Why Trump Won

Vibes. In a modern democracy, you don't really need to know anything about the policies being pushed by the parties to guess who will win. All you need is the vibe. When the vibe is bad, the incumbents almost always lose. We got our first black president because the vibe was so grim in post-Iraq, financially collapsing America. Right now the vibe in the US is horrible. Of course the people in the out party are often grouchy, but left-wing Americans have also been miserable under Biden; I have all year been seeing complaints from liberals about how young people will never own homes because private equity is buying them all up etc.

This is true around the world. Matt Yglesias:

The most important context for this race – what broadly distinguishes the family of takes you should pay attention to from those you should dismiss – is what's happening internationally. The UK conservatives got thrashed recently. The Canadian liberals are set to get thrashed soon. The incumbent center-left party lost its first post-Covid election in New Zealand, and the incumbent center-right coalition lost its first post-Covid election in Australia. The incumbent coalition is Germany is hideously unpopular.

Yglesias missed the fall of the Law and Justice Party in Poland, which some liberals were afraid had rigged the system to keep themselves in power forever; turns out their hold on power was not strong enough to survive a post-Covid election.

In a country where 80 percent or more of people always vote for their party and the other 20 percent aren't paying much attention to politics, I think the global bad vibe is sufficient to explain the Republican victory.

Trump's hold on the Republican party is a separate issue, but once he was nominated it would have been hard for him to lose.

Inflation. Every pollster who asked Americans about their top issue found the economy either first or second, and inflation was by far the biggest economic concern. Americans hate inflation. This bout of inflation was not that bad by 1970s standards, but it was worst in food, which is the thing that people worry about the most. Plus we got higher gas prices because of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and then interest rates were raised to fight inflation, which made houses and cars more expensive. 

Let me make a note here on what "inflation" means to people. The economists I follow have been pointing out for six months that inflation is easing and is now down to around 2%. But this mistakes what people upset about "inflation" are talking about. To them it means high prices. So long as prices don't come down, they complain about inflation, even if the prices have been at the same high level for months. 

It took me years of pondering polls about crime and divorce to figure this out. I wondered why, all through the 90s and 00s, Americans kept saying that crime and divorce were "increasing" when they were really going down. It eventually dawned on me that people responded to that question as being about the level of those things, not their rate of change. They meant, "crime and divorce are too high." Once I figured this out I switched my scorn to the pollsters who insisted on asking the question this way.

We got this bout of inflation, across most of the world, because of Covid-related supply disruptions and governments pumping big money into the economy to keep the pandemic from causing a depression. In retrospect, maybe they pumped out too much money, but both Trump and Biden did this, and Congress went along; this was a thoroughly bipartisan error. But of course the incumbents paid the price.

Immigration. Millions of Americans think we have too many immigrants, and in historical terms we do have a lot. The percentage of the foreign born in the population is at a post-World War II high. Most of the people who worry about this are solid Republicans anyway, but not all of them; Trump seems to have gotten a record share of the Hispanic vote, partly because of his anti-immigrant position. It's old news that recent immigrants often oppose more immigration. Besides the level of immigration and complaints about refugees, the sense that we simply don't have control of our borders (we don't) feeds a sense that this is somehow out of control.

Liberal Foibles. I am a proud liberal and a lifelong Democrat, but even I am sick of diversity talk. Enough already. When the National Science Foundation demands that applicants for grants in physics show how their projects will promote diversity in science – they do – things have gotten out of hand. And if liberals don't stop it with the "educational excellence is just a code for racism" talk they will drive all the ambitious Asians out of the Democratic party. 

Harris. I despised her in 2020, was utterly baffled that Biden put her on his ticket, and I still despise her. One complaint: as Attorney General of California she did absolutely nothing to reign in prosecutors – in fact she waived off every single complaint of prosecutorial misconduct she ever saw, and never disciplined anyone – then when the George Floyd thing erupted she tried to pretend that she had always been for police reform. Because she knew she was weak on that issue she tried to shore up her leftist credentials by issuing a bunch of really dumb statements about economics and publicly defending school busing, one of the worst government mistakes of my lifetime. She had to drop out before the primaries even started. Bleah. For me the one silver lining of this debacle is that she won't be our first female president.

You also have to think that being black and female cost her at least a couple of million votes.

So if you want any reason for the Republican onslaught, other than the vibe, then the chain of Democratic failures goes: Biden puts Harris on his ticket; Biden tries to run for a second term depite his declining mental state; it takes so long for his friends to persuade him to withdraw that there is no time for primaries, leaving Harris the only practical option; she is a weak candidate.

Trump's Pevious Term. I saw over and over again that when Democrats tried to warn about bad things Trump would do if reelected, lukewarm Trump people (e.g., Trump-skeptical Republicans) would say, "Did he do that last time?" And mostly he didn't. I share the concern that all the organizing MAGA folks have been doing to surround Trump with more extreme people might have an effect, but I do have to admit that until he challenged his election loss Trump was a mediocre president who did a lot less damage than Bush II.

Human Nature. If you want a negative lesson from this election, it would be that most people are selfish, insufficiently moral, generally unthoughtful, and don't give a damn about people not like themselves. The average Trump voter didn't care about his bursting closet of scandals, his rancid rhetoric, or his constant lying, because the price of eggs was too high. 

Millions of people, of course, support Trump because of his amorality and viciousness. Some of them are just amoral and vicious themselves and admire Trump because he has the balls to act the way they would like to. Others feel deeply threatened by something about the modern world (atheism, globalization, immigration) and see Trump as somebody who will fight against the dark forces they fear.

But I think viciousness is a minority position; much more common are people who just don't care. Trump captured the vicious faction, riled up folks upset about immigration and globalization, and got control of the Republican Party. Given party loyalty and the importance of vibes in determining who wins elections, winning nationally was only a matter of time for him.

Democracy is Not All that Beloved. Talking about threats to democracy seems, so far as I can tell, to have no effect on voters. It doesn't seem that the American system has many real fans. What people mainly want is a good economy and to be left alone. If a dictator gave them that, millions wouldn't care about losing their votes. Plus, in the US both parties have been accusing the other of being anti-democratic for so long (since the 1930s, anyway) that most voters just tune out all that talk.

What people would do if there was a real coup, I have no idea, but I am not convinced that the outrage would be all that great.

Another way to think about this is to note how many people believe it just doesn't matter who wins elections. I know smart people who are convinced it's all a sham anyway because nothing ever changes – these are mostly socialists – but the sentiment that politics doesn't matter seems very widespread. Consider, as just one datum, how many people don't bother to vote.

Nobody Cares about the Rest of the World. Trump's avowed desire to stop aiding Ukraine probably cost him about a thousand votes, and his utter scorn for most of the world's inhabitants even less.

Don't Over Interpet. After every election a buzzing swarm of political writers run in circles waving their arms, shouting about how everything has changed. I don't think anything much has changed in America since 2012. In that year Obama beat a much tougher Republican than Trump because the economy was booming and the vibe was positive. The vibe had soured by 2016, enabling Trump to barely beat a widely hated Democrat. The vibe was still bad in 2020, enabling a Democrat about whom most voters thought nothing at all to beat Trump. The vibe is still terrible, enabling Trump to beat another unloved Democrat. 

Remains to be seen what kind of four years we are in for, but in terms of deeper meaning to this election, there is none.