Mere hours after it became clear that Donald Trump was going to beat Kamala Harris for the presidency, the blame game began. And there is certainly a lot of blame to go around: On Joe Biden for not stepping back sooner; on Democrats for so thoroughly losing touch with working-class voters; on progressives for many years of overemphasizing identity politics and the language of social-justice academia over the material needs of average Americans. Voters were obviously frustrated with the economy, immigration, and a general sense of disorder. There is no singular explanation for why Trump won – except, of course, he got more than 270 electoral votes, and in this case, most of the total votes as well.
But too many of the election postmortems have treated the results of this race as a kind of up-and-down vote on Democrats, as if Trump’s victory is entirely about Democratic shortcomings. The truth is that voters who turned out on Nov. 5 were also voting for something, and for someone. That person was Donald Trump – a man who has not exactly been shy about his priorities, his bigotries, and his character, a convicted felon who has also been found liable of sexual assault.
Read More: What the Media Missed
Comparing 2020 to 2024 is telling. Four years ago, when Biden beat Trump, the general media narrative was that Democrats had done the right thing by choosing the moderate white guy. Democratic Party leaders seemed to agree, and the party’s left flank became increasingly marginalized. Republicans, by contrast, had run a candidate who lost the popular vote twice in a row and had just been bested by a gaffe-prone man who had never inspired much in the way of voter excitement, and their reaction was to triple down on Trump. There were no big public postmortems and mea culpas. If anything, Trump only gained power, taking over the RNC (his daughter-in-law became its co-chair) and leaning harder into MAGA politics. Trump’s GOP didn’t remake itself to be more appealing to the median voter. They may have professionalized their organization a bit more, but their core message stayed the same. They bulldozed forward and assumed voters would come to them.
Voters did. Exit polls are notoriously unreliable, but they do seem to show that Trump retained his support from........