Joe Livaudais, from Virginia, holds an image depicting Republican presidential nominee and former US president Donald Trump during the 2024 US presidential election on election day in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 5, 2024. [Seth Herald/Reuters]
“Obviously, that’s not the way you want to close [a campaign],” Donald Trump’s election advisers said about the former president shortly before the polls opened in the United States. They were pulling their hair out listening to the Republican candidate say he “shouldn’t have left” the White House in 2020, despite losing the election to Joe Biden, and that he wouldn’t “mind… so much” if reporters got shot.
But it was they who proved to be naive. The more he provoked, the more he rallied support. “I like the fact that he’s not perfect. I like that he’s dirty,” a Trump voter told a TV camera. In the previous elections, non-college-educated Americans made up 65% of registered voters. They represented the majority of the electorate, a group that – based on the outcome – felt marginalized by the Democrats’ time in office.
Ahead of the election, two indicators competed to determine the outcome. On one side, Kamala Harris was more popular than Trump: Historically, the candidate with the highest popularity always won the election. On the other hand, only 25% of Americans believed the country was heading in the right direction. Whenever this figure dropped below 28%, the ruling party consistently lost the next election. The result confirmed why Trump would beat Harris and not the other way around.
Furthermore, President Biden held the second-lowest approval rating in modern US political history, and Harris did not distance herself from his policies in the slightest. Instead, she invested in highlighting her opponent’s anti-democratic behavior without delving into key issues like the economy and immigration. “Democracy is a luxury when you can’t pay your bills,” said a former Trump associate, cynically describing the sentiment that ultimately prevailed.
The side effects of globalization and the rapid technological race pushed the lower and middle class away from the Democrats, even though Biden’s economic policies were aimed precisely at them. The intensity of inflation as a failure of macroeconomic policies, the strategic dose of “Trumpism” as a political exploitation of challenges, and the dynamics of the “woke agenda” as a costly backlash effect led to a new divide in American society. This divide steamrolls over the traditional binaries that once defined political alliances: left-right, white-Black, male-female.
The ballot box spoke: The Democrats focused on Trump’s eccentricity instead of addressing their own inability to meet the needs of half of America. Now, whether Trump will solve more problems than he creates is another story altogether.