I have only been occasionally dipping in to the plethora of "talking heads" discussions of how we ended up with the Trump electoral victory. FWIW, here is my take.
A look at the presidential popular vote numbers going back to 2008 is essential to beginning intelligent analyses of what happened this year and to figure out how to avoid the 2024 result in the future. Here are the numbers:
Republican Democratic
2008 59,948,323 69,498,516
45.7% 52.9%
2012 60,933,504 65,915,795
47.2% 51.1%
2016 62,984,878 65,853,514
46.1% 48.2%
2020 74,223,975 81,283,501
46.8% 51.3%
2024 76,553,010 73,936,479
50.0% 48.3%
Note: Trump got 11,239,097 more votes in 2020 than he got in 2016, but Biden got 15,429,987 more votes than Clinton got in 2016, so Biden swept the Electoral College in 2020.
Note: The total number of votes cast in 2020 for the two major party candidates was 155,507,476; the total number cast in 2024 was 150,489,489 – a dropoff of 5,017,987 –much more that the 2,616,731 Trump margin of victory in the popular vote.
Note: Trump got 2,329,035 more votes in 2024 than he got in 2020. Harris got 7,347,022 FEWER votes than Biden got in 2020. Even if all of Trump’s 2024 increase came from 2020 Biden voters, if Harris had been able to hold the rest of the 2020 Biden voters, she would have had 81,790,945 – or a popular vote margin of 5,237,935, which likely would have been enough to win the Electoral College.
I have always thought that a big part of Steve Bannon’s grand strategy was to discourage a segment of the electorate into thinking that it did not matter who was president. That strategy, in Bannon’s Big Lies World, was even more important than mobilizing his base. The above numbers indicate that the Bannon strategy succeeded.
If so, the challenge for Democrats and those on the left is to convince people that it DOES matter who is president, and that they can deliver. The Biden Administration actually was delivering, pulling us out of the trough of Covid that came on Trump's watch (and was exacerbated by Trump's handling of the crisis) and getting the country back on track. But this did not matter to the 7,347,022 voters who abandoned the Democrats in 2024. It is not just doing the right thing in politics that matters. You have to explain WHY it is the right thing, and HOW it is taking us in the right direction.
We do not know how many of the 7,347,022 gave up in despair. Or were convinced that a woman (and a woman of color, to boot) should not be president. Or were so offended at the Biden Administration’s failure to rein in the Netanyahu/Ben-Gvir/Smotrich response to the 10/7 atrocity that they could not vote for Harris even though Trump and his minions will be far worse for the Palestinians. Or were so offended at the happy talk of Bidenomics (when Biden should, instead, have focused on how Trump dug the hole that got us into the mess, how the Biden Administration saved us from total economic collapse and was now acting to get us out of the hole) that they abandoned the Party. Or abandoned the Party because they simply did not understand the realities faced by transgender people and were susceptible to the largely unrebutted attacks on efforts to treat transgender people fairly and with simple humanity. The old political consultants’ shibboleth that “when you are explaining, you are losing” is no longer tenable.
These are the questions that must be grappled with in the months and years ahead if we are to have any chance of getting the American Experiment back on track.
[Addendum, as of the evening of Nov. 21: Not that it matters a whole lot, but according to the tracker from Cook Report, the numbers are now Trump 76,909,463 (49.87%) and Harris 74,411,631 (48.25%), with a total vote for the two major parties of 151,321,084. So the dropoff from 2020 was 4,186,382. and Harris got 6,871,870 fewer votes than Biden. The basic analysis still holds. But if these percentages hold up, then the Republicans will have failed to break 50% in every presidential election in the 21st Century except for 2004. The Democrats broke 50% three times -- 2008, 2012, and 2020. Trump has achieved power again, but not based on clear mandate from the people -- just from a bare plurality of those who voted.]
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