How could he not win?

AFTER Donald Trump’s win, late-night hosts and the internet wasted no time jumping on Kamala Harris’s Obamaesque (albeit uninspired) campaign slogan “We’re not going back.” In a bizarre mashup of horrified hilarity, they trilled separately in unison, “We ARE going back!”

Pollsters, pundits, bookmakers, chat-show parrots – many were stunned into silence as the comeback kid Donald Trump showed why he’s probably the only one truly deserving of that moniker.

One common reactionary statement was that the US is, at its core, a squirming bog of recidivist racists, xenophobes, and capitalist vipers bent on every flavour of inequality that serves their perverse interests. On CNN (the C stood for commiseration post-election) a guest contributor surmised that the “surprising” support for Trump was a repudiation of multiculturalism.

The impact of race and xenophobia on the election is undeniable – the extent of their influence is what’s overblown. The idea that Trump won because America is a land of racists is an oversimplification.

A good place to start introspection is in the camp of the Democrats.

Joe Biden should never have submitted himself for consideration for a second term. Flickers of cognitive decline dogged his presidency. His decision to go after a second term was peculiar given his stated intention to be a one-term president – to be a bridge to the next generation.

Biden had tremendous support within the Democratic Party in the race’s early stages. That ebullient mood among donors and party insiders evaporated following Biden’s disastrous debate performance. By the time a decision was made to change horses, the race was all but lost.

The attempted assassination against Trump – and the ensuing photograph capturing his defiance – gave his campaign a new gear that would be hard to match.

Compared to Trump, Kamala Harris was an excellent candidate – an intelligent prosecutor with some track record in governance.

To many voters, however, she was a complete unknown. Harris’s first bid at the presidency fizzled before it even got going in 2019. Analysts identified her key problem as the absence of a platform – no one knew what she stood for. This didn’t change in 2024, which made her indistinguishable from Biden.

Moreover, the Democrats didn’t have a clue of who their target audience was. Campaign messaging was geared towards political elites on the west and east coasts. Harris, in her speeches, often referred to Trump as a fascist and authoritarian. Columnists noted that most average Americans don’t know the meanings of either word.

The left concentrated on abortion rights and climate concerns while, according to some political commentators, voters were preoccupied with “kitchen-table issues” – food-price inflation, working three times harder just to stay afloat, the soaring cost of daycare, etc.

Mind you, Trump didn’t have any answers to those or any challenges himself. In a town-hall-style meeting, a young woman pressed DJT on what he proposed to do about extortionate daycare costs. Trump fumbled through some diatribe about tariffs against China, implying that these are somehow tied to daycare.

It didn’t matter that he couldn’t muster anything close to a coherent response. The MAGA campaign discovered that they didn’t need to have any solutions. In this election, it was incumbent on the incumbent to supply strategy. The MAGA posse just needed to weaponise the problems, which they did to astonishing effect.

The billionaire-backed Trump and his VP Vance pushed all the right buttons – immigration fears, crime, and increased cost of living. Meanwhile, the Democrats were like a first-time lover fumbling in the dark.

Their entreaties to voters that the economy was stronger than ever fell flat. Data and numbers don’t tell the whole story. For many Americans, they remember life being easier under Trump – they don’t have the bandwidth to understand why the cost of living increased. For many, it was just easier to buy the myth that money that could be helping them was being spent on migrants and bombs for Ukraine.

Many suggested that Harris lost because she is a woman of colour – two strikes. That’s lazy thinking. The ethos of “it’s time for a woman” president probably did the campaign more harm than good. It echoed the same toxicity of Hillary Clinton’s anointing as the heir apparent back in 2016.

Electoral politics is a tricky enterprise. You can’t very well ask people to vote in their own self-interest (not party) and get upset when that turns out to not be in the best interest of the country, depending on your point of view.

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