Opinion: It was avoidable. And inevitable.
My thoughts as Donald Trump takes office (again)
Americans are waking up to a new president. Well, sort of.
Donald Trump, America’s 45th commander-in-chief, will take the oath of office Monday as its 47th (and I will be on a beach enjoying “winter” in San Juan, but that’s besides the point).
It’s a day that was just as avoidable as it was inevitable.
I have spent a lot of time since the election thinking about what all got us to this moment. Truthfully, it’s hard to come up with a single correct answer. But as I reflected on the election and all the events leading up to it, it’s hard to find any fundamental that pointed to Democrats winning the White House in 2024 – yes, even against Donald Trump.
1. 39%. 75%. 86.
If you are looking for a simple reason to explain the results of the election, look no further than the following 3 numbers.
39%. President Joe Biden had a 39% approval rating in the run-up to election day. Even after he dropped out and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, questions about his administration’s transparency (or lack thereof) – particularly regarding his health -- would not go away. Harris herself had defended her boss’ acuity even after his June debate with Trump. But once she became the nominee, it was her responsibility to differentiate herself from her unpopular boss. She was not able to do so, as Trump’s campaign reminded her and voters over and over again.
75%. Roughly three in four voters have been saying all year that our country is on the “wrong track.” This is a number that many people (myself included) never really saw as indicative of the national mood. But it is hard to tell an electorate full of dissatisfied voters that now is not the time to rock the boat. Harris repeatedly said on the trail that it was time to “turn the page,” which might have been a naïve selling pitch for the sitting vice president in an unpopular White House to offer voters.
86. That’s how old President Biden would have been in 2029 – the end of what would have been a second term. Despite low approval ratings and his advanced age, the President initially ran for re-election thinking that only he could beat Trump. It was that decision that could end up defining Biden’s legacy – the man he had vowed to expunge from the political scene is now just hours away from being sworn in as president again. We’ll never know how things would have gone if he hadn’t run at all, but a spirited Democratic primary (a contest that Harris likely would have emerged from as the de facto next-in-line) would have given the eventual nominee more time to introduce themselves to voters and to create some distance between themselves and Biden. Harris only had 100 or so days to mount a national campaign against someone who has been running for nearly a decade. It may seem hard to believe, but voters seemed ready and willing to take a gamble on the devil they knew rather than the one they didn’t know.
2. “Facts don’t care about your feelings”
One of the biggest lessons we all learned from this election is that facts do not matter anymore — at least not when it comes to how people are feeling when they come home to the dinner table every day after work.
It is unquestionable that President Biden oversaw a largely successful recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Within just a few months of taking office, millions of Americans were vaccinated and back to living (somewhat) normal lives. But voters and their pocketbooks quickly began feeling the effects of Biden’s massive spending plans at everyday places like the gas station and the grocery store. Inflation had undoubtedly cooled since its 8 percent peak in 2022, but voters are still paying higher prices for just about everything (and oftentimes getting less bang for their buck).
Immigration is another great example. Biden was forced to act alone on the issue after Trump pushed congressional Republicans to walk away from the negotiating table. The White House and the Harris campaign would quickly point to the decreasing number of illegal border crossings. But how do you think the average voter feels when they turn on “Good Morning America” and see buses full of migrants and their families arriving at high school gyms and hotels in some of America’s largest cities?
In other words, it’s hard to explain a bunch of positive numbers and trends on a graph when that’s not what people are feeling at the checkout line or seeing on the evening news.
3. “I am your retribution”
It’s a line we heard from Trump time and time again on the campaign trail: our political and legal systems have been weaponized. And it might be one of his most successful campaign tactics yet.
Since leaving the White House in 2021, Trump has tried to rebrand himself as a martyr-like figure to the MAGA faithful. As he faced impeachments, dozens of criminal charges and assassination attempts, you would hear him warn his supporters “if they can come for me, they will come for you.”
Rather than explore or debate the merit to these claims, I just want to point out how interesting it is that it all it took for people to begin losing trust in our institutions was for Donald Trump to start pointing it out.
Put another way, there are people in this country who have legitimate reasons not to trust the system (slavery, unarmed murders, lab experiments and natural disasters, just to name a few). Their concerns are often met with scoffs and eyerolls. But any accountability Trump faces for his misdeeds can only be because of a broken system – the same system they say works fairly for everybody.
4. “All About That Base”
Democrats should to take a page out of Meghan Trainor’s playbook and be “all about that base” if they want to be successful in future elections, because the coalition that fueled Biden’s victory just isn’t there anymore.
Donald Trump won the popular vote last year in part because we saw huge shifts away from Democrats in areas where they had been known to garner huge support in the past. Turnout among minorities across the board was down compared to four years ago, a sign that the energy and enthusiasm from 2020 has all but evaporated. (For god’s sake, NEW JERSEY was within single digits!)
What could be behind these shifts? 2024 was the first presidential election since the pandemic, and some voters in these blue states may still resent their local and state leaders for implementing strict lockdown rules. Voters in cities like New York could be telling Democrats to change their tune on crime and immigration. Not to mention, the impact of inflation and rising prices can be felt more in urban and suburban areas than in rural communities.
And as the conflict in Gaza worsened, the Biden (and eventually Harris) campaign was forced to defend and explain the administration’s unabashed support for Israel. But many Muslim and Palestinian-Americans in places like Dearborn, Mich. weren’t waiting on an explanation: Four years after awarding Biden nearly 70 percent of the vote, Harris earned just 36 percent in Dearborn.
CONCLUSION
A lot of people are still in shock about the outcome of last year’s election. But the writing was on the wall the entire time and I am disappointed in a lot of our pundits and prognosticators for trying to overcomplicate what happened last November.
It’s simple: there was an unpopular Democrat in office, his vice president had little time to campaign and voters overwhelmingly thought our country was headed in the wrong direction.
Ordinarily I would say that an electoral loss would seal a politician’s career. But the incoming president literally lost the previous election (and tried overthrowing the government after doing so). Harris, who will only be 64 in 2028, could easily run again if she wanted to. But personally, I don’t think there is a better time than right now for Democrats to start from scratch. Harris may have lost for reasons that were largely beyond her control, but I think Democrats need to try and move on from the Obama/Biden/Clinton era and spend the next four years prepping the next generation of leaders. Harris, for better or worse, is part of that era.
But if she does run, she will certainly have more than 100 days to mount a campaign against the first Republican nominee not named Donald Trump since 2012.
Excellent !