5 reasons why Donald Trump won & the Democrats lost

This will be the first time that the Republicans have won the popular vote since 2004, when incumbent George W Bush won 50.7% of the national vote, and the Democratic challenger John Kerry 48.3%.

In fact, this might end up being the party’s best performance since 1988, when then Vice President George HW Bush basked in the afterglow of his popular predecessor Ronald Reagan to win more than 53% of the national vote, and 426 Electoral College votes.

Here are 5 reasons why Donald Trump won — and Kamala Harris and the Democrats lost.

1. 01

   Voters’ miseries & anti-incumbency

   Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee did not change the fundamental dynamic of the race. As an article in The Telegraph put it: “incumbents don’t win when voters are miserable”. And the past four years under Joe Biden did make many Americans miserable — inflation ran rampant, unemployment was rife, and the economy witnessed a steep downturn. 

   Not that Biden could have prevented a global pandemic or stopped Russia from invading Ukraine, prime drivers of the United States’ economic downturn, he still copped the voters’ blame for their dwindling fortunes. Even though things are much better now — by some accounts, the Biden administration has actually been very successful in leading the US out of an economic crisis — this seems to not have registered in the average voter’s calculus, who still vividly remembers the difficulties faced during the pandemic and after.

   Contrast this with the Trump presidency, during which the stock markets soared, unemployment fell to historically low levels, and inflation was manageable, it is not all too surprising why most voters favoured Trump over the incumbent vice president on economy. And pre-election polling had suggested that this was the single most important issue in this election.

   Harris simply did not promise the transformative agenda that voters yearned for, and although Trump’s propositions have been far from definitive, positive, or even deliverable, his promise to bring change that voters so desperately want has propelled him to an unprecedented victory.

2. 02

   Support & turnout in Rural America

   Since the 1960s, Rural America has shifted its support to the Republicans. How well the party performs presidential elections has often been directly correlated to voter turnout in rural counties — higher the turnout, more the probability of a Republican winning the race to the White House. 

   White rural voters helped propel Donald Trump to the White House in 2016, and they seem to have done so again in 2024. Rural county after rural country, especially in the seven swing states, saw Trump improve his 2020 numbers both in absolute terms and relative to Harris. Put together with a downturn in urban turnout — a key for Democrats to win — the outcome was never in question.

   Beyond the aforementioned economic concerns — some of which are real while others more a product of perception — rural voters have long felt ignored, patronised, or outright denigrated by the Democrats, considered to be the party of liberal elites. Despite spending millions of dollars and significant campaign time to court rural voters over the past decades, the Democrats have fundamentally failed to fight this perception. And for good reason. 

   Consider Hillary Clinton referring to Trump voters as “a basket of deplorables” during the 2016 campaign. Or The New York Times’ bestseller White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy (2024) making the argument that rural Whites are “racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay”, and pose an existential threat to the American republic.

3. 03

   Trump’s expanding support among minorities

   Democrats have long believed that they are the party of the United States’ myriad minorities, that they represent the most marginsalised people of the country. And minority voters, especially people of colour, have traditionally backed the party. This time around, however, Trump has managed to engineer a broad coalition of support and made deep inroads into the Democratic base — deeper than Harris expected, and could afford.

   In fact, Trump is set to win a bigger proportion of the non-white vote than any Republican candidate for at least the last 40 years. This has allowed him to nullify the Democrats’ advantage in so called strongholds. Take for instance Georgia’s Baldwin County, where 40% of voters are African American, which has voted Republican for the very first time since 2004.

   Trump has also earned a bigger share of the Hispanic vote than ever before, something which is likely to get him over the line in the states of Nevada and Arizona. This remarkable coalition of rural, low educated, blue-collar voters with significant pockets of Hispanic and Black support has proved that Trumpism has a far bigger base than Democrats have reckoned with, and the party’s politics has seemingly taken many of its core voters for granted.

   As an opinion article in The Indian Express put it: “His speeches are rambling, yes, but the campaign has focussed on issues… The Harris camp, on the other hand, bought into the TikTokification of political grammar and in doing so, lost the vocabulary to address fundamental issues”.

4. 04

   Women not the trump card Harris hoped for

   Both in Rural America and among minorities, the uptick in support for Donald Trump was driven by male voters. According to an article in Time magazine, “Exit polls showed Trump winning large numbers of Latino men in key battleground states, improving his numbers with that group in Pennsylvania from 27% to 42%. Nationally, Trump's support among Latino men leaped from 36% to 54%.”

   This far outdid the support Kamala Harris gained — and had banked on — from women across the political aisle. Crucially, Trump “held steady nationally with white women, shocking Democrats who had expected a post-Dobbs uprising”.

   Since the conservative-majority Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe vs Wade ruling in 2022, reproductive rights have been a central plank of Democratic politics. For Harris, her stance as a staunch defender of abortion rights was always going to be the trump card against Trump’s juggernaut — something that would galvanise women, irrespective of race or political affiliation, to vote for her. Not only did she enjoy limited success in this regard, this was offset by the far bigger inroads Trump made among men across the political aisle.

   Overall, Trump led among men by roughly 22 percentage points, compared to only 14 percentage points that Harris led among women. In an election which did not see women significantly outvoting men (as they have done in the past), this was simply too big a gender gap for Harris to overcome.

5. 05

   Democrats’ hypocrisy, Trump’s authenticity

   The Democrats have long fashioned themselves to be the party which believes in democracy, upholds the United States’ liberal values, and is the bulwark against the so-called demagoguery and authoritarianism of the likes of Donald Trump.

   But soaring rhetoric about saving American democracy flies in the face of much of what the Joe Biden presidency has allowed to take place — and actively engaged in.

   Take for instance Israel’s actions in Gaza, and the Biden administration’s steadfast support for the country. Critics question how can a party which claims to stand for liberal values support the mass killings of Palestinian civilians by a regime that has long stripped them of their rights?

   And how can a party then expect Arab Americans — traditionally a voter-block for the Democrats — to vote for then it? Dearborn, a city in the swing state of Michigan, with among the largest populations of Arab Americans in the US saw a voter turnout of only 39.6%, “a NOTA rebuke if ever there was one”.

   In the face of Democrats’ seeming doublespeak, Trump appears to be authentic and unapologetic. Is he a friend to Arab Americans? Perhaps not. But he does not pretend to be. And while he might lie all the time, there is a certain honesty in his politics — unlike the Democrats, he does not pretend to be something that he is not. That is what voters in the US have seemingly rewarded him for.