How the Democrats Lost

A way-to-soon breakdown of how Trump won in 2024.

"America is cooked," cries the Democrat. Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 Presidential Election has given rise to despondency from Democratic voters, euphoria on the right, and among the voters that put Trump over the top a combination of indifference and a growing sense of buyers' remorse. The Press and the neoliberal factions of both parties are already trying to downplay the threat, and blame any group they can think for Trump's victory. The internet has been awash in hot political takes since Election Day, many from learned and experienced analysists claiming Trump's election means the end of America, or trying to downplay the risk. People are panicking and that's understandable; what happened on Election Day was traumatic because what happened in Trump's first term was traumatic and Trump ran on a platform of "more trauma." I'm not going to tell you things will be ok, they won't. And while I screwed up on calling this election, just as I did in 2016, I think I can explain what happened, where we stand, and try to identify the things we can be certain of in Trump's second term. This first installment will serve as an analysis as to how the Democrats lost.

Americans’ Lack of Perspective

In my somewhat light on substance 2024 After Action Report, I tried to explain that Donald Trump's popularity always boils down to theory vs. reality. A lot of people on the left (me included) made one crucial mistake during the 2024 campaign: we assumed that most voters were as engaged in the election on a daily basis as we were. They weren't. The bulk of voters try to avoid the discussion of politics, and when its time to vote, they cast their ballots as a reaction to what they personally have experienced under the incumbent party. They don't think deep, and while many have interpreted that as stupidity, I'd argue its a consequence of American political culture.

For most of this country's 248 years it's been insulated from political violence and long term economic turmoil, and as a result most Americans lack perspective or any sense of electoral consequence. I can you hear typing about Bush and Iraq, or Trump and COVID, but please try and remember how relatively few people in the US were actually negatively impacted by the worst things done by those Presidents. Life went on for most people, and its easy for most people to dismiss the suffering of those on the margins. So as difficult as it may be, let's try and look at the election from the perspective of people who vote reactively by focusing on the issues that decided this election for those voters who were neither MAGA stalwarts or Progressives:

Campaigning Doesn't Work

In 2024 the Democratic party spent around $1 Billion on the Harris campaign, about double what the Trump campaign had spent. Hillary Clinton's campaign also spent double what was spent by the Trump campaign in 2016. Every voter was hounded by emails, texts, leaflets, and TV ads for months and it amounted to the Democrats losing both houses an the Presidency. There's only one reasonable takeaway from this: campaigning doesn't work. Since about 1960, professional political operatives have operated on the assumption that televised debates, a sea of advertisements, and public campaign events are all essential for a candidate to win an election... and why wouldn't politicos tell politicians that when all of those things require people like them to organize everything? But the reality is this: for most voters, all of that crap is just annoying theater that they actively try to ignore, or at best treat like entertainment.

Really think about what campaigning actually means to most voters: it means more junk mail. More spam emails and texts that come at all hours of the day. It means politicians showing up in a major city in a swing state and fucking up traffic when you're just trying to get to work or go home. At best, maybe the politicians show up to a town you don't live in, to talk to a room full of people who's questions have already been screened, and give a bunch of long winded that is just boring or in Trump's case, incoherent. And as for the debates, their lack of an impact on the election is well documented, and is anyone really surprised? 67 million people watched the Trump Harris debate, but did anyone actually watch expecting to change their minds? Trump claimed Haitian immigrants are eating people's pets, it didn't seem to seriously harm his odds on election day.

Now I have yet to mention the press when discussing the failure of the Democrats to capture a majority in 2024, and that's because the press is, by in large, just another piece of pointless fluff. A lot of Democrats, myself included, have bemoaned the problem being the lack of effective coverage by the traditional media of the Democrats successes and Trump's many crimes and scandals, but we're probably wrong about that too. Afterall, how did we learn about Project 2025, or Trump's chief of staff calling him a fascist, or his conviction in New York? The traditional media is what its always been: entertainment that occasionally reports important information. Modern liberals have convinced themselves of the myth of the 4th Estate; that responsible investigative journalism is able to take down corrupt politicians and help preserve democracy. While that does occasionally happen, it has always been a rarity and only pursued in service of sales/ad revenue to an ever diminishing audience.

Immigration Backlash

This may very well be the most difficult thing for Democratic voters to accept, but most voters really like Trump's anti-immigration platform. There is an impulse among many liberals to blame this on racism and xenophobia, and while those are certainly strong motivators for many Trump voters, a large bloc of people who voted for Trump were motivated more by a very simple desire for law and order. I know a lot of people chafe at those words and have rightly identified them as white supremacists dog whistles for brutalizing people of color. But dog-whistles only work if ordinary people like the surface level idea they describe, and most people are generally opposed to people breaking the law. And while it is true that this new wave of unauthorized border crossings began arriving shortly before Biden took office, many Americans saw this as the Democrats being overly lenient on unlawful behavior. This in turn, made it easy for Trump to paint the US as experiencing a wave of lawlessness, despite the fact that crime rates are at record lows, and immigrants are less likely to commit violent crime than non-immigrants.

The recent wave of unauthorized boarder crossings is purported to have added another 2 million people to the US population, and about half a million mostly from Central America, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Ukraine were paroled as refugees. These immigrants did more than any other Biden administration program to arrest inflation by filling critical gaps in the labor pool, but even if Biden had made that stated policy it wouldn't have mattered. Americans, like most people in the world, largely don't understand that immigration is the only thing keeping their economy afloat with the world facing a labor shortage. The labor shortage itself is something that few people on either side of the isle are even willing to have an honest conversation about, and that will persist until the country gets a very rude wake-up call in the next couple of years. Until then, immigration continues to be a wedge issue that has proven very effective at motivating voters to back Trump.

Inflation

You're probably sick to death of hearing about "Price of Eggs," but the surge in inflation since the Pandemic is not something you can just dismiss. In 2021, the average price of Dozen Eggs was $1.67 vs. $3.82 in September 2024. The average price per pound of ground beef was $4.26 in 2021 vs. $7.39 in March 2024. The Median Home Sale Price in 2021 was $347k vs. $420k this year. And the most overlooked economic indicator by far: the US Personal Savings Rate was 19.3% in January of 2021 vs. 4.6% in September of 2024 with Credit Card Debt at a 10 year high of $1.05 Trillion. In short: Americans have less money to spend while every essential has gotten more expensive. Yes, by November the Savings Rate was on a rebound from a low of 2.7% in 2022, but prior to the pandemic it was at around 7%, credit card debt was rising, but still below a trillion dollars, and basic essentials were that much cheaper. GPD may have grown, but as I have been saying for the last 2 years: because of labor inflation, normal economic indicators no longer measure the health of the economy for most people.

I want to underline that while Inflation contributed to people voting for Trump, it likely did more to make Democrats stay home on election day. While the last few votes are still being tallied, Trump won around 76 million votes, 2 million more than he won in 2020, but Harris won 73 million votes or around 8 million fewer than Biden won. The hardship of the pandemic motivated a lot of people who don't typically vote to turnout for Biden in 2020, but in 2024 those same voters saw the Democrats as having failed to make their lives substantively better, and stayed home. Now if you're someone who closely follows politics, you might be thinking that Biden did a LOT for working people, to the tune of a huge spending package package that mainly went to Union voters, a serious attempt at debt relief that was only stopped by a corrupt Supreme Court, and a genuine effort to decarbonize the economy. But voters don't ask how, they ask how many. All of that spending bought the Democrats less than half of all Union voters, and only 10% of workers are represented by a Union. The environmental push, was also heavily curtailed to win organized labor, but it manifested as a glut of electric vehicles most people couldn't afford, and some new renewable energy plants when America already has some of the lowest energy costs in the advanced industrialized world. And while Biden tried to pardon student debt, he failed; some people care that it was the Supreme Court's fault, but that doesn't change the fact that millions of Americans are still drowning in debt. Biden did not make enough Americans' lives better for people to turn out on election day to give the Democrats another chance.

A final point: the Democrats' legitimate failures, and the very real hardships people are facing does not excuse the slim majority of people who voted for Trump. Most of us care a LOT about how expensive things have gotten through inflation and price gouging; its just that if you voted for Harris you valued other things more than the Price of Eggs, like the fact that Trump is a criminal, pedophile, rapist who tried to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021 and has promised to be a Dictator upon taking office with a list of truly some of the most horrifying policy proposals I've ever seen. But for most American voters all of Trump's many, MANY evil deeds are either ignored by his cult of personality, or seen as just more political theater. Put it another way: they chose fascism or chose to permit fascism. That is a stain upon our nation that can't be forgotten. However, in the next installment of this series, I'll get into how Trump's agenda is unlikely to manifest as planned.