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Why Did Trump Win?
By Kieron Murdoch | Opinion Contributor
People both inside and outside the United States (US) who did not see the former US President turned President-elect Donald Trump’s comeback in the 2024 Presidential election as favourable or likely, will be debating the possible reasons behind his success and the failure of his opponent for some time. It is important to remember however that the US is a large, diverse, and complex country where one line explanations may risk oversimplifying matters. Mr. Trump likely won for a wide variety of reasons.
In any democracy, voters can cast their ballots on the basis of confidence in a candidate or party, lack of confidence in another candidate or party, or strictly on the matter of policy and whichever side has promised to implement. As such, there will be many people who voted for Mr. Trump on the basis of his personality and leadership, those who simply voted to oust the Biden-Harris leadership, those who prefer any of Trump’s particular conservative policy approaches, and everyone in between.
A number of polls taken before and on election day showed that concern over the US economy, the growth and survival of certain industries and stubbornly high prices was a major concern. Such a state of affairs seldom bodes well for any incumbent, and Mr, Trump’s opponent effectively represented an incumbent administration. There will be many voters who voted with confidence that a Trump presidency would result in a better economic situation.
Abortion was made a major issue in the election. There will be those whose ballots were cast in large part on the confidence they had in a Trump administration to take a far more conservative approach to the issue as compared to his rival who promised to pass legislation at the federal level providing access to abortion.
Notably, his rhetoric here was inflammatory, using things such as a viral misquote from a 2019 comment of a Democratic Virginia Governor on abortion to falsely claim that his opponents were in favour of abortions after birth (euthanizing a newborn). A Reuters report addresses the issue here. Many of his supporters bought into this and other extreme theories.
Border security and immigration were major elements of the campaign as well. There will be those who supported Mr. Trump on the basis that they had greater confidence in him to effectively manage the migration crisis affecting the US-Mexico border. He also promised mass deportations which may have been favourable to those who hold the view that migrants were causing economic pressure, or that those to be considered true citizens were being ethnically, socially or culturally marginalised.
Notably, his rhetoric on immigration was incendiary. He consistently referred to it as an “invasion” pitting himself a the strongman to fight the battle against it. None could forget his debate performance against Kamala Harris where he repeatedly stated that thousands of rapists were pouring over the US border, ready to cause havoc in the country, that migrants were savagely killing the family pets of Americans and eating them (based on a false claim about Haitian migrants), and that crime was decreasing in all other countries around the world because all the criminals were pouring into the US.
“They’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the pets of the people who live there,” is a quote that won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
US foreign policy and its support for Ukraine and Israel in the conflicts in Ukraine and in the Middle East were also important to US voters in this election. Conservatives during the Trump era have coalesced around the notion that the Ukraine conflict, that Ukraine itself is not a worthy ally to support, and that Vladimir Putin is a leader with whom a deal can be struck. The view seems more in tune with Trump and his America First brand of politics than it does with more traditional conservative views on America’s role in the world and in Europe.
Nevertheless, many were also influenced by the idea which had gained currency that the incumbents were wasting US taxes to support an unworthy ally in an unwinnable war.
Notably, Trump and his supporters had long spread the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory prior to and after the 2020 election. These were a series of false allegations about corruption involving Biden, his son, and activities in Ukraine. Read more here. The very inference of Ukraine by 2024 brought up a deluge of ideas for some conservatives – a corrupt and murky place where the incumbent President had corrupt dealings and is now throwing away our money.
According to the Pew Research Centre in September of 2024, the economy, immigration, violent crime and foreign policy were the top four issues for Trump supporters who planned to vote in the elections, while healthcare, supreme court appointments, the economy, and abortion were the top issues for Harris supporters.
The circumstances surrounding this election were also relevant as they are in any election. This brings us back to the economy. In this Presidential election, much of the talk among many working and middle class people in the US is about the impact of higher prices and how difficult it continues to be to afford certain things. Back in 2020, when Biden achieved a historic record number of votes for any presidential candidate at 81 million, the focus was on Covid-19 and the response.
In 2020, Biden was able to take Trump to task as the incumbent, blaming him for what Biden’s campaign would have classified as an abysmal handling of the pandemic. He accused him of being partly responsible for deaths across the country and of participating in the spreading of Covid-19 misinformation. In October 2020, the New York Times reported on a Cornell University study that found that Donald Trump was “the single largest driver” of covid misinformation in the US, encouraging his supporters to work against lockdowns, covid protocols, mask requirements, vaccine mandates and the like.
Trump’s anti-establishment politics had people in the streets protesting against measures designed to safeguard their very lives, and becoming highly mistrustful of their state governments and agencies of the federal government working to prevent the spread and mortality of Covid-19. Biden was able to capitalise on this in the midst of a misinformation pandemic in which Trump was basking, to paint the then President as an extremely poor option for another four years. Pew noted in 2020 that vastly more Biden supporters say that the pandemic and its handling were a motivation for the way they voted.
Biden also campaigned at a time of deep division in the US surrounding racial and ethnic relations and inequality. George Floyd was killed by a police officer in May 2020. More attention was being paid to issues like police killings of minority groups. Racially and ethnically charged protests were ubiquitous. Meanwhile, Trump had cast himself and was cast by his opponents as less sympathetic to the grievances of these minority groups.
DW has suggested that top issues in the 2020 election were the pandemic, healthcare, the economy, and racial tensions.
Meanwhile, based on data from Pew, the Brookings Institute discussed in 2021 how Biden secured victory in 2020. It said the Biden campaign reunited the Democratic Party, maintained solid support among African Americans, appealed to the centre of the electorate across party lines, regained much of the support among men that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 while retaining her support among women, raised the Democratic share of the white working-class men’s vote—the heart of the Trump coalition, and continued the shift of educated voters towards the Democratic Party.
It is also notable that in this election, Trump looks set to nearly match or surpass the 74 million votes he got in 2020, whereas Harris seems likely to fall significantly short of the 81 million votes Biden was able to muster in that election. She looks set to fall in the mid-70s.
Some have suggested that Harris may have done better had she had more time to campaign if Biden had not run for a second term. Alternatively, had he not run for a second term, there would have been a much earlier primary process that may have found a candidate that might have done better for the party or who might have had the opportunity to develop a more clearly defined platform and gained mileage on issues that resonate with voters.
One cannot discuss Mr. Trump’s victory without acknowledging the populist nature of his movement and the alarming extent to which he has used misinformation and fear to rally support amongst his base. This to many, is the most dangerous thing about the nature of his politics – the comfortability with using falsehoods, playing on their emotions and stoking fear, and then encouraging them to disregard other sources and only hear the truth from you. Certain traditional and social media outlets like Fox andTwitter under Musk are echo chambers for this type of information.
When you practise that type of politics, you are not encouraging your supporters to be critical thinkers. You are encouraging them to simply believe you against all odds and to always mistrust anything to the contrary. It encourages people to lock themselves in information echo chambers. It is a near religious sort of approach to politics. The leader is messianic. The leader is under attack from evil forces. Those who speak against the leader are heretics.
He has built up and emboldened a base of supporters in his country who have literally carved out their own reality in many cases, and believe his word and the word of others within the same ideological camp faster than they would give credence to a government official, or a public authority, or a credible news organisation, or scientific sources.
Professor Ruth Wodak of Lancaster University commented in 2017 for an article on populism published online by the London School of Economics. She stated, “Right-wing populist parties claim that they and only they represent the ‘real people’ in a nativist and culturalist sense. This ideology manifests a deeply authoritarian mindset. They tend to construct and reinforce threat and danger scenarios – a politics of fear – caused by arbitrarily defined scapegoats. The party leaders promise to solve these problems and create hope – they will save ‘the people’, protect our borders, and attempt to turn the clock back – as an apocalyptic future (of decay, failure and destruction) is predicted if such changes would not be implemented.”
This has a great deal of resonance when analysing the rhetoric of Trump and his allies.
Nevertheless, while the results of the election clearly indicate that the current American voting population is largely comfortable with Trump’s brand of populism, or if not, at least prefer his conservative policies over the alternative party, it does not necessarily suggest that the country has slipped over a cliff into a far right abyss as some are suggesting. To make that conclusion, it is arguable that we would need to have seen a total collapse in support on the other side. We didn’t see that.
Trump won convincingly as many Presidents have before. But it may still be too early to conclude that his election signals a new era of ever more right leaning and populist tinged conservative dominance in US politics. His victory, like the many Presidents before him, signals the sentiment of the US people at this point in time, under the current circumstances. He also faces a term limit, meaning that he will be out of office by early 2029 after the election of 2028. This will work against the threat of the Trump personality cult.
But his mark on American and world politics will be nonetheless indelible. This is a man who has dominated US politics since June 2015 when he announced his candidacy for the 2016 election and the US and world media picked up on him as an outlier. When he became the Republican nominee, the focus increased. Then he won the 2016 election, and for four years he dominated the headlines while in office. Then he lost office and further dominated the headlines for refusing to accept it, and encouraging his supporters to reject the result, precipitating the US Capitol attack on January 6th, 2021 by a Trump mob.
He assumed the post of heir apparent the moment he left office. He remained in the spotlight throughout the entirety of Biden’s term, fighting off a deluge of cases related to his business conduct, and his conduct surrounding the 2020 election. He effectively rebranded the Republican party as a Trumpist party, increasingly aiding the marginalisation of traditional conservatives in the party, and giving rise to the ascension of many die-hard Trump loyalists. He has now won a second election and will continue to dominate US politics for the next four years.
When the history of this era is written, it will find that Donald J Trump was one of, if not the most influential person of this time period. No other President or candidate of the last 3 decades or more has attracted such attention.
In large measure, observers outside of the US were looking to see whether Americans would reject or further legitimise Trump’s brand of politics in this election. To the surprise of many, the majority of Americans are comfortable with four more years of a Trump White House. A rejection in 2024 might have been the final nail in his political aspirations for the Presidency given his age. It might have given subdued elements of his party some oxygen to try and lead a refocus away from his style of politics. But with his success comes the further institutionalisation of Trumpism in conservative organisations and in the mind of conservatives in the US.
The difference between this term and the last term is that now, he has fewer guard rails. His party has the Senate and seems likely to take the House . His grip on his party is far tighter than before. And whereas he surrounded himself previously with appointees who moderated his views and reigned him in – conservative appointees with whom he fell out and many of whom openly warned against his return – he is now likely to pick persons firmly in his camp who amplify and support his views.
About the writer:
Kieron Murdoch worked as a journalist and later as a radio presenter in Antigua and Barbuda for eight years, covering politics and governance especially. He is an opinion contributor at antigua.news. If you have an opinion on the issues raised in this editorial and you would like to submit a response by email to be considered for publication, please email staff@antigua.news.
As a hopefully impartial journalist from our country, which I must remind you is NOT a part of the U.S.A., I would advise you to spend 50% of your time reading conservative media articles, and more importantly reading comments from actual people on the ground and also viewing conservative commentary videos on YouTube from non-mainstrean sources and reading the comments on those as well. The mainstream media in the US leans left heavily but that does not represent the actual political divide. Their talking points are biased and their interpretation of how people on the right think is wrong. Usually they are trying to sway people to the left and misrepresent what people on the right believe. And the rightwing mainstream media also does not fully represent what most citizens on the right think. The media is normally trying to score political points. I have found it helpful to hear from the actual people themselves via their comments online to get a true picture. If you really want to understand why Mr. Trump won you should try that. Although there are one or two racists here and there, most people on the right are very rational people who disagree with various leftist policies and ideals. Even black people voted more for Trump than usual because of very real concerns about the direction the Democrats would take the country if they won this time around. Democrats and leftwing media should actually listen to the people and stop blaming Trump for their loss. The people have spoken.