The question: how is it possible that Trump won? It is perhaps one of the most heard since this November 5, the Republican candidate won the elections for the presidency of the United States. An incontestable victory not only in delegates to the Electoral College, but also in the popular vote, something unprecedented for a Republican candidate in more than twenty years. The popular vote was throughout the entire vote counting process the indicator that set off all the alarms in the Democratic field. And yet, before November 5, other data could be observed, one of them, the high level of identification of the population with the Republican Partyanother the number of registered voters in Pennsylvania that indicated that Trump could be elected president again. In any case, the surveys offered very close results, especially in swing states (swing states), the Sun Belt Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada, and the Blue Wall Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania: in all of them the result could fall with little margin on one side or the other. Thus, the key was to achieve the mobilization of the respective electorates. The question was, which constituencies did each camp deal with?
Trump carried out a sustained campaign about discontent and rejection of the woke movement that was very transversal. I wanted to take advantage of what has been sown since 2016 to polarize even more and enter into a cultural confrontation with the Democrats, between losers/winners of globalization. For her part, Kamala Harris wanted to expand her electoral base and focused on three groups of voters: those disenchanted with Trump’s Republican Party, women and racialized minorities. His proposal consisted of moving towards the political center to attract escapees from the right, hence his mentions of the possession of a gun. glock or to fracking; He placed the emphasis of his campaign on the concept of freedom, especially in relation to women’s reproductive rights; and, in the final weeks before the election, it focused on African Americans and Latinos. For the former he had the collaboration of Barak Obama or Samuel L. Jackson, for the latter with Jennifer López or Bad Bunny. His campaign was much more segmented than that of his opponent, trying to mobilize on the basis of the battle for democracy, between his option or the abyss.
The result is known. The Republican did well, the Democrat did not. Thus, it is observed that Trump improved his performance by 20 points among Latinos and 10 among young people, while the Democrats only grew among the white university population. The Latino electorate has been decisive in these elections. It was an essential group, it exceeds the barrier of 35% of the population and 15% of eligible voters, and since 2020 it has made up half of the new voters in the country. They are decisive in states such as California, Florida, Texas, but also in Arizona and Nevada. They have historically supported the Democratic Party. In 2020 Joe Biden won 59% of that vote, in 2024 Harris obtained 53%, but Trump reached 45%, ten points more than in 2020 supported by the male vote (something unprecedented for Republicans to win among Latin men). And that was especially decisive in swing states like Michigan where it was the first option among the Latino community.
Regarding the African-American vote, Harris did not manage to reach the support numbers in this group that Biden had obtained in 2020 (90%); On this occasion it has remained around 78%, losing a lot of the male vote. The young vote has also turned its back on the Democrat, this party continues to be the favorite of young people, but its advantage is only six points in relation to Trump, while Biden’s in 2020 was 25 points, and the Clinton’s share was 18 in 2016. This vote, along with the inability to attract more votes from young women, is what gave Trump victory. It does not seem that Taylor Swift has managed to mobilize new Democratic voters beyond New York.
This result means that we can now draw some conclusions that go beyond mere moral criticism of Trump’s behavior. The first of these conclusions is that given the axes of debate raised (economy and immigration versus reproductive rights and rights of sexual or ethnic minorities), the North American electorate has opted for the first, the one that it perceives as essential for its material coverage. This is why Republicans have grown so much in their support for Trump: according to a CNN poll, only one in four Americans perceive themselves as better than they were four years ago. They understand that by voting for him they will have a better chance of accessing housing, and also, and this is very relevant, they do not feel they are the target of Trump’s immigration policy, they are second or third generation people who self-identify as white, not as Latino. according to a Pew Research Center survey.
The second has to do with the reconfiguration of the parties in the US, a reconfiguration that began some time ago but has now been completed. Clinton’s defeat in 2016 was already a first warning. So it was not known if she had lost because she was a woman or because she was Clinton. Now we know, it was because of both of us, but especially because Clinton was, privileged, East Coast, white. If then there was talk of disconnection with the electorate, now that disconnection has been raised to maximum power. Machismo surely had a percentage of responsibility in Harris’ defeat, but above all, these elections have been lost due to the absence of the Democratic Party’s own identity. The expansion to the center, losing its left wing, has prevented it from connecting with the working classes in a transversal way; The segmentation of the vote by groups perpetuates stereotypes and, finally, betting everything on post-material values without paying attention to class biases penalizes Democrats, and in what way.
The combination of all these factors means that we are facing a new framework in which the Republican Party has become the MAGA movement, the party of the working classes (also of the rich) no longer only white, but also diverse, and that the The Democratic Party is increasingly identified with the privilege and glamor of Hollywood. They are lessons to learn.
#Trump #won #happen
