There are lots of reasons. My personal ‘top five’ are:
Biden didn’t drop out early enough. Biden should’ve announced in 2022 that he wasn’t running. That would’ve given the Democrats time to have a primary and face Trump with their strongest candidate. I quite like Kamala Harris on the whole, but she was not the Democrats’ strongest candidate.
Social media. Platforms like X, Facebook, and Bluesky are essentially just contrivances for supercharging bullshit. Republicans benefit more from this than Democrats.
Immigration. People are desperate for illegal immigration to be stopped. This isn’t unreasonable, and it’s something which you see in large numbers across all racial groups. If Biden made strides in this area then he didn’t do much to publicise them effectively.
Inflation. Not much Biden could’ve done about that. It was due to events outside of his control. Still, the Republicans blamed it all on him, and you can’t really fault them for doing that because that’s just the nature of politics.
Campaign messaging. I just think Harris ran the wrong sort of campaign. Her ‘vibe’ for want of a better word was upbeat and optimistic, and you can understand why she’d go for that, but it’s out of touch with how a lot of people are feeling. A lot of people feel that America is fundamentally unfair, and that the game is rigged. I think an opportunity was missed, and that a significant chunk of the electorate would’ve been uniquely receptive to a more class-oriented message. I mean, look at how many people were laughing and hi-fiving when Brian Thompson got shot. Has there ever been a better time to campaign hard on things like healthcare reform? I know Harris didn’t exactly ignore this issue, but she could’ve pushed a lot harder on it IMO.
Edit: And I’m just now realising I kinda missed the point of the thread
Oh well. I don’t care. I’m not deleting it. Deleting posts is why Trump won.
We have Trump because we, as a country, ran into some bad luck, not because it was inevitable.
Going back to 2016, there was the time that James Comey made his comments about Hillary Clinton’s emails back during the 2016 election. We could have been luckier had Comey just decided differently on his timing.
If Jeb Bush had the charisma that his brother George has, Trump would have never won the Republican primary in 2016. If Jeb had inherited better genes from George Sr., we wouldn’t be here.
If the blue states had lifted the COVID-19 lockdowns sooner, we wouldn’t have had the problems we did with inflation, and Trump would not have had that issue to run on. Had that mutation or other unlucky event not happened and COVID-19 never been a thing, Trump would have lost in 2024 because no worsening inflation.
We have Trump because his people threw so much money at it from Billionaires and the like… through legal channels, illegal channels, false promises, and out and out bribes that the numbers ‘seemed’ to show him as the winner.
We have Trump because many of the far left disenfranchised and turned off so many of the 3/4 left that they stayed home.
We have Trump because he cheated, broke the law, and we let him get away with it without consequence.
We have Trump because we didn’t plow under country clubs and golf course clubs.
We have Trump because Merrick Garland sat on his hands and was not removed.
We have Trump because we became lost in trying to ‘play fair’ when the other side cheated to win at all costs.
I know the OP is asking for specious arguments, but it seems this thread has turned into half-serious or full-serious replies instead.
One reason Trump won, IMHO, is because in 2012 Democrats savaged Mitt Romney - who is a decent honorable fairly-centrist Republican - and treated him as if he were the kind of villain that Trump actually is. By doing so, it created a crying-wolf effect and the result was that when a genuine horror-show like Trump came along in 2016, the Democrats’ warnings about Trump fell on deaf ears.
We have Trump because nonskeletal marsupials have been turning churches into pickleball courts. We have Trump because late fees at foreign libraries subsidize lobster circumcision. We have Trump because commercial breaks on Sunday mornings are no longer measurable in prime numbers. We have Trump because FIFA refuses to let Norwegians tend goal facing east. We have Trump because DDT is making billiard balls soft. We have Trump because SCOTUS wants to overturn Planck’s Law. We have Trump because the Olsen Twins once tried to eat the same deviled egg. We have Trump because you can’t ride a blue bicycle across the same river three times and come out the same window. We have Trump because Top Gear never made an episode in Belarus. We have Trump because three words rhyme with “spatula” and “spatula” is two of them. We have Trump because there is no God and we are in Hell.
To expound further on this, anger is one of the most powerful emotions that there is; indeed, possibly THE most potent one.
Republicans understand this, and know how to tap into it. Democrats have never been as good at utilizing anger - ironically so, given that D voters have even more legit reason to be mad than R voters.
We have trump because democracy is too good for the masses. And because of Fox News. And because of late stage capitalism. If late stage it is. And because of religion. And because rabbits stare at snakes, and deer stare into the lights of cars that are racing towards them until they hit them.
Anger’s sibling Hate is the most powerful emotion.
I didn’t truly understand hate until COVID, when MAGA’s actions were causing people to die.
But I also believe that the majority of the population knows how to handle emotions like anger and hate in a healthy way. People who understand what they can and cannot control don’t let hate consume them. The work on fixing what they can control, and they let the things they can’t control go.
These people are going to vote against someone who uses anger and hatred in their efforts to sway public opinion.
Now that I understand the purpose of this thread, I’ll posit that Trump won because of Hillary. The two worst presidential candidates in history happened to run against each other in the same election. Go figure.
That and the fact that the very crowded field of GOP presidential candidates in the GOP primaries in 2016 was nothing but a bunch of deadbeats and Jeb Bush.
If Trump hadn’t won in 2016, there is no way he would have won in 2024. So it’s all Hillary’s fault.
Note: I typically refer to Hillary Clinton as “Clinton”, but I figured that using a disrespectful address was a good way to parody those who use this line.
You know…I expected the thread to turn into a reverse Pitting eventually, but I gave Dopers more credit than they deserved for doing so as quickly as they did.
There were plenty of people “call[ing] out bigoted uncles” from leftist pundits and political figures to comedians and scholars of authoritarianism , even as the corporate media tried to ‘toe the line’ of being ‘moderate’ and ‘notpartisan’ (and certain billionaires reigned in their hobby media outlets like the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post). Certainly, there was no lack of vocal criticism of Trump for his felony convictions, past history and present evidence of corruption, influence of the Heritage Foundation, Silicon Valley ‘techbros’, and lingering suspicions over just how much influence Vladimir Putin has with Trump. The fundamental problem is that about half of the engaged, voting public witnessed four years of Trump’s disastrous leadership including the monumentally inept handling of a pretty tame pandemic threat followed by inciting an insurrection and decided, “Yes, please, I’d like another!” This wasn’t because of anything that Harris or “The Democrats” did or did not do in the 2024 election cycle, but because Americans have been primed for autocracy and even incipient fascism for going on four decades by the ‘New Right’, heralded by Newt Gingrich and his hypocritical “Contract with America”, with resentment fueled by decades of neglect of working class concerns and opportunities in favor of corporate benefactors by the vast majority of politicians on both sides of our constrained ‘two party system’ where despite the rhetoric around culture wars most of the actual policy differences when it comes to economics, employment, and public investment are a matter of splitting hairs.
Harris did not, BTW, run a terrible campaign, or fail by pandering to one group while ignoring the other (hence the contradictory claims). I think there are plenty of things to criticize Harris about (and Biden and the people insulating him for not doing the smart thing and encouraging Democrats to find a strong candidate rather than reneging on his pledge to be transitional candidate to the) but as I said in this thread she pulled in near record numbers of votes (74.7M), more than Obama (both times) or Clinton even adjusting for population, and just short of what Biden did against an enormously unpopular Trump in 2020. Trump, on the other hand, barely even bothered to campaign, had no actual message or policies other than vague statements about deporting immigrants in quantities guaranteed to overwhelm the immigration system, cut an impossible amount of money from the federal budget while cutting taxes on the wealthy, and bringing back manufacturing jobs to plants and companies that no longer exist. He literally spent one rally just swaying to an ‘eclectic’ selection of music and somehow still managed to get over 77 million votes on the premise of bringing ‘change’ even though he is stupidly reactionary and obtuse in every facet of governance to the point of being comically incompetent.
Trump won because a large swath of Americans no longer believe in the effectiveness of government or democratic institutions, because they are easily swayed by manufactured ‘culture wars’ issues being hyped on unregulated social media by exaggeration, distortion, and outright fabulation, and because they seek a ‘strongman’ leader who can just fix things the way Trump claimed that he will, even though there is zero evidence that he’s capable of leading a marching band much less a major business or national government. They bought into the hype, and the notion that Democrats need to field a candidate with an equal degree of hype-fueled bullshititude is really just asking to spiral faster down the slope to corruption, failure of institutions, and collapse of national integrity.
I am currently reading a book called “Fever in tbe Heartland” by Timothy Egan, about the rise of the KKK in the 1920s. The parallels with today’s social climate, especially the surge of overt hatred toward immigants that were previously accepted, the venal and corrupt leaders driving the movement and how they gained power, are staggering. When asked later why so many seemingly normal Americans embraced the Klan and its message, a witness to the time remarked that it filled a need: people stuck in a rut of small-town life needed something to hate smaller than themselves and to feel a part of something larger than themselves. That seems still true today, and not just of small town residents. In the 1920s they had D.C Stephenson and the KKK. Today we have Donald Trump and MAGA. They are damn near the same in philosophy and goals.
I stick by my comment: we have Trump because white America (especially older white America) was equal parts bigoted and/or complacent to bigotry. Our complacency let us not call out bad behavior from “our” people while coming down like a ton of bricks on black America’s bad behavior (things like the Clintons’ super predator bullshit). White America simply didn’t give a shit enough about democracy to protect it if it meant being the least bit inconenienced.
