There's a lot of micro-level pieces to the result (which, to be clear, is very very bad - this is an attempt at explanation, not justification). But I think the macro-level piece is simply this:
Institutional trust has collapsed, and the public is desperate.
Yes, "it's the economy, stupid" - but economic perceptions are reflective of that desperation, and of how far voters will go to express it.
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There are a million individual failures that add up:
- An economic and judicial system that protects the rich at the expense of the poor, to the point that no one of any political persuasion is the slightest bit surprise when rich guys get off scot-free.
- The normalization of snake oil, MLMs, conspiracy theories, etc., which enhance the perception of institutional failure even when institutions are functioning (e.g., antivaxxers). This includes deliberate misinformation from a very effective right-wing propaganda apparatus, beginning with Fox and continued through the present day; I think this apparatus is a very important factor but it's one Democrats have no control over.
- The almost naked contempt for the lack of well-being (particularly economic well-being) among the public from many laissez-faire politicians of the Clinton-Bush era.
- The post-9/11 apparatus that led to the Iraq War, which obliterated trust in neocons/hawks as an institution (paving the way for an alternative wing on the right, whereas the left has had no comparable failure [possibly until now] to clean house on the left).
- The 2008 financial crisis, which intensified perceptions that we were getting screwed and generated the Tea Party and Occupy. The Tea Party became MAGA, while Occupy has no similar vent on the left (thanks largely to the fairly transparent sidelining of Bernie Sanders, the heir-apparent of that movement).
- Outsourcing, particularly of manufacturing. Beneficial overall, perhaps, but looks like an institutional failure from the perspective of workers whose towns evaporated. That's part of why the Trump movement started with those towns and expanded outward: they were the nexus of a discontent that has continued to grow among the electorate.
- The relentless enshittification of nearly everything we do, use, or consume. As I was waiting for results to come in, I was watching a YouTuber play video games, and he was talking about how every fast food place sucks now relative to how they used to be. Not election-related at all! It's just so pervasive in the zeitgeist that it's a normal discussion topic. And everyone can name stuff that's gotten worse in their daily lives because someone's trying to milk it for extra cash.
- The increasing alienation of workers from their work, and especially from doing work they feel has any moral value. I wrote more about this a while back at [1]
- A pervasive sense of societal decay, brought on by...well, everyone's got a different theory, but everyone can feel it. Almost no one actually feels better about life right now than they did ten or even twenty years ago, with the possible exception of queer rights (and as a queer person, I can tell you I certainly don't feel like things are going well, and I wouldn't have felt that they were even if Harris had won). I think there is substance to that (see [2]), and because it's vague and nebulous, it's incredibly easy to assign to whatever cause you want.
- A lack of belief that success even can be done without being corrupt. (see [3]) A lot of Trump supporters are fully aware that he's nakedly corrupt and lies all the time, they just think everyone is and that he's at least lying and corrupt "on their side".
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When the public is in this state, it has a legitimate grievance. The social contract between the working class and the elite is, roughly, "make sure my life is OK and I won't burn the place down". Well, the elite failed to hold up its end of the bargain, and failed to listen to many cries for help (among other things, during 2008), until people got desperate. So they decided to burn the place down.
People often wonder how Sanders-Trump voters existed given the apparent policy conflict between the two. Well, I was almost such a voter in 2016 (I would not be now! I'm ashamed to have ever considered him), and I can tell you where I was: it's not (just) about policy, it's about disruption. If you feel like things are going badly for you, and no one will listen or offer you help (and might actively sneer at you when you ask for it), you start asking yourself if you have anything to lose by going nuclear.
And this isn't just a logical judgement, either. To be ignored and suppressed is humiliating. It makes you feel impotent - choice of word very intentional - and that seems to hit male voters rather harder than female ones. There's a reason Bannon found a lot of Trump's initial younger base of support in gaming communities: it's not much different than someone raging in a League of Legends match because someone else is feeding and that's making you lose. Your pride is being damaged because someone else (in your perception) screwed up. You're a great player, it's all their fault, so your pride is unbesmirched.
Voters do care about democracy, contrary to this result. A lot said they cared about it, and a lot of people who voted for Trump said they were concerned about Jan 6. But people won't care about someone else unless they feel like they're taken care of for themselves, and principle comes after basic everyday needs for most people. And that goes double when you're being asked to defend institutions that (you feel) have completely betrayed you.
The same goes for, say, social justice. It's not that voters don't care in a vacuum, it's that it's at a higher tier of their hierarchy. Yes, hardcore racists, sexists, etc do exist, and are a problem, but what makes Trump powerful is that he co-opts populist rage into bigotry. When he talks about DEI, it's not "boo black person in power" (keep in mind, much of Trump's base enthusiastically voted for Obama), it's "that person took a job that you should have had because Democrats care more about diversity than they do about you". That works for the people who are explicitly racist, but it also works for the people who feel like they've been robbed and are looking for someone to blame. And the latter can become the former, especially because it sets them up for being called racist when they feel they aren't (somewhat correctly, in my view, but not in theirs).
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Was the inflation of the last few years bad? Yeah. But it was also everywhere, and it wasn't that bad in the US relative to the rest of the world. An electorate that was interested in listening to any sort of explanation would have probably been persuadable on that point. But the electorate has had their problems explained away one too many times.
Was there a problem at the border? Yeah. But it was clearly not a problem of our own making, and not as simple as "put up a wall". And an electorate interested in expert opinions and complex solutions might have believed that. But when you feel like you're being screwed in a thousand ephemeral ways, it's easy to point a finger and say "Biden gave all your money to immigrants".
Despite the fact that I'm probably leaving the country to avoid what I expect to be attacks on people like me, I don't think voters are actually all that much more conservative. The administration will be, and their power will be almost wholly unchecked, but voters weren't. Abortion measures passed last night in some really red states. So did minimum wage hikes. Dobbs has been wildly unpopular.
Harris outperformed Biden by wide margins among the wealthy, presumably because of Jan 6. But she got blown out among the working class by an even wider margin - a working class that cannot own a home, or afford healthcare, or expect a good stable career, and who might be automated away entirely at any minute.
Trump isn't the answer to that (he is more or less a walking institutional failure himself, one that is causing a cascading collapse of other institutions), but Democrats have, so far, largely failed to acknowledge the problem at all. And so they could not present a compelling alternative.
I'm not sure Democrats can actually solve this problem. Institutional failures are being driven by a lot of non-political forces, and if you care about policy, some degree of institutionalism is inevitable. And worse, addressing systemic issues runs fundamentally against American individualist values. But I think that's the nature of the problem they're dealing with, and one they better figure out quick.
Institutional trust has collapsed, and the public is desperate.
Yes, "it's the economy, stupid" - but economic perceptions are reflective of that desperation, and of how far voters will go to express it.
-----
There are a million individual failures that add up:
- An economic and judicial system that protects the rich at the expense of the poor, to the point that no one of any political persuasion is the slightest bit surprise when rich guys get off scot-free.
- The normalization of snake oil, MLMs, conspiracy theories, etc., which enhance the perception of institutional failure even when institutions are functioning (e.g., antivaxxers). This includes deliberate misinformation from a very effective right-wing propaganda apparatus, beginning with Fox and continued through the present day; I think this apparatus is a very important factor but it's one Democrats have no control over.
- The almost naked contempt for the lack of well-being (particularly economic well-being) among the public from many laissez-faire politicians of the Clinton-Bush era.
- The post-9/11 apparatus that led to the Iraq War, which obliterated trust in neocons/hawks as an institution (paving the way for an alternative wing on the right, whereas the left has had no comparable failure [possibly until now] to clean house on the left).
- The 2008 financial crisis, which intensified perceptions that we were getting screwed and generated the Tea Party and Occupy. The Tea Party became MAGA, while Occupy has no similar vent on the left (thanks largely to the fairly transparent sidelining of Bernie Sanders, the heir-apparent of that movement).
- Outsourcing, particularly of manufacturing. Beneficial overall, perhaps, but looks like an institutional failure from the perspective of workers whose towns evaporated. That's part of why the Trump movement started with those towns and expanded outward: they were the nexus of a discontent that has continued to grow among the electorate.
- The relentless enshittification of nearly everything we do, use, or consume. As I was waiting for results to come in, I was watching a YouTuber play video games, and he was talking about how every fast food place sucks now relative to how they used to be. Not election-related at all! It's just so pervasive in the zeitgeist that it's a normal discussion topic. And everyone can name stuff that's gotten worse in their daily lives because someone's trying to milk it for extra cash.
- The increasing alienation of workers from their work, and especially from doing work they feel has any moral value. I wrote more about this a while back at [1]
- A pervasive sense of societal decay, brought on by...well, everyone's got a different theory, but everyone can feel it. Almost no one actually feels better about life right now than they did ten or even twenty years ago, with the possible exception of queer rights (and as a queer person, I can tell you I certainly don't feel like things are going well, and I wouldn't have felt that they were even if Harris had won). I think there is substance to that (see [2]), and because it's vague and nebulous, it's incredibly easy to assign to whatever cause you want.
- A lack of belief that success even can be done without being corrupt. (see [3]) A lot of Trump supporters are fully aware that he's nakedly corrupt and lies all the time, they just think everyone is and that he's at least lying and corrupt "on their side".
-----
When the public is in this state, it has a legitimate grievance. The social contract between the working class and the elite is, roughly, "make sure my life is OK and I won't burn the place down". Well, the elite failed to hold up its end of the bargain, and failed to listen to many cries for help (among other things, during 2008), until people got desperate. So they decided to burn the place down.
People often wonder how Sanders-Trump voters existed given the apparent policy conflict between the two. Well, I was almost such a voter in 2016 (I would not be now! I'm ashamed to have ever considered him), and I can tell you where I was: it's not (just) about policy, it's about disruption. If you feel like things are going badly for you, and no one will listen or offer you help (and might actively sneer at you when you ask for it), you start asking yourself if you have anything to lose by going nuclear.
And this isn't just a logical judgement, either. To be ignored and suppressed is humiliating. It makes you feel impotent - choice of word very intentional - and that seems to hit male voters rather harder than female ones. There's a reason Bannon found a lot of Trump's initial younger base of support in gaming communities: it's not much different than someone raging in a League of Legends match because someone else is feeding and that's making you lose. Your pride is being damaged because someone else (in your perception) screwed up. You're a great player, it's all their fault, so your pride is unbesmirched.
Voters do care about democracy, contrary to this result. A lot said they cared about it, and a lot of people who voted for Trump said they were concerned about Jan 6. But people won't care about someone else unless they feel like they're taken care of for themselves, and principle comes after basic everyday needs for most people. And that goes double when you're being asked to defend institutions that (you feel) have completely betrayed you.
The same goes for, say, social justice. It's not that voters don't care in a vacuum, it's that it's at a higher tier of their hierarchy. Yes, hardcore racists, sexists, etc do exist, and are a problem, but what makes Trump powerful is that he co-opts populist rage into bigotry. When he talks about DEI, it's not "boo black person in power" (keep in mind, much of Trump's base enthusiastically voted for Obama), it's "that person took a job that you should have had because Democrats care more about diversity than they do about you". That works for the people who are explicitly racist, but it also works for the people who feel like they've been robbed and are looking for someone to blame. And the latter can become the former, especially because it sets them up for being called racist when they feel they aren't (somewhat correctly, in my view, but not in theirs).
-----
Was the inflation of the last few years bad? Yeah. But it was also everywhere, and it wasn't that bad in the US relative to the rest of the world. An electorate that was interested in listening to any sort of explanation would have probably been persuadable on that point. But the electorate has had their problems explained away one too many times.
Was there a problem at the border? Yeah. But it was clearly not a problem of our own making, and not as simple as "put up a wall". And an electorate interested in expert opinions and complex solutions might have believed that. But when you feel like you're being screwed in a thousand ephemeral ways, it's easy to point a finger and say "Biden gave all your money to immigrants".
Despite the fact that I'm probably leaving the country to avoid what I expect to be attacks on people like me, I don't think voters are actually all that much more conservative. The administration will be, and their power will be almost wholly unchecked, but voters weren't. Abortion measures passed last night in some really red states. So did minimum wage hikes. Dobbs has been wildly unpopular.
Harris outperformed Biden by wide margins among the wealthy, presumably because of Jan 6. But she got blown out among the working class by an even wider margin - a working class that cannot own a home, or afford healthcare, or expect a good stable career, and who might be automated away entirely at any minute.
Trump isn't the answer to that (he is more or less a walking institutional failure himself, one that is causing a cascading collapse of other institutions), but Democrats have, so far, largely failed to acknowledge the problem at all. And so they could not present a compelling alternative.
I'm not sure Democrats can actually solve this problem. Institutional failures are being driven by a lot of non-political forces, and if you care about policy, some degree of institutionalism is inevitable. And worse, addressing systemic issues runs fundamentally against American individualist values. But I think that's the nature of the problem they're dealing with, and one they better figure out quick.
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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41977655
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41872998
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41581119