources of that rejection. The work of correction is hard but not complicated.
The seeds of Harris’s failure were planted eight years ago, when the Democratic Party responded to Trump’s 2016 victory not by moving toward the center, as defeated parties often do, but by moving away from it. This decision was fueled by a series of reality-distorting blinders on the Democrats’ decision-making elite. During the first Trump era, public polls showed the president immediately and deeply unpopular, fueling the belief that Americans opposed him so overwhelmingly that Democrats did not need to make any ideological compromises to win. And that misperception was fueled by the pervasive influence of social media, especially Twitter, which fostered a delusional sense that the Democratic base had veered far to the left. Candidate after candidate bowed to demands of progressive groups to endorse unpopular stances favored by the left. This self-destructive process was shaped by a culture of moral absolutism on the left, in which any compromise at all is seen as tantamount to an endorsement of bigotry, genocide, and ecological collapse.
And so the Democratic primary in the 2020 cycle was a race to the left. Joe Biden won because he abstained from that rush to the left, keeping him closer to where the party’s voters had remained. Yet his win happened so quickly it could not dispel the notion that Democrats actually wanted radical transformative change, and Biden had too little organizational ballast or strong convictions of his own to defend the more mainstream vision he had used to win the nomination.
Biden had won the nomination because most Democrats associated him with the popular Obama administration. But the party’s activists disdained Obama as a sellout and a disappointment. And so after winning the primary, Biden eschewed the customary pivot to the center and pivoted away from it, adopting positions (and eventually staff) aligned with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
In office, Biden suffered a combination of bad judgment and worse luck. The COVID pandemic led to dislocations and a surge of inflation that has toppled the governing parties of every ideological stripe across multiple continents. Inflation generated so much resentment it caused a retroactive halo for Trump, whom Americans began to remember more fondly than they ever had during his first term.
Inflation was by far the largest single source of Biden’s unpopularity. Its effects drove governing parties in other countries 20 or 30 points below water. It would have been difficult for any sitting president to defy the pattern of anti-incumbent rage.
But Biden’s policies worsened his predicament. He ignored warnings of inflation, believing that the fastest return to full employment and rising wages would be rewarded by a grateful public. Biden was following a strategy designed by the “anti-neoliberal” movement, which believed a populist economic strategy provided the key to building a Democratic majority. A 2020 memo laying out this strategy by the Hewlett Foundation, which poured millions of dollars into an intellectual campaign to spread these beliefs, called for “a new consensus permitting governments more room to spend on efforts that boost aggregate demand without worrying about inflation quite so frantically.”
Many liberals (including me) were eager to believe these policies could produce rapid growth without the risk of inflation or that inflation would prove more tolerable than slow growth and high unemployment. This proved mistaken: People prefer to believe their wage gains are a credit to their own skill and that inflation is the government’s fault.
Biden compounded public alienation by reversing a slew of Trump-era immigration restrictions, leading to a massive surge of asylum seekers, who were permitted to stay in the United States while overwhelmed authorities processed their claims. Biden was following demands of immigrant-rights activists, who had long persuaded Democrats that dovish immigration policy was the key to cementing the loyalty of Latino voters. This calculation proved tragically wrong, and Biden reversed himself too late to avoid the backlash that followed.
Surrounded by loyalists in office and a coterie of progressive intellectuals who celebrated his policies, Biden and his party spent far too long delusionally believing he was a historically successful president and an indispensable politician. Biden did not draw a primary challenger and only departed the race after a cognitive breakdown on the debate stage so late in the process that Democrats felt unable to organize a competitive process to replace him.
Into the void stepped Harris. The vice-president had two gigantic liabilities to overcome. Her ill-fated 2020 primary campaign had saddled her with a long string of left-wing stances and statements that made her seem alien to the public. Trump’s most incessant ad seized on her 2019 endorsement of free sex-change surgery for migrant detainees and prisoners, a position so unimaginable to most Americans it suggested she could not possibly have sensible views on anything else.
Harris ran determinedly toward the center. Much of her 2024 campaign registered important successes. She rebuilt Democratic enthusiasm and won over a share of Republican-leaning voters, especially ones who are aware of Trump’s long string of moral deformities.
But Harris was never able to supply an explanation of why she had changed her mind from 2019. She treated questions about her change of mind as an accusation rather than an opportunity to offer a convincing narrative of her evolution. Most damagingly, she could not detach herself from Biden, telling one interviewer that nothing came to mind when asked what she’d have done differently. That line became Trump’s second-deadliest weapon against her.
It was not merely a gaffe. Harris reflected a partywide inability to understand how toxic Biden had become. The very decision to replace Biden with his equally unpopular vice-president reflected that same denial — Democrats continued believing people didn’t really think Biden was an awful president but was merely temporarily misunderstood. The progressive intellectuals allied with Biden were so convinced he was another Roosevelt they failed to admit that he was another Jimmy Carter.
Harris surged ahead of Biden’s moribund position, but her momentum stalled. She could never quite overcome the toxicity of her old positions or the administration in which she served. Her only chance to win given the baggage she inherited required her to run a perfect campaign, and she did not.
The Democrats’ only chance of winning, in retrospect, was to pick a nominee who could credibly run as a complete outsider untainted by either the 2020 primary left-a-thon or the Biden administration’s record on inflation and immigration.
Why is it important to understand all this? Because their defeat is fundamentally rooted in concrete events and decisions, many of which lay in their control. There is no mystical bond between the public and Trump they cannot sever. The Democrats allowed themselves to be prodded, and sometimes bullied, into either fooling themselves about the true nature of public opinion or fooling themselves into thinking public opinion didn’t matter. And their impulse to rally around Biden led the party to minimize his unpopularity and deny his physical decline until it was desperately late. Echo chambers can trap their own inhabitants.
When Trump won the first time, Democrats abandoned strategic thinking in response, setting the stage for their defeat later. Their future will be determined by whether they can respond more shrewdly this time.
More on 2024 election
- Trump Claims Nonexistent Youth-Vote Landslide
- Trump Sues Iowa Pollster Who Annoyed Him
- Kamala Harris Can Aim for Governor or President — But Not Both
