As with Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, his somewhat less surprising – though still jarring – win in 2024 has set off a flurry of failed explanations for how and why he pulled it off.

Let’s try to cut through the fog and get at why this happened (again).

National Election Results

The obvious story here is that Trump defeated Kamala Harris and won the presidency in a very Grover Cleveland like fashion.

But once we move past that and look at other federal races, we see it was a good night for the GOP across the board. I predicted that we’d see a nationalized race where the House and Senate largely follow the presidency. And, indeed, that’s what happened. I figured those races would lean Democratic to follow a Harris win. Instead, they leaned GOP to follow a Trump win.

But they did follow. It just looks like the GOP – rather than the Democrats – will end up with narrow House and Senate majorities. Contrary to my predictions.

But why and how?

Bad Explanations

We have a pretty standard explanation on the political right and center for why Trump won. It’s the same one they gave in 2016. And it’s the reason why J.D. Vance became famous and eventually fast tracked to the vice presidency.

It’s this: They think Trump has some kind of special electoral genius. He’s naturally in tune with ‘working class Americans’ and led a working class revolution at the polls. And, according to this line of thought, he did it again.

I’m not going to dig too deeply into this one here, because I’ve debunked it repeatedly, starting years ago. Once the full data are available, no doubt I’ll have more to say. But Trump’s base wasn’t working class in 2016 or 2020.  Whether it was in 2024 remains to be seen in the data, but I still have my doubts.

So, one bad explanation down.

That leaves us with a couple of related explanations found in centrist, liberal, and progressive circles. From these parts of U.S. politics, we get the idea that the country isn’t ready to elect a black woman, either because she would be perceived as ‘too liberal’ (centrists) or because the country is too racist, sexist, and/or misogynist to vote for a black woman (liberals and progressives).

Both explanations fail.

At the end of the day, what stands out to me more than anything is how little the gender or race of the candidate mattered to voters. The U.S. remains a deeply racist, sexist, and misogynistic country in many ways. But this seems to have had even less impact on election results in 2024 than it did in 2016 – and it didn’t matter much in 2016, either.

Democrats lost for a different reason.

Democrats Can’t Change the Weather

On the face of it, the main reason why I say Trump’s win isn’t a matter of structural bias, racism, or sexism is that we had a great test case of how the election would’ve gone had a white man been the Democratic candidate.

Joe Biden was the Democratic candidate until he stepped aside. And he was doing worse than Harris. Had Biden remained the candidate, Democrats would’ve lost by a greater margin. Perhaps they would’ve gotten wiped out.

Plus, let’s not forget the fact that Democratic women won several key Senate races in states Harris lost (Wisconsin, Michigan, and possibly also Nevada).

And that brings me to my main point. Here’s what I think happened in the election: The Democrats were an unpopular incumbent party. Unpopular incumbent parties tend to lose elections. Democrats lost.

That’s the gist of it.

Why were the Democrats unpopular? Mostly because voters still feel economic shock waves in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, particularly inflation and the relative lack of good jobs in the last couple of years. When nearly two thirds of the voters say the country is on the wrong track, and fewer than 40% of voters approve of the job the President is doing, it’s bad news for the incumbent party.

That’s why Trump won and Harris lost. Because Democrats can’t change the weather. They did their best – and Trump did his best to pull defeat from the jaws of victory – but they came up short.

Iowa Elections

On an anticlimactic note, I’ll say a word about Iowa. I predicted the GOP would sweep all 4 Congressional races, and they did.

Iowa Democrats are lost, and they need to figure out how to build a future coalition of voters. I said it over 3 years ago, and I’ll just repeat it until it happens, I guess.

For now, Iowa Democrats are still doomed.

Postscript – What are you trying to convince me of, exactly?

In a memorable scene from Kill Bill, Vol. 2, ne’er-do-well bouncer Budd strolls into his boss’s office for a meeting. Budd complains about having to work while no one is in the bar, while his boss complains about Budd showing up 20 minutes late.

Budd’s got a point, I guess. Why work as a bouncer when there’s ‘no one to bounce’? But that point doesn’t exactly help poor Budd. As his boss notes, ‘what are you trying to convince me of, exactly?’

Predictably, the boss fires Budd because he’s paying him to do nothing.

You should watch the scene. It’s hilarious.

I think about this scene when I listen to liberals and progressives argue that Americans are too racist and misogynist to vote for a black woman for President. And I wonder – what are you trying to convince me of, exactly?

To those who make this argument: my sense is that you’re trying to make a moral argument to the listener that they should check their own biases. The goal seems to be to spur a moral reckoning among the voters, to push them out of their slumber and into firm anti-racist commitments.

But that’s not how the voters work.

For one, as I argued above, I don’t even think this is why Harris lost. But even if it were, most voters will draw a different lesson, just as Budd’s boss did. Most Democratic primary voters – people who might even be sympathetic to this reasoning – would use it to conclude that they should stop nominating women to the presidency.

After all, if a candidate can’t win, isn’t that just an argument to nominate someone who can?