Trump won, and everyone knows why. It was because liberals put up with too much, or not enough. It was because Kamala Harris ran, or didn’t run early enough. It is because Biden dropped out, or didn’t drop out when he should have. It was because progressives took over the party, or because Democrats abandoned progressives. Talked too much about trans! Didn’t hold the line on trans! Didn’t push alternatives to police! Insisted on defunding the police! Spent all our time talking about Trump’s lies instead of policies! Didn’t talk enough about Trump’s lies!
The only constant, as far as I can tell, is that somebody didn’t do the thing that the speaker wanted them to do. And that’s why we have Trump.
I figure we could use one place to collect all these specious arguments, and this thread could be that place. Note that sometimes (such as the example I’m about to give), I absolutely agree with the person that the thing is bad. But saying “this is why we have Trump” is a lazy argument unless it’s exhaustively researched.
So let’s start things off.
This is why we have Trump: we didn’t call out bigoted uncles.
The thing is either all, or at least mostly all, those arguments are correct. Harris’s loss was a “straw that broke the camels back” situation. We can’t really point to any one straw and blame that particular straw as “the reason” Harris lost. But they all contributed, and the flip side of the straw that broke the camel’s back is that we also can’t say the other straws weren’t to blame.
ETA: And those weren’t the only straws either. There were many others, and I’m sure some of those will also be brought up in this thread. Sure, maybe a few of those reasons might actually be wrong, in the sense that the particular reason in question might have actually gained Harris / lost Trump votes rather than the other way around. But if Harris lost votes / Trump gained due to the reason in question, then yes, it was one of the many straws that can be blamed for a straw that broke the camel’s back scenario.
FWIW, here are some of the straws that I think led to Trump’s victory, in no particular order other than the order that they popped into my head.
Joe Biden didn’t drop out early enough.
The Democratic propaganda machine is more incompetent than the Republican’s.
Far left voters tend to vote on a “the perfect is the enemy of the good” type thinking.
There are numerous others I can think of, but I don’t want to run out of time to edit my post and don’t want to double post.
I think it’s more that a huge chunk of the voting population is basically composed of bigoted uncles, and largely talk to each other. Calling them out wouldn’t have mattered much, I fear, because that would have been on the periphery and largely by people whose political and social opinions were suspect.
Personally I think the failing was in us not really perceiving that chunk of the population and how they differ from everyone else.
I mean, I grew up in a conservative family in the suburbs, but when I went to college (Texas A&M) I found out that there’s a whole other level to weird white person religiosity and conservatism. It was very off-putting to me at the time, and I mostly derided them as shit-kickers, but in retrospect, it was all the people who were out there who lived in the sticks and who were basically bypassed by popular media. There was a whole separate musical style (country) and fashion that went with that segment of the population that I was utterly unaware of. And it’s not like I was sheltered, but I had grown up in the big city.
I think that something like this has happened on a nationwide scale- the big city people where a lot of the people live, and where all the entertainment and news media are located have very little interaction with these types, and they’re effectively invisible in that sense.
The American political system is not a meritocracy, and it’s foolish to think that Harris (or Clinton) could have won if they’d just arranged all their the straws in a certain way.
Trump has come up with a particularly abrasive way of sidestepping merit, but in my lifetime merit-based victories have been the outlier, not the norm. That’s why Bush got re-elected even after we all knew there was no merit behind Iraq.
The only thing our system of government has been able to guarantee is a peaceful transition of power, and J6 showed how fragile even that was. And with Trump 47 I think we’re seeing its failure. It’s… not a great system. And while scapegoating people who fail to perfectly operate in this broken system is fun and easy, it’s not particularly productive.
eta: It doesn’t help that our society isn’t merit-based either.
A constitution, a system of government, only works if the overwhelming number of people generally agree that it should work that way. That may no longer be true in the USA.
How precisely the constitution is written doesn’t matter very much.
Right. Some of the arguments are actually incorrect. One of those is correct and the other isn’t (although I have no way of knowing which is which). But whichever is the correct one, that means that reason was just one more reason that led to the loss. A few hundred / thousand voters here for Reason A, another few hundred thousand voters there for Reason B, and so on, and pretty soon we have a Trump victory. IMHO that’s the only realistic way to look at it.
That’s true, but it was also true when Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden won their elections. The challenge is trying to figure out why it mattered more in 2016 and 2024 and why it mattered less in 2008, 2012, and 2020. It’s like blaming coastal flooding on the fact that the ocean is really deep. Yes, that’s true, but it doesn’t explain why sometimes it floods and other times it doesn’t. It’s the voters on the edges that make the difference, not the base. The people who voted for Obama and Biden but not for Harris or Hillary Clinton. The ones who didn’t vote for Mitt Romney but did vote for Trump. The ones who stayed home in 2024 but voted for Biden in 2020, and so on. Those voters aren’t Stereotypical Bigot, who probably last voted for a Democrat for POTUS in 1964 (or maybe 1976 if he wasn’t paying attention).
Exactly. “Everyone who steps foot on US soil should have the benefit of equal protection under the law as a fundamental right” is a fairly basic foundational principle, enshrined not only in our constitution and laws but also our shared culture. It’s a position steeped in merit, one that should in no way be controversial, and yet we can’t all agree on that anymore. Truly, we never did agree on that, as evidenced by our storied history of slavery, prejudice, and institutional oppresion.
How can anyone possibly blame an individual politician for that?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t read the OP as soliciting yet another endless debate attempting to answer the question in the title. It’s an observation that the various attempts to boil it down into a brief and pithy answer are limited, incomplete, and frequently contradictory, and an invitation to catalog those wrongheaded simplifications.
For the last four years, the Trump and MAGA people have been successfully blaming Joe Biden for the mess that Trump left behind. For instance, Joe Biden led the nation with the world’s lowest inflation rate in the post COVID recovery period, which is an amazing success. MAGA has somehow managed to paint that as a failure by constant repetition of turning every criticism against Donald Trump into an attack on Joe Biden.
I don’t understand how people can possibly think that’s okay, the deflection piece which is the very basis of the MAGA movement.
I wouldn’t blame any one individual politician. I would blame the combination of multiple factors that led to Harris getting 6 million fewer votes than Biden did, and Trump getting 3 million more in 2024 than he did in 2020. But that doesn’t mean I blame some vague, nebulous system. Instead we need to place blame on all the factors that contributed to that 9 million vote swing, and to not deny that any one factor contributed simply because it isn’t all the other factors.
You’re right- it’s just that I feel like in the past, there were more voters who were in that category, and that’s largely because they have roped more people into their base.
What I can’t figure out for the life of me, is how someone is actually undecided at this point?
Lack of education. Or at least that’s one of the contributing factors. As but one example, i happened to be watching an episode of some reality TV show that was on in the background somewhere, and one young woman (an American) was unaware of who the POTUS is and of the major parties in American politics.
A Democratic winner needs to get everything right
A Republican winner just needs to say they’ll do the thing you like to hate.
The republicans have a massive document listing all the things they want to do, they’re coordinated, aligned, and feeding on every little thing you hate about todays society (real or imagined) and I’ll begrudgingly admit: They’re doing everything they said they’d do.
They did a better job selling the candidate despite the candidate’s shortcomings.
Plus total lockup of their news feeds.
And ignoring any kind of campaign contribution limitations.
And massive manipulation by external state sponsored actors.
The only reason they’re not more successful is that they’re morons and not a one of them paid attention in Civics class. We sure are testing the guard rails of our government.
By all indications, there are more democratic leaning people…but the republicans got where they did by playing dirty. And you’re gonna hafta account for that.
I agree with all that. I’d also add that Democrats still tend to campaign as “egghead professors” who lecture the public about what they really need, while Republicans tend to campaign as “one of you” who tell the public they are going to go do what they want done.
That’s it, plus an invitation to link to this thread whenever anyone tries to shore up their argument in GD or P&E or elsewhere by saying, “You person I disagree with? Your viewpoint is why Trump won!” That rhetorical flourish is dumb and should be mocked, and this is a place to mock it.
That said, I’m getting some pretty sour amusement out of how this thread is turning into exactly the sort of thing I’m making fun of.
I heard a discussion on a radio show recently that was similar to this thread. Kamala Harris has been accused of talking too much about transgender issues, and someone else said that Harris didn’t say the word “transgender” even once during her entire campaign.
I don’t know if that’s true, or if she may have used other words to discuss the issue. If someone else has done the research on exactly what she said, and when, it would be interesting to see.
It does seem that if you accuse someone of something enough times, people will believe it happened.