Why Trump won: 5 theories

Republicans promised a red wave in 2022; it arrived two years later. Not only did Donald Trump romp to victory atop the ticket in 2024, but Republicans retook control of the Senate and seem poised to hold the House. (A number of House races, as of Friday, are still too close to call.)
What Trump did was a remarkable feat. Polling suggested a margin-of-error race in every swing state; Trump delivered a clean sweep of all seven. He improved on his 2020 margin in over 90% of counties across the country, per analyses by The Washington Post and Financial Times.
Throughout a race that was unpredictable and at times chaotic, Trump proved invincible. The things that doomed previous presidential campaigns did not apply. In 2016, early reporting about Hillary Clinton’s alleged mishandling of classified documents sunk her campaign; Trump was indicted on 40 counts of mishandling classified documents — plus indicted in two other lawsuits, and convicted in a third — and he was unaffected. In the closing days of the 2012 race, Mitt Romney sank after he offended Barack Obama’s supporters; in the closing days of 2024, Trump criticized Harris supporters, Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden, immigrants, Puerto Ricans, Haitians, journalists, Liz Cheney, Oprah, the city of Detroit and Fox News. It had no impact.
Autopsies of Harris’ loss will roll out in coming weeks; analyses of Trump’s victory will follow. There is no one reason why Trump won. Here are five possibilities.
Theory No. 1: Economic dissatisfaction. If the Biden-Harris administration deserved credit for avoiding a post-pandemic recession, it earned none of it from voters. By most metrics, the U.S. economy’s recovery was outpacing other developed countries: inflation had declined since its mid-2022 peak; the S&P 500 was up over 70% from Election Day 2020; unemployment is down and and wages are up.
But voters do not want to be mansplained that the economy is great, when their individual economic situation is not. Ever since mid-2023, polls suggested the economy (and more specifically, inflation) was the top issue for voters. Biden tried, for months, to pitch them on “Bidenomics,” telling them the situation wasn’t as bad as they thought it was. That didn’t move the needle, so Biden focused on democracy. That didn’t work, either, and Biden exited the race. (An obviously simplistic retelling, but the issues track.) When Harris attempted to pick up the scraps, voters had already decided they wanted a change — and their pocketbooks were the leading proponent.
Theory No. 2: Status-quo sickness. Voters wanted change, and Trump — more so than Harris — was able to convince voters he would bring that change. Harris’ messaging was forward-looking, but when she was asked just how her administration would be different from Biden’s, she could offer no coherent answer. It became a frequent attack line from Trump’s team: a vote for Harris is a vote for a continuation of the same.
David Axelrod, a chief architect behind Obama’s campaigns, noted that Harris faced “tremendous headwinds” — economic dissatisfaction, low favorability, a majority of voters who saw the country as on the wrong track. “Give Trump’s team credit,” Axelrod posted on X. “They set out from the start to define her as the status quo by tying her to an unpopular president on economy/border issues, and they succeeded.”
Theory No. 3: Blame (or thank) Biden. Not only did Biden hand Harris the baton while they were losing the race, but he did so with an incredibly short runway remaining. “We dug out of a deep hole but not enough,” David Plouffe, a top Harris adviser, posted on X Wednesday. (The veiled jab at Biden was deleted by Thursday morning, as was Plouffe’s X account.)
It’s common for rival segments of a party to spar in the wake of an electoral loss. The divisions are particularly visible this time around: Harris’ supporters think Biden should have dropped out earlier; Harris critics think Biden never should have run for reelection in the first place, allowing a Democratic primary to bring forward the best candidate possible. Trump’s campaign was not free of infighting, but at least it was matured: while Harris had 107 days to throw a campaign together, Trump had 710.
Theory No. 4: The class divide. Much ink has already spilled on Latinos and Black voters, who moved to the right in massive numbers. But a more effective reading of exit polling may not be a race-based shift, but a class one.
In 2012, Obama won a majority of voters without a college degree; this year, Trump secured 64% of them. In 2012, Obama won 57% of those who make between $30,000 and $50,000 a year; this cycle, Trump won most of them.
And while Trump pulled together a more ethnically diverse coalition than 2016 and 2020, it was driven by men of color: Trump won 55% of Latino men, but only 38% of Latino women; he won 21% of Black men, but only 7% of Black women.
For many in Trump’s circle, the election is seen as a referendum on the excesses of the progressive left, and a shift away from identity politics. “The elites cannot come to grips with how alienated they are from the country,” Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, told The New York Times.
Theory No. 5: Out with the old. Across the world, ruling parties are losing and challengers are winning. Per the Financial Times: “The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters.” In France, Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble coalition was ousted. So were Britain’s Tories and Japan’s Liberal Democrats. And on and on. “This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records,” FT noted.
Why? Perhaps voters globally are unsettled by the possibility of war; perhaps they are frustrated by the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2024 election, The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson noted, was “the second pandemic election.” Biden won the first, which was seen as an attempt to get a grip on public health. Trump won the second, which hinged on the pandemic’s economic effects.
“On the Trail 2024″ will continue, as we make sense of what happened in this election and follow the transition efforts, but it will become a weekly newsletter. Check your inbox every Friday for the latest.