Why Trump won: Democrats have a coalition, Republicans have an ecosystem
Why Trump won: Democrats have a coalition, Republicans have an ecosystem
Americans preferred the vice president’s policies, but her campaign messaging was overwhelmed by a titanic far-right ecosystem that Democratic elites refused to counteract
This essay is the ninth in a series called “How This Happened,” examining larger trends in recent American political history and how they manifest in today’s politics. Please subscribe to receive future installments.
It’s not official, but it’s obvious by now that Donald Trump is going to return to the White House next January. It’s easy to blame the voters when your candidate loses, and I can understand the impulse. But the entire point of democracy is that the people have the right to vote for whomever they wish. Ultimately, if citizens make the wrong choice, the responsibility rests upon the leaders of the losing party.
From a tactical perspective, Kamala Harris ran a great campaign. She won the single debate that Trump had with her. The Democratic grassroots was historically enthusiastic about voting. The crew behind @KamalaHQ was incredible. She raised a record amount of money for a presidential candidate. Her campaign had an incredible ground game operation. But it wasn’t enough because tactics are not strategy.
Despite their fantastic tactical abilities, the Democratic Party’s top leaders have been outmatched and outclassed strategically for over 40 years by their Republican counterparts. Most Americans completely disagree with the Christian supremacist movement that dominates the Republican party. Only 29 percent of the public, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, have viewpoints that could be described as “Christian nationalist,” but this small minority just convinced tens of millions of other people to vote for their hand-picked candidate and his down-ticket allies. MAGA did not win the election for Trump, it was people outside of it.
As the returns started looking grimmer last night, I feared that the election was going to be decided by the people who didn’t like the candidates. Now that we have the final exit poll data, it looks like that is exactly what happened.
According to the survey, both candidates did exactly the same among people who liked them, 99 percent of voters who liked Trump voted for him, ditto for Harris.
The election was decided by people who disliked both candidates. As you can see in the data table below, 8 percent of Americans surveyed disliked Harris and Trump. But they clearly disliked Harris more since 55 percent voted for Trump. Only 32 percent voted for Harris.
(A similar dynamic prevailed among the 2 percent of voters who said they liked both parties’ nominees. 57 percent voted for Trump.)
Media platforms vs. policy platforms
Throughout his political career, Trump has always bet on getting people to vote for him who didn’t like him based on what political scientists call “negative partisanship,” people basing their vote on opposing an undesired candidate instead of supporting a favored one.
In 2016, Trump’s primary message was how he would give far-right Christians the Supreme Court of their dreams, and that Hillary Clinton was concealing a fatal disease diagnosis. In 2024, Trump’s closing message drumbeat was fearmongering against transgender people.
Objectively, it’s absurd to think that trans women are going to take over women’s sports. There are almost zero trans athletes in America, which is the reason you always hear about the same handful of people in Republican messaging.
Likewise, the notion that millions of cisgender men would copy Trump by walking into women’s locker rooms is ridiculous. It is already illegal for males to enter female-only spaces, and laws allowing trans people to use the bathroom fitting their gender identity offer zero legal protections to lewd cisgender people.
It wasn’t just Trump’s closing message that was ludicrously false, either. He relentlessly pushed the lie that America’s economy is in a terrible state, despite the fact that the inflation rate and unemployment are low, and GDP growth has been consistently positive.
Trump’s campaign also promoted the lie that crime rates in the US are out of control, despite the fact that violent crime is at a 50-year low and that a splashy report claiming that massive organized retail crime rings existed had to be retracted for inaccuracy.
None of these facts seem to have phased a majority of American voters. In the exit poll, 73 percent of respondents said they were dissatisfied or angry about the state of the nation while 67 percent rated the economy as “not good/poor.” That echoed a May survey commissioned by the Guardian which found that 56 percent of adults who responded believed the U.S. economy was in a recession.
Trump’s victory was built on blatant lying, but it could not have worked without the far-right media machine that Republicans have been building for decades but which has mushroomed in size since the once-and-future president came onto the political scene in 2015.
When you compare and contrast the Republican and Democratic parties, it’s crystal-clear that Republicans have created a sleek and modernized ecosystem, while Democrats oversee a tottering coalition based on outdated assumptions about how politics works.
Democrats have great tactics, but their strategy is obsolete. This is why Kamala Harris lost.
In internet age, media platforms matter far more than policy platforms.
I hate to say it, but I’ve been afraid this would happen for a long time. This essay is part of a larger series called “How This Happened” which I started in March when I began to realize that Democrats seemed to have learned very little from their 2016 loss to Trump, and that the party’s 2020 victory was primarily due to dissatisfaction with Trump’s pandemic oversight rather than a mandate for Joe Biden.
How Republicans built their powerful ecosystem
As both candidates headed toward the Election Day finish line, Kamala Harris’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon made a notable shift in tactics, moving away from the highly successful “Republicans are weird” attack toward campaigning as often as possible with conservative ex-Republicans like former House members Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.
I have no inside scoop on what prompted the change, but if I had to guess, it seems like that Dillon wanted to capture some of the negative partisanship energy that Trump was successfully tapping into.
As noted above, this did not work, not because Harris and her team didn’t work hard to make it happen, but because they were playing a sucker’s game. The two parties’ possible voter universes are not the same and they cannot be motivated with the exact same tactics.
It was not always this way, however. Historically speaking, American political parties were multi-ideological coalitions. Liberal Republicans were commonplace and conservative Democrats were as well. All of that changed once anti-New Deal reactionaries began flooding into the Republican Party in support of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential candidacy.
Working in lockstep, far-right activists targeted ideological opponents in primaries, canceled journalistic and academic critics, and scaled up a media infrastructure from shoestring newsletters into a multi-billion-dollar behemoth that totally dominates YouTube, the preferred news and entertainment source of Generation Z. They also have come to totally dominate the podcast space, as I reported last month.
Through their efforts, reactionary Republicans managed to change the nature of who was in the party. It became an ideological vehicle similar to how political parties are outside of the United States, with a core of voters who agreed on its general direction.
Inside the Democratic Party, however, nothing like this has ever taken place. It remains a legacy coalition of disparate groups with wildly different objectives that often have little understanding or sympathy for each other, a stark contrast to the “fusionism,” the shared sense of purpose that early American reactionaries developed to link their unrelated struggles of fighting communism, secularism, and business regulations.
What political ecosystems offer that coalitions can’t match
As the head of a modernized, ideological party, Donald Trump’s general election campaign automatically started at the 30 yard-line. With a gigantic, and self-funding media apparatus keeping grassroots Republicans onside, he was able to focus almost all of his attention and campaign money on identifying and mobilizing “unlikely voters” who agreed with Republicans but were not strongly interested in voting.
The Trump campaign’s bet that it could motivate reluctant voters to show up was incredibly risky. It went completely against the conventional wisdom, as articulated in 2021 by Matthew Yglesias, that parties should focus on winning swing voters rather than bringing in new ones.
Powered by deep investments in social media activism, microtargeted ads, relentless evangelical missionizing, and Trump and running-mate J.D. Vance making scores of appearances on any podcast that would have them, the campaign’s wager paid off. Trump improved his share among Hispanic men by 33 percent and among Hispanic women by 15 percent.
Social media platforms are filled with angry Harris supporters claiming that these reluctant Latino Trump supporters will soon change their tune once he inevitably betrays their interests in office. As much as I would like for that to be true, however, I don’t think it will be because large partisan ecosystems are great for both attracting and maintaining relationships with reluctant voters:
Through advocacy media, they educate party voters to maintain negative partisanship, meaning that people who dislike the leaders will still be inclined to vote for the party. Advocacy media also helps co-partisans interpret negative information in a more favorable light
They speak to and learn from the party members to find messages that will mobilize them. Talk radio and web shows are much better than focus groups for this because the host-caller relationship is far more organic and unforced.
They can attack the opposition 24/7 in a way that allows candidates to keep their hands clean
They provide professional networking to help members earn a living, capturing their passion and making expansion easier
They operate numerous events to bring co-partisans together and help new voters find community
There are a variety of other highly useful functions that partisan ecosystems can provide to a modernized political party. I hope you will subscribe to Flux as I explore these, tapping my unique background as a former builder of Republican institutions.
I’ve wanted to have this conversation with grassroots and leadership Democrats for a long time. Unfortunately, it’s been difficult getting people at the top to listen. If you can share this article and the “How This Happened” series with any Democratic officials you know, that would be much appreciated. As someone who built up several major institutions within the Republican ecosystem, I have been continually stunned that there are so few advocacy institutions on the American center-to-left. We must rapidly change this state of affairs to protect our country.
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