Why [Insert Candidate] Won
My Trump and Harris pre-mortems.
As of today, more than 17 million Americans have voted in the 2024 election. Two weeks from today, the last voters will cast their ballots. If we’re lucky, some time that night, we’ll know who won. Much more likely, some time in the subsequent week, we’ll know who won. If we’re really unlucky, as in 2000, the call will come some time in the subsequent month.
But, whenever it is, there will be a winner. And once they are declared as such, their strategy will be celebrated. Their advisers will be fêted. Either Susie Wiles or Jen O’Malley Dillon will instantly become the toast of Washington.
Broad declarations will be made about the American electorate — even though, if not for fewer than 100,000 people voting differently, the opposite declarations would be popping up. It won’t matter. History is written by the winners.
In fact, across newsrooms in New York and Washington, that history is already being written — both versions of it. Journalists call these stories “pre-writes”: articles drafted weeks in advance, to ensure their news outlets have copy ready for either outcome.
This morning, for transparency’s sake, I’m publishing my pre-writes early.
Why? This election is close enough that you can mount credible cases for either candidate emerging as the winner — and I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to tease that out for you all, as a qualitative companion to all the polls showing how close the race is. I’ve tried to make the steelman version of each candidate’s theory of the case; at the end, you can decide whether you think one of them is more convincing.
Why Trump Won
If there has been one theme in the string of global elections that have been held this year, it’s been the vulnerability of incumbent parties. Throughout 2024, incumbent leaders have been humbled in the United Kingdom, France, India, South Africa, and several other countries.
On Tuesday, the Biden-Harris administration in the United States fell victim to that pattern, as Republican nominee Donald Trump rode a wave of popular dissatisfaction to achieve his long-held dream of returning to the White House.
Every month, Gallup asks Americans what they believe is the most important problem facing the country. For several months now, two answers have consistently risen to the top: immigration and the economy. On both issues, Americans have long signaled deep displeasure with the performance of President Joe Biden; voters ultimately judged that Harris, Biden’s deputy, represented continuity, while Trump — the ultimate change agent — would implement a swerve in the country’s direction.
Given several opportunities to explain how her presidency would be different than Biden’s, Harris passed repeatedly (“There is not a thing that comes to mind”), while also struggling in interviews to explicate a vision for her administration. With voters deeming high prices and levels of migration as more pressing issues — and Trump-friendly judges lending him a hand with those pesky indictments — Harris’ warnings about democracy and other non-pocketbook issues paled in comparison. A majority of Americans said they feel like they are worse off than they were four years ago; in that case, who better to shake things up than the man who was in charge four years ago?
Trump’s messaging about inflation especially resonated with some constituencies Democrats have relied on in recent cycles, most notably young men — of all races. Trump’s efforts to reach Black and Hispanic men, and show up in their podcast and TikTok feeds, paid off; they were among the groups most anxious about inflation, and they joined other voters nostalgic for the Trump economy in opting to return him to the Oval Office.
Many of those young men are also on the forefront of the country’s loneliness epidemic, one example of a broader malaise that has fallen over the country during the Biden era. Harris, who was given little time to introduce herself after Biden’s refusal to quit and last-minute abdication, proved unable to overcome this listlessness. On the other hand, Trump — ever the master showman — relied on flashy iconography throughout his campaign, most notably after his July assassination attempt, when he raised his fist and yelled “fight,” which became an overnight campaign slogan. He gave his supporters, including young men grappling with social isolation, something to be part of.
While Harris stuck to a script throughout the campaign, Trump also engaged in more off-the-cuff retail politicking than in his previous White House bids, stopping at a Vietnamese restaurant in Virginia, a Cuban cafe in Florida, and — most famously — working the fry station at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, to burnish his image as a fighter for the working man (despite his billionaire status).
Benefiting from facing a lesser-known (and hastily anointed) opponent, Trump pulled off an impressive two-step. To wavering moderates, he successfully painted Harris as too far-left, largely by pointing to her own positions adopted in 2019, which were out of step with a country becoming more culturally conservative. (See the support for mass deportations and for restrictions on transgender health care, an issue Trump emphasized in advertising.) At the same time — despite Democrats’ best efforts — Republicans boosted Jill Stein and Cornel West’s efforts to get onto battleground-state ballots, creating an outlet of dissent for left-wing Democrats.
No issue represents this two-step like Trump’s use of the war in Gaza (one of two foreign conflicts Trump deployed to accuse Biden/Harris of overseeing a chaotic foreign policy), as he peeled off Jewish voters by boasting of his support for Israel — while also nudging Muslim voters away from Harris. As in 2016 (and unlike 2020), Trump benefitted from the presence of well-known third-party candidates on the ballot — and found it especially easy to take advantage of cracks in the Democratic coalition against a candidate who seized her party’s nomination without winning a single primary.
After starting the general election from a position of strength — vanquishing an unpopular Biden on the debate stage — Trump went on to do the same with his poorly-defined vice president.
Why Harris Won
Just three and a half months ago, Democrats appeared headed to near-certain defeat, after President Joe Biden imploded in a face-to-face encounter with Donald Trump. In a 100-day sprint of a campaign, Kamala Harris swept in to take her boss’ place, infused a new level of enthusiasm into the party, and went on to defeat Trump’s bid for a second term on Tuesday.
Harris will be the first female president, but she spoke little about her identity on the campaign trail — a choice that may have contributed to her ability to stave off losses among men, even as her unspoken history-making status (and Trump’s crude denigration of her) deepened her advantage among women.
Particularly in the suburbs — the site of Democratic gains since Trump entered the political arena — college-educated female voters thronged to Harris, including moderate Republicans and Independents repelled by the least popular legacies of Trump’s administration: January 6th and the repeal of Roe v. Wade.
Trump pinned his hopes on a rickety coalition of low-propensity voters, including young men of color, but ultimately failed to set up the ground operation required to bring them to the polls. While Harris’ campaign shattered fundraising records, Trump — with a vastly smaller war chest — opted to outsource his ground game, including to groups led by Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk that failed to match Harris’ firepower.
In the end, Trump did pick up more support than previous cycles from young Black and Latino voters — but Harris was able to offset it with gains among older white voters. In addition, many of Trump’s newfound supporters were located in states like Florida and New York, which helped contribute to a particularly close popular vote but gave him no assistance in the Electoral College. In the battleground states — where it really mattered — Trump’s campaign was outworked, outspent, and outmatched, even though (considering the low-turnout voters he was targeting) he could ill afford to be.
Trump also did himself few favors in the campaign’s final stretch. While Harris stuck to a consistent, abortion-heavy message aimed at moderate voters — executing a similar strategy as other winning Democrats in recent cycles — Trump’s speeches grew less focused (see Palmer, Arnold) and more extreme (calling January 6th a “day of love,” referring to the “enemy from within,” doubling down on false claims about Haitians eating pets).
At exactly the wrong time, Trump reminded voters of why they had voted him out of office in the first place — that is, when Harris wasn’t reminding them herself, playing clips of his comments at her rallies and contrasting his four indictments with her record in law enforcement. (In the end, electing a convicted felon proved a bridge too far for many Americans.) An adept coalition builder, Harris was able to merge Democrats excited to “turn the page” from Biden and Haley voters wanting to free the GOP from Trump under the same optimistic umbrella.
Just as Americans had seemed poised to reject an 81-year-old Joe Biden earlier in the campaign, they voted against a 78-year-old Trump amid reports of his “exhaustion” and worries from his allies about his rambling and occasionally bizarre appearances. Suddenly, Trump was the old candidate — and Harris, 60, took advantage of it. As Trump descended into darkness, Harris — a new face on the scene, unburdened by what had been — successfully promoted a politics of “joy,” bolstered by large rallies not seen on the Democratic side since the age of Obama.
Trump never seemed to adapt to running against Harris, continuing to muse about Biden returning as the Democratic candidate well into October. While he went stretches where he barely mentioned her, Harris maintained a laser-focus on Trump, prosecuting the case against him and keeping attention trained squarely on her opponent. This was an election cycle when debates made an impact: both of them. Harris’ mocking face on the debate stage came to symbolize her efforts to make Trump seem small, weak, and easily manipulated.
The two candidates don’t share much, but they did share a favorite topic: Trump. But the ex-president, nine years into his political career, remained enduringly unpopular with voters, allowing Harris — riding high from the energy unleashed by her 11th-hour ascension — to deal him his second straight defeat in a presidential election.
What these stories tell us
As I indicated at the top, no matter who wins in November, either of these stories will only be true to an extent. Presidential campaigns only come around every four years, which means there’s still a lot we don’t know about them: Do campaign stops matter? Do ads matter? Does anything matter?
In the end, the election for the world’s most powerful office will come down to whether a fairly small number of people decide to leave their homes on Election Day and then which lever they decide to pull if they do. I think this exercise is partially helpful because you can see how divergent the national narratives will be, based on how only a handful of (very hard-to-predict) people vote. Either Trump’s indictments will be seen as having no impact on the race, for example, or — if a fraction of a percentage point of voters in Pennsylvania go the other way — they will have been judged to make all the difference in the world.
Still, one candidate will get more votes than the other in the key states, and there will be reasons why, so it’s worth fleshing out what some of them might be (even if not every one of the above reasons will ring true to every one of the winning candidate’s voters. On the indictments, for example, the truth is that they will have made a difference to some voters and not to others, no matter who wins).
These stories are also useful because they help us see where there is and isn’t overlap in the strategies of the two candidates (regardless of whether those strategies were The Thing that flipped the presidency). In this case, the thing that jumps out at me are how both stories are as much “How [Insert Candidate] Lost” stories as “How [Insert Candidate] won”.
Perhaps that’s merely reflective of how I understand the race, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable. American Enterprise Institute scholars Ruy Teixeira and Yual Levin recently penned a report, “Politics Without Winners,” which argues that American politics currently features “two minority parties, and neither seems interested in building a national coalition.”
“Each party runs campaigns focused almost entirely on the faults of the other, with no serious strategy for significantly broadening its electoral reach,” they continue. “Each offers itself fundamentally as an alternative to the other, even if it has the incumbent majority in Congress or holds the White House. And neither offers a clear or broadly compelling vision of the country’s future. This noxious stalemate has shaped an entire generation of American political life.”
This is the same protracted stalemate — this era of 50/50 elections — that I’ve written about before. Teixeira and Levin argue that both parties have allowed this status quo to continue, by taking unpopular positions instead of trying to build a national majority — which they know they can do, because the other party is also taking equally unpopular positions that shield them from any lasting consequences.
In practice, this leads to a game of inches, where it’s not as though nothing is changing in politics — there are big shifts happening underneath the surface — but the shifts offset each other, as the parties’ attempts to pick up new groups lead mirror groups to drift to the other side in roughly equal proportions.
These trade-offs could play a key role in this election, just as they play a role in the “pre-mortems.” Most notably, Republicans are spending the final stretch courting young men of color, which Democrats are hoping to balance out with gains among white suburban women. To do so, each party is focusing on messages that can be remembered with easy mnemonic devices: I&I (immigration and inflation) vs. D&D (Dobbs and democracy). Depending on who wins, these are the pivot groups that will be emphasized, and the issues that will be credited with winning them over.
Of course, these changes are not brand-new to this election — they are the outgrowth of the education polarization which has been remaking American politics for years now. If the shifts do snap into place, though — no matter which proves bigger — it will represent the most evolved forms of two competing coalitions which have been coalescing throughout the Trump era. In line with the “minority parties” mentality, both coalitions are best understood as organizing against rather than for something:
A broad anti-establishment coalition, wrapping from RFK Jr. to Steve Bannon
A broad anti-Trump coalition, wrapping from Liz Cheney to Bernie Sanders
Trump and the anti-establishment coalition are using the I&I issue set to coax Black and Latino men into their ranks, while Harris and the anti-Trump set are using D&D in an attempt to bring over college-educated suburban women. If the polls are correct, these shifts are poised to almost offset each other. Which way that “almost” leans will decide, a few weeks from now, which coalition is seen as ascendant and which strategy is regarded as prophetic — even though, in all likelihood, both will come within inches of paying off.
More news to know
WaPo: FBI investigating alleged leak of Israel war plan documents
AP: Trump makes more debunked claims about FEMA as he surveys storm damage in North Carolina
NBC: Usha Vance’s expansive reading list gives a glimpse of a private figure in the campaign
CNBC: Trump tax plans could exempt 93 million Americans from income taxes
Punchbowl: The nonagenarian Senate GOP chair
MLive: Gerald Ford‘s daughter endorses Kamala Harris for president
The day ahead
President Biden will meet with Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob and then travel to Concord, New Hampshire, where he will visit a Democratic campaign office and deliver remarks on prescription drug costs with Bernie Sanders.
Vice President Harris will tape interviews with NBC’s Hallie Jackson and Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro.
Former President Trump will hold a roundtable with Latino leaders at his golf club in Miami, Florida, and hold a campaign rally in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Gov. Tim Walz will hold events in Madison and Racine, Wisconsin. Former President Barack Obama will join him for the Madison stop.
Sen. JD Vance will campaign in Tucson and Peoria, Arizona.
I'd like to stay the course and remain optimistic, Gabe?! I'm filling out my Mail in Ballot today in Oregon,as are millions of others. While trump flails around incoherent and Raging Hate, Kamala is campaigning her heart out to the American people. Vote Blue Up and Down the Ballot in November. Thank You and will reStack ASAP 💯👍🇺🇲💙🌊!
Perhaps it's time to re-visit (post-election) the legacy of Lee Atwater, who "gifted" us (for lack of a better term) much of the nastiness and racism that imbues our presidential elections annually.