What do we do now
Turns out this election was less about Donald Trump than it was about us. Ultimately, it revealed who we are and what we actually care about.
For at least the past few election cycles, Democrats have attempted to sustain their coalition around positive, idealistic, collective values. Kamala Harris focused on democratic values, reproductive freedom, human rights, and global alliances. On paper, at least, majorities of voters voice support for democracy, abortion rights, and NATO. Almost every time I saw her speak, including at the convention and in her concession speech, Harris proclaimed, “We all have so much more in common than what separates us.”
But for voters at large, the question seemed to boil down to, “What are you going to do for me?”
What we know about this election so far is that Trump widened his appeal and broadened his coalition across disparate and sometimes contradictory segments of the electorate. Not only did Trump increase his strength among his core constituency of non-college educated voters from an 8-point spread in 2020 to a 28-point spread in 2024, he also made gains in the Democratic base. In 2020, Biden carried voters under 30 years old and voters earning less than $100K by 17 points, respectively. This time around, Harris only carried voters under 30 by 11 points and lost voters under $100K by 4 points.
Among Latino voters, Trump made huge gains. Biden carried this demographic by 30 points in 2020; network exit polls estimated that Harris eked out a scant 6-point margin. Trump also made gains with Black voters, breaking into double digits after failing to break 10 percent in the two previous elections. In the Bronx, for instance, Trump has consistently increased his share of the vote, from 9% in 2016 to 15% in 2020 and to a whopping 27% in 2024. Then there’s the gender gap. Exit polls showed 54% of women overall supported Harris, while 54% of men supported Trump. But significantly, Trump won 53% of white women.
Trump also seemed to bring incongruous factions into his coalition, including Muslim and Jewish Americans. In Dearborn, Michigan, with its significant Muslim population, Democratic support fell from 70% in 2020 to 36% in 2024. And among Jews in New York, which has a much higher concentration of the country’s observant population, support for Trump soared from 30% in 2020 to 45% in 2024, according to Fox News exit polls.
Democrats will spend the weeks and months ahead trying to reconcile these results with what they thought they understood. How, for instance, could so many women support a campaign with such misogynistic undertones — and overtones? How could women support the architect of Dobbs? How could so many Muslims support a campaign promoting Christian nationalism? How could Latinos support a campaign that pushed a portrayal of Mexicans as criminals and Puerto Rico as an island of garbage? Or a president who tweeted conspiracy theories about Hurricane Maria and threw rolls of paper towels at desperate storm victims as the body count climbed into the thousands?
Trump has based his entire political career on a promise to Make America Great Again. While he has never specifically identified when America was great, it seems pretty clear to me that he must be talking about the 1980s. Not a student of history, it makes sense he’d be referring to a period for which he has a personal frame of reference. The gilded, greed-is-good era of the 1980s, the time when his own fame and celebrity were born, seems like a good fit for his agenda and his worldview.
The decade opened with the election of Ronald Reagan, the end of the Iranian hostage crisis, and the crushing of the air traffic controllers’ strike. The era portrayed in Bonfire of the Vanities saw the rise and fall of characters like Mike Tyson and Michael Milken. The consumerism of young Boomers (Yuppies and DINK’s) drove the culture. Not unlike boom-and-bust cycles that preceded it, the decade was brought to a fateful conclusion with the inevitable implosion of greed destroying itself — the stock market crash of 1987 and the recession that followed.
For Trump, his eponymously-named Trump Tower opened in 1983. The 58-story tower topped out at the 68th floor, because Trump counted the five-story atrium as 10 floors. Trump: The Art of the Deal was published in 1987, explaining the secrets to his success. “I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: If you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.”
Most economists believe that Trump’s economic proposals, including tariffs, tax cuts, and mass deportations, may stoke growth initially but are also likely to reignite inflation and fuel trade wars and shortages. The markets seem to agree — stocks are up but so are bond yields. A measure of 10-year inflation expectations rose by a tenth of a point following the election to 2.4 percent, its biggest one-day increase since early 2023. Greed is good, until it’s too much — 1980s boom and bust all over again, perhaps.
In his observational treatise Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville argues that this individualism is, to some degree, a by-product of democracy. Because of a democratic society’s inherent mobility and instability, Americans are prone to forget those who came before them and lack interest in those who may come after. “They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man.” Democracy promotes a focus that is self-interested.
He goes on, “It is difficult to draw a man out of his own circle to interest him in the destiny of the state, because he does not clearly understand what influence the destiny of the state can have upon his own lot.” If, however, you propose to tax his earnings or to build a road to his property, the connection becomes real and immediate.
The high-minded ideals of modern liberalism are well and good, but they are nice-to-haves, not must-haves, for most voters. Voters have demonstrated that American capitalism, with its focus on individualism and egoism, is the lens through which they really view the world. We don’t have to accept the 1980s as our model for an idealized America, but we do need to understand why others might. There’s a reason why Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous was such a phenomenon. And there’s a reason why voters see no problem with a soon-to-be trillionaire helping a billionaire win an election claiming to represent the unrepresented.
Undoubtedly, Trump exploited misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and hate in his campaign, but if we accept that as the entire reason for his victory, we’ll miss the point of this election and be unprepared for 2026 and 2028. To me, Trump’s character and his campaign rhetoric were disqualifying, but many voters were more than willing to look past all of that.
While identity politics motivates many people, it repels an equal number. While single-issue voters exist, there simply aren’t enough of them to carry a presidential election. At the end of the day, not enough Americans feel seen and heard. Too many Americans feel they aren’t getting what they were promised. Too many Americans feel that Democrats defend small minorities in this country at the expense of significant majorities who feel equally disaffected and ignored.
We will do a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking and second-guessing, but the reality is, most voters don’t really care that much about reproductive freedom, democracy, or climate change. Democrats need to demonstrate more forcefully that, while we care about all those things, we also care about people and the challenges they face every day. As Charlamagne tha God observed, most voters were focused on “dinner table issues.” We need to demonstrate that the rescue package, the child tax credit, the CHIPS Act, the Infrastructure Bill, and, yes, Obamacare are all, in fact, about the needs of everyday people. And we need to legitimately fight for a more progressive tax code so that the majority of voters see real money back in their pockets.
Democrats believe Trump is a con man, at best, and a tyrant, at worst. Maybe voters made a terrible mistake in 2024, but in a democracy, we need to accept the outcome and move on. We need to stop deluding ourselves that Trump can be defeated in any other way than at the ballot box. We tried outrage, impeachment, a special counsel, civil and criminal convictions — two impeachments and 34 felony convictions, to be precise. None of it persuaded enough voters. We need to see the world as it really is, not as we wish it were.
Still, let’s not fall for the narrative that Trump won by a landslide. He won the election, for sure, but with less than 50% of the popular vote, I can’t accept this election as a repudiation of the entire Democratic platform. We don’t need to reject our values, but we need to make more room for other priorities. If we are truly the party of the working class, why don’t voters buy it? And if they don’t buy it, that’s on us not on them.
