Anatomy of victory: The five reasons Trump won

Harry Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, once quipped: ‘Polls are like sleeping pills – designed to lull the voters into sleeping on election day’. And the truth of Truman’s thesis has been confirmed once again by the recently concluded US presidential campaign – the outcome of which contradicted the pollsters.

Donald Trump is back.

America has changed a lot since the tycoon first won the presidency eight years ago. But the reactions to his recent victory have evoked lasting memories of 2016. Just as then, the Democrats, stunned by the results of the election, fell into a stupor for a while, while the Republicans, elated by the victory, rejoiced: “We have stopped the invasion of the left and the globalists – America has a chance to be saved.”

The shock of some and the joy of others is compounded by the fact that Trump not only won all the key swing states, but also became the first Republican candidate in 20 years to win both the electoral and popular vote. The latter shows that he didn’t just win in an ‘anti-rating battle’. So it’s not just that Harris was so bad, it’s that Trump himself ran a near-perfect campaign. The ingredients of this success are many, but the most important are probably five.

First, having been burned by early and remote (“postal”) voting in 2020, the Republicans this time managed to set up these processes relatively quickly for their supporters. The first early voting results showed the greater discipline of the conservative electorate – one of the Democrats’ potential avenues of manipulation was closed in time.

Second, in the traditional confrontation of so-called party coalitions, Trump’s political technologists managed not only to retain the votes of ‘their’ electorate (‘white, older, predominantly male’), but also to chew up some of the ‘outsiders’ (people of color, younger, predominantly female’). Democrats can blame Kamala Harris personally for this. In 2020, Biden took a significant number of voters away from Trump in each of the three categories: even though as an ‘elderly white man’ himself, he was associated with the older generation.

With the country reeling from the Covid pandemic and Black Lives Matter riots, the eccentric and often inconsistent Trump didn’t look like the man to clean up the mess. In 2020, the demand for a steady hand won out.

However, four years later, it’s Trump himself who looks like the experienced candidate. It also seems that voters never understood who Harris was – there was no coherent image of Kamala during her vice-presidency. Attempts by Democratic Party campaign strategists to turn her into a ‘universal’ candidate liked by both sides did not work. The celebrity positioning didn’t work, and the far from perfect – but ‘real’ Trump was closer to the voters than Harris, who changes her views with the speed of a weather vane on a windy day.

Trump’s success among Latino men (immigrants or descendants of Latin American immigrants) is particularly notable: four years ago, Biden was well ahead of Trump in this category (66% vs. 32%); this year Harris took 52% and Trump 46%. The narrowing of the gap from 33% to 6% in four years is a serious sign that the Democrats are falling out of favor with the fastest-growing group of voters. In other categories, the increase in votes for Trump compared to 2020 is less substantial, but that doesn’t make it any easier for the Democrats. Among 18-29 year olds, Trump won 43% (35% in 2020), while the Democrats lost 13% (they beat the Republicans by 24% in 2020, by 11% in 2024). In the 30-44 age group, Trump almost reached parity with Harris – 48% to 49% (in 2020 he won 43% here and the Democratic lead was 12%). 

The growth in support from the younger electorate was helped by the Republicans’ embrace of issues popular with them: cryptocurrency, cyber games, UFC fight promotions, innovative technology and social media. Hollywood was largely anti-Trump, but that didn’t help Harris. The Republicans responded by engaging popular opinion leaders, streamers and bloggers ‘of the people’ in their campaign.

Third, for the first time in a long time, it was the Republicans, not the Democrats, who managed to attract ‘third’ forces to their side. Usually, independent candidates play the role of spoilers, taking votes away from the GOP. This time, the independent candidate Robert Kennedy, who gained big support relatively speaking, and the ‘candidate without a party’ Elon Musk, who embodied the voters’ demand for something conceptually new instead of the eternal fight between ‘elephants’ and ‘donkeys’, endorsed Trump – and energetically at that.

Fourth, the force majeure events that occurred with enviable regularity in this campaign – hurricanes, assassination attempts on Trump, calling his supporters “garbage,” etc., also played into the Republicans’ hands. These episodes were important not so much in themselves, but because each time Trump and his political technologists managed to use them to their maximum advantage.

Finally, Trump made a clever choice of ruling mate. Although J.D. Vance himself ran an uneven campaign and regularly prompted negative news stories for himself and his patron, it was he who gave voters the image of the future of the Republican Party and the vision of the ‘old/new America’ that the Democrats had convinced voters did not exist as an option.

As for themselves, having failed to block first Trump’s nomination, then his victory, the Democrats are gradually returning to the regime of daily delegitimization of the president-elect, which was tried and tested in 2017-2020. Hence some utterly ridiculous new accusations of Russian interference (allegations that bomb threats to some polling stations on November 5 came from Russian domains), reminders of the unproven criminal cases against Trump, and fear-mongering about America’s inevitable transformation from democracy to tyranny. It all sounds unconvincing and looks more like the Democrats desperately flinging the last pieces of mud. Americans, however, do not care much about any of this – they are much more interested in finding out what the President-elect will do than in watching the ‘downed pilots’ flounder. 

But the confrontation between Trump and the so-called deep state is not over. In time, new, more serious reasons will be found to significantly limit his political maneuvering, if not take him out of the game.

Trump, who showed himself to be a more systematic player in this election than in 2016, is likely to act less provocatively but more decisively. It is not for nothing that his supporters have spent the last four years “growing” a cadre of bureaucratic and ideologically savvy lieutenants at non-public conservative organizations. Therefore, with the election of Trump, the eight-year saga of rebuilding the American state on new ideological principles is not coming to an end, but is entering a new phase. This will no longer include one of its current protagonists, Joe Biden, who paradoxically also emerged victorious from this election campaign. From the moment his fellow Democrats persuaded him to give up the party’s nomination, ‘self-denial’ has been an effective survival strategy for Biden. He won’t be called the best president in history, but the burden of failure and embarrassing mistakes can be shifted to Harris – it was she, not Biden, who lost.

Perhaps that is why today Biden is more upbeat than ever, as happy as if he had won the election himself.

This article was first published by Profile.ru, and was translated and edited by the RT team