The Real Reason Kamala Harris Lost
Exit surveys now reveal exactly why Donald Trump won the 2024 election, and it's not because he was the better candidate.
by Ben Cohen
I posted this on Substack Notes on Wednesday after reading hundreds of ‘hot takes’ on why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump:
My summary of the internet today:
The Alt Left (Matt Taibbi/Tulsi Gabbard etc): “We knew Kamala was going to lose because people hate Democrats and the Deep State and don’t want endless wars”.
The Bernie Left (Cenk Uygur/Nathan Robinson etc): “We knew Kamala was going to lose because she is a corporate elite who doesn’t care about the working class”.
The smug conservative (Andrew Sullivan/Bret Stephens etc): “We knew Kamala was going to lose because of woke far left identity politics”.
The Alt Right (Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson etc): “We knew Kamala was going to lose because bros love Donald Trump!”
The truth is, everyone had their theory of the election. My guess is that if you got it right this time, you probably got it wrong last time too, so while you can feel very clever for the next few days, remember that your next prediction will likely be wrong.
I posted it mostly in jest, but was also making the point that pundits are extremely prone to explaining (and predicting) everything through their own ideological prism. The truth is, no one knew in advance why over 50% of the voting population picked a fascist lunatic to run the country. And without taking a very hard look at the data, we should take their post-mortem analysis with a grain of salt too.
Why Trump really won
Americans shouldn’t have voted for a man who is ranked by scholars as the worst president in US history. They shouldn’t have voted for a man who lost in 2020, tried to overturn the result and then incited a violent coup on the Capitol. They shouldn’t have voted for the man who tanked the 2022 midterms for Republicans, then ran one of the most disgusting, unhinged, racist campaigns ever seen. They shouldn’t have voted for a man whose favorability numbers were worse than his opponent’s, or for a man who most acknowledged was “too extreme”. But they did.
And the reality is that Donald Trump made gains pretty much everywhere:
Interestingly, the only two minorities that voted for Harris overwhelmingly were black Americans (80%) and Jewish Americans (79%). Otherwise, it was a clean sweep with dramatic improvements with Hispanics (particularly men) and Asian Americans.
Exit surveys now show us why Trump won so easily, and the primary reason has almost nothing to do with the dogmatic assessments of the Alt Left, libertarians, or Bernie Sanders socialists…
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