The Enormity of Donald Trump’s Win
He accomplished a partisan realignment that’s been in the making for nearly a decade
I link to it within the piece below, but I also wanted to announce at the top that I have an op-ed in The New York Times today, giving my first-cut take on why Kamala Harris lost the election so decisively. That’s a gift link, so you don’t need to be a NYT subscriber to read it. I’m also Andrew Sullivan’s guest on the Dishcast this week. That will be dropping tomorrow. Finally, the post below is running simultaneously in slightly different form at Persuasion.
For most of the past year, I’d been expecting Donald Trump to win.
It was just a feeling, though one with lots of discrete data points to back it up: inflation had voters mad, and so did immigration; incumbents had been losing around the world; Joe Biden was far too old and addled to make a case for four more years; Trump’s polling was stronger than in either 2016 and 2020, when he either won or came very close to winning; and so forth.
This feeling has obviously been vindicated—but not at all in the way I thought it would be.
After Biden’s catastrophic debate performance at the end of June, I thought Trump might not only prevail but actually approach winning an outright majority of the popular vote for the first time. (He hadn’t even won a plurality before.) But once Kamala Harris took over from Biden, such thoughts vanished from my mind. If Trump still managed to win, it would be just barely—by taking advantage of support from just the right groups of voters (mostly white men who haven’t completed a four-year college degree) in just the right states. That probably meant him winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote yet again.
But that’s not what happened. At all.
The Scope of the Victory
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