Donald Trump claims that his big win in the 2024 election gives him an “unprecedented and great mandate”. Many commentators have agreed to a lesser extent, seeing the election as a decisive shift in the American electorate towards the right. But the results tell a different story: Trump did not so much win the election as the Democrats lost it.
To be sure, Trump’s victory is clear and convincing. He swept all swing states, giving him a 312-226 victory in the electoral college. He is the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years, albeit with one of the narrowest wins by popular vote in American presidential history.
But whether this indicates a massive popular shift toward Trumpism is another matter. Trump’s victory has been exaggerated because he once again outperformed the polls. In addition, most analysts have examined only the percentages of those who voted for him – where he improved on his past performance across the board – rather than the raw number of votes he received. In fact, Trump only marginally improved upon his 2020 total of 74 million votes. His vote share as a percentage of the eligible voting population may even have declined.
What made the difference this election was the Democrats’ massive underperformance. Kamala Harris received nearly 10 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020. To lose so many voters – while running against an existential threat to American democracy – is nothing short of political malpractice.
No one is more responsible for the Democrats’ loss than Biden. While eventually he did the right thing by stepping aside, it was so late in the process that no open primary was possible. A primary would have enabled the Democrats to air out issues, energise their base and ensure that the best candidate emerged. As the sitting vice-president, Harris was the only viable option to replace Biden. And she inevitably struggled to distance herself from an unpopular administration. Biden’s unpopularity is primarily due to high inflation. He may be unfairly blamed for this, but Harris missed the chance to make the case that she would act differently to address the cost-of-living crisis. In the case of the probable genocide in Gaza, Harris should have distanced herself from Biden.
Overall, Harris tried to be all things to all people. Accordingly, many voters did not know where she stood. The coalition she sought to assemble – ranging from Liz Cheney to Bernie Sanders – was incoherent. But, in truth, she focused all her attention in the final part of her campaign on attracting votes from the centre-right. She campaigned more with Cheney than she did with almost any other figure. She did not appear once with Sanders, a very popular figure among the party’s base.
Because defeating Trump was such an important priority, most on the party’s left would have accepted Harris’s shift to the right, had it worked. But it didn’t. Harris appears to have made at best minor gains among well-educated suburbanites while she haemorrhaged votes among working-class Americans of all races. Sanders issued a damning judgment following the election: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” It is hard to dispute Sanders’s conclusion that “while the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change”.
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Democrats can take heart that they performed better down ballot. They won Senate seats in four swing states that Harris lost: Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin, the first openly gay US Senator, won re-election by running on a progressive agenda that stressed workers’ rights. Democrats’ relative success in the Senate suggests that Harris was not done in by a massive shift away from her party, but by the unpopularity of the Biden administration and by her flawed campaign strategy.
Harris’s errors were not hers alone, but those of the consultants and donors who control her party. Democratic Party consultants typically urge candidates to move to the right to attract centrist voters. Meanwhile, big donors are usually centrists who oppose an economic populism that threatens their own interests. Even when the strategy of moving ever rightward works electorally, it damages the party in the long term by erasing any strong sense of its identity. The Democrats brand simply becomes “not as bad as the Republicans”. But this strategy no longer works even at winning elections in the short term. It has been tried in 2016 and 2024, and it failed miserably both times. It will be difficult to reform the Democratic Party. But with party elites discredited, the chance of an insurgent progressive winning the Democrats’ next presidential primary has never been higher.
That Trump won a narrow victory abetted by the mistakes of his opponents does nothing to diminish the terrifying threat that he poses. For even if he did not win a “clear and compelling” mandate, he will certainly govern as if he had. And with Republicans having control of all branches of the federal government, Trump will have enormous power to do harm. But he is also likely to overreach and produce a backlash. Presuming American democracy withstands Trump’s authoritarianism, Democrats have a good chance of taking back the White House in 2028 with a more charismatic candidate who lacks the baggage of the Biden administration. But Democrats should be aspiring not just to win the next election but to form a long-term winning majority that can defeat not just Trump but Trumpism. To do that, they need to take back their party from the consultants, donors and politicians who yet again failed to defeat Trump.
Daniel Geary is the Mark Pigott Professor in US history at Trinity College Dublin
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