Once again, the polls got it wrong, and so did the media, unable to accurately capture an electorate that included so many “shy” Trump voters. None of the pros predicted the breadth of his victory. It was a dark comedy to watch them be bolloxed by the results. They were prepared for a nail-biter, but the election wasn’t even close.
On the losing side, the self-laceration has begun, as disappointed liberals aim at the set of values loosely called Woke. Forgoing his famous motto, “It’s the economy, stupid,” James Carville crabbed about the Democrats’ embrace of “annoying” left-wing language. Bill Maher, who presents himself as the only reasonable man in the room, was in full told-ya mode. On SNL. comic Bill Burr, the latest fake example of the locker-room loudmouth who tells the truth, delivered jokes about women that could have been told 40 years ago. (“I know a lot of ugly women—feminists.”) We can expect to see a surge in sexist and homophobic banter from a show that has walked the line between male resentment and hardcore bigotry for decades. In the arena of edgy entertainment, the boys are back in town.
But if male rage was a major theme in this election, why did a majority of white women vote for Trump? And why do many of those women support abortion rights? We won’t know the truth about this election until deeper digging into the data over the next week. In the meantime, almost any ideological disposition can be validated by cherry-picking the exit polls. Pundits of the left can conclude that the failure to be more like AOC doomed the Democrats. Pundits of the right can call it the revenge of the rejected. They’re both right, up to a point. But every explanation that is monadic is also incomplete.
From what I’ve been able to glean, no social issue led to Kamala Harris’s defeat. Sexism, racism, gender panic, the war in Gaza, the inanities of the internet, the reversal of national abortion rights, the stilted recovery from the pandemic, and the irreversible transformation of America into a multicultural society all influenced the outcome. But neither racial bias nor misogyny can fully explain Trump’s triumph. In the end, it came down to the basic stuff of politics, a widespread sense that the economy isn’t working right. Even the panic over migrants stems from that perception.
To examine the myths that surrounded this election—until the results made them moot—is to see how easy it is to round up the usual suspects. Take the much-publicized unwillingness of black men to vote for a black woman. As it turned out, about 78 percent of them chose Harris, a margin only slightly smaller then Biden’s. Another media assumption, the solidarity of women in the wake of Roe’s reversal, also bit the demographic dust. A greater percentage of women chose Trump than had voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Sexual solidarity is a potent force, but it has its limits in a presidential election, given the wide variety of women’s experience and their dispersion throughout society. This wasn’t a rejection of pantsuits, whatever the rude dudes of standup may say. Rather, it showed how complex the question of unity is. To the extent that the Democrats couldn’t reassure most voters about their financial prospects, the emphasis on abortion rights seemed insufficient, and therefore it had limited appeal.
But the main reason why Harris lost was turnout. It dropped significantly among Democrats, creating a deficit that crossed racial, sexual, and generational lines. Partisans of the Palestinian cause, who argue that Harris’s moderate stance on the war in Gaza cost her Michigan, may be correct, but she would have been defeated even if she had won that state. The defection of Latinos was much more salient than any political issue. Despite the vile comments about Puerto Ricans at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, more than four in 10 Latino voters chose him over Harris. The difference between black and Hispanic voting patterns reflects the distinct experiences of both groups. The so-called BIPOC alliance is real, but it’s provisional. Different vibes for different tribes is more like it.
That brings me to the youth vote, which played such a striking part in Barack Obama’s victories. About 60 percent of voters under 30 have chosen the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 2008, but Harris won only 54 percent of them. It’s true that young men led the march toward Trump, while Harris swept young women by 18 percent, but that doesn’t mean the bro vote was driven mainly by an anti-feminist backlash. It may reflect resentment at the new restraints on male sexuality, but once again the material world matters. Young women are on the rise, and while they still earn less than equal pay in the workplace, the trend is upward for them, while young men continue to fall behind. This deficit is more important than any loss of social status. As a professor, I can attest that economic anxieties are far greater among men under 30 then they were for my generation at their age. We raged against the patriarchy and its wars, but we didn’t worry about finding a decent job. It’s impossible to untangle these career anxieties from gender discontents—they both exist within the powerful shift toward a deeply stratified society.
It’s true that men were more likely than women to fall for Trump’s macho act—sadism will always appeal to disaffected dudes. But neither sex is a unified voting bloc. Alienation doesn’t explain why well-educated males went for Harris, or why Latinos, who are among the poorest Americans as a group, vote more and more like whites. Nor do the evident errors of the left—its rigid paradigm of oppression, its obsession with neologisms (Latinx is a word that doesn’t exist in Spanish), its indifference to anti-Semitic bigotry—account for the growing appeal of the right. The Democrats were more united than I have ever known them to be, and Harris ran a very good campaign. Her appeal to women and her emphasis on Trump’s authoritarian instincts are not the reasons why she lost. The reasons are systemic, not strategic.
Bernie Sanders has never been more trenchant than in his analysis of the 2024 election. Tight-lipped and tired of saying the obvious, he made it clear again on Meet the Press that, until the vast inequities of American life are effectively addressed, liberalism will be vulnerable to bigots and demagogues. It isn’t just the cultural left that has lost its sense of why class counts. America itself has become detached from reality. Trump is a product of the retreat into spectacle.
As for me, I’m strangely confident that I can withstand whatever horror Trump inflicts on us. That’s because I have benefited economically from the policies of the past 40 years, whether Republicans or Democrats were in charge. My class has grown richer, while those who live the way I started out are struggling. This is the naked lunch at the end of the fork, as William Burroughs put it, and it’s why we have to eat shit now.