The *Actual* Day After

How did we get here? Where are we going?

If I’m honest with myself, I knew this was coming, and have known it for a long time.

When the Senate declined to convict President Donald Trump after his second, post-January 6th impeachment, I knew that meant he was the odds-on favorite to be the next Republican nominee. Indeed, on a panel for Tortoise Media a year into the Biden administration, I was asked who I thought the GOP would pick to run in 2024, and I readily replied that if Trump wanted it then it was his for the taking. I wavered after the midterms, which went so unusually poorly for the party out of power facing an unpopular president, but I never truly believed Governor Ron DeSantis or any of the other hopefuls were going to catch fire, and as soon as the campaign really got going it was clear that the whole thing was a sideshow. Trump wanted it. He was going to get it.

And once he was the nominee, I knew Trump would be favored to win the presidency. Biden was extremely unpopular, for a combination of legitimate reasons related to his governance choices, bad timing related to events beyond his control, and factors related to his own persona—most prominently his advanced age but not only that. (Joe Biden, let’s be frank, was known as an effective legislator, never as a great political leader.) Before Biden’s disastrous debate, I thought he was a 2-to-1 underdog for reelection. Afterwards, I thought he was certain to lose. And after the assassination attempt against Trump, and his iconic fist-raised posture of defiance, I mused to friends about the likelihood of a Trump landslide, wondering whether he’d have the coattails to bring in a resounding majority in the House and Senate or whether we’d see more ticket-splitting since it was so clear who the president would be.

Swapping out Biden for Kamala Harris was clearly an improvement, but I never really bought into the enthusiasm for Harris. I was deeply unimpressed with her as a senator, as a candidate in 2019, and as vice president. She was a much more vigorous campaigner than Biden could possibly have been, and I think her positioning for the general election was reasonably good, though not great. But thematically her campaign was extraordinarily vague, and largely negative and reactive, an endorsement of what America is and where it is already going and a rejection of Trump as an agent of reactionary and dangerous change. I’m not surprised that an electorate unhappy about the status quo, unhappy with President Biden’s stewardship, and nostalgic for the pre-Covid Trump years was not eager to hire her on that basis.

Finally, looking at the polling data objectively, we went into Election Day with the two campaigns neck-and-neck, but with Trump mildly favored because he was clearly doing better in the Sun Belt than Harris was, which meant she likely needed to sweep the Rust Belt battleground states to win, while he likely only needed to win one or two of them. With those states polling as tied and Harris leading only by a point in national polls, even without a totally normal polling error Trump was in an objectively better position. And it would take only a modest polling error to bring about precisely the result we saw.

So I knew. But I didn’t believe. I believed it would turn out differently, and I think the fundamental reason isn’t that I knew who I was voting for or that I couldn’t bear the thought of four more years of Trump (I’m not looking forward to it, but I’ll bear it). I think the reason is that I, like most of the Harris coalition, have enough of a stake in the world as it exists that I’m fundamentally risk-averse, and Trump was obviously—obviously—the riskier option. I just couldn’t make myself believe that so many of my fellow Americans were eager to take such a significant risk.

Democrats really need to face the fact squarely that most Americans did. The maps of the change in vote margin since 2020 are a sea of red arrows, not only in rural counties but in many urban ones (very much including NYC). They’re still counting votes, but it looks likely that Trump won a larger Electoral College majority than in 2016, and not only a plurality but a majority of the popular vote—a majority large enough to overcome a slight Electoral College skew against him. Tentative breakdowns of the electorate suggest that he made gains among nearly all demographic groups, the largest being among young people (18-29 and 30-44), and among Hispanic and Asian voters. The only major groups that moved slightly in Harris’s direction were White college-educated women and voters over 65. Trump gained ground in 48 states (all but Utah and Washington), notching especially huge percentage gains in the four largest states—California, Texas, Florida and New York—along with “blue” states like New Jersey, Illinois and Maryland and “red” states like South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi. 2016 and 2020 both were realigning elections, in which educated and urban voters went one way while less-educated and rural voters went the other. Yesterday wasn’t like that; it was a broadening and consolidating election in which the whole map shifted right. Harris’s campaign arguably “succeeded” in that she lost less ground relative to Biden’s vote share in the most of the important battleground states, but that just shows how powerful was the tide that she was swimming against.

The reasons for that tide are something books have been and will continue to be written about. As they will happily tell pollsters, voters are clearly angry about inflation and the migration crisis, and also lingeringly angry, I suspect, about the disruptions of the Covid era. But I think the reasons go deeper than policy. The feeling that the system simply doesn’t work as well as it should is pervasive, as is the suspicion that one reason is that the people who run it are fundamentally out of touch with the realities of ordinary people’s lives. I hear about this all the time from people with all sorts of politics, including from plenty of Harris voters. Relatedly, the sense that rules are promulgated without popular consent or even consultation, and then are enforced in a prejudicial manner, is also extremely widespread, even among people who consider themselves liberals, believers in tolerance and diversity and so forth. The populist tide clearly predates it, but I suspect that Covid crystallized a pervasive suspicion of the managerial class and its institutions, not only in government but in business, in academia, in the media—everywhere.

There is clearly a global dimension to this; incumbent politicians all over the developed world, and of all political complexions, are being tossed out of power. Right-wing populism is on the rise almost everywhere, and “brahmin left” parties are suffering particularly brutal defenestrations. In that sense, Trump’s election was overdetermined.

But that doesn’t mean it was preordained. I think the Democrats would clearly be in better shape today if had they handed the migration crisis with more alacrity. (Inflation is, I think, a much thornier matter.) I also think they would have been in better shape if Biden had declared his intention not to run for reelection after the 2022 midterms, and if there had been a genuinely open contest for the nomination. International comparisons suggest a more pointed counterfactual, though: that another Republican, one who didn’t suffer from Trump’s his manifest personality disorder and his other obvious baggage, would have won even more decisively than he did.

Yet that counterfactual requires an addendum, to whit: to win the nomination, and to garner the kind of enthusiasm that Trump clearly achieved in the general election, any such other Republican would have had to win the way Trump did when he first ran. The striking thing about the Trump phenomenon is that from the beginning he spoke directly to the people, and declared that he was speaking directly for the people. He has never been a party man or a factional leader. At a time that a great many people have the sinking feeling that government of the people, by the people and for the people is perishing, that kind of personalized direct address is incredibly powerful (as well as inherently dangerous). I don’t think that power is incidental to Trump’s success. And so I do not think that if the Senate had convicted Trump in 2021, and then nominated Ron DeSantis or Marco Rubio or Nikki Haley or whoever, that any of them would have become the kind of dominant figure that Trump is. Any of them would have been favored to win, but for more normal reasons, and with more normal implications—and quite possibly less decisively.

Dan McCarthy, my editor at Modern Age, has an excellent op-ed in today’s The New York Times explaining Trump’s victory in precisely the terms I’m suggesting, as a consolidating victory against the system itself:

This was no ordinary contest between two candidates from rival parties: The real choice before voters was between Mr. Trump and everyone else—not only the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, and her party, but also Republicans like Liz Cheney, top military officers like Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. John Kelly (also a former chief of staff), outspoken members of the intelligence community and Nobel Prize-winning economists.

Framed this way, the presidential contest became an example of what’s known in economics as “creative destruction.” His opponents certainly fear that Mr. Trump will destroy American democracy itself.

To his supporters, however, a vote for Mr. Trump meant a vote to evict a failed leadership class from power and recreate the nation’s institutions under a new set of standards that would better serve American citizens.

I think McCarthy is right. But I think it’s fair to say that Trump, and his entire movement, has been far more focused on the “destruction” part than the “creative” part—which is why, despite all I knew, I’ve had such a hard time believing Americans would vote for it.

But vote for it they did. Now it is incumbent first and foremost on those newly entrusted with power and those, like McCarthy, who built the intellectual scaffolding of this victory—but also on the Democrats as they head into opposition—to spend the bulk of their time not on figuring out how to reverse what just happened, nor on how to take advantage of it for their own particularist agenda, but on filling in those creative blanks. The ship of state is well under sail as we undertake its reconstruction. Far more than wanting to see my preferred policies enacted, I’d like it not to sink with all of us on board.