In terms of historical perspective, the 2024 election has the potential to challenge the New Deal realignment of 1932 as the most consequential election of the past 100 years.
On Nov. 5, American voters re-empowered Donald Trump, a man who has explicitly declared he will gut civil service protections for the highest ranked federal employees, prosecute political adversaries and somehow deport 11 million illegal immigrants. On Thursday, he told NBC News that his plans for mass deportation were so precious that there would be “no price tag” on them.
The outcome of the election, it almost goes without saying, puts America on a right-wing populist path, inching ever closer toward a form of national autocratic rule rarely, if ever, seen in the nation’s history.
Douglas Massey, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton, summed up the situation in an email:
Trump won a clear victory, in a free and fair election, in both the Electoral College and the popular vote. A majority of American voters seems to have embraced his dark message of a nation in decline, with its false narrative of a failing economy, rising crime, predatory minorities as well as an existential threat from left-wing radicals.
Trump’s campaign was openly racist, xenophobic and authoritarian and his supporters appear to be willing to jettison democracy in support of an autocratic demagogue who promises to “fix everything” while pandering to their angers, resentments and prejudices.
Massey minced no words:
Once in power with a supine Republican-controlled congress and judiciary, Trump will govern despotically as a populist based on his uninformed and increasingly delusional understanding of the nation and its challenges, wreaking havoc on the American political economy and the global political order.
The 2024 election did answer one key question: Does the Trump coalition provide the basis for a fully competitive political party?
Julian E. Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton, emailed me to say:
The MAGA/Republican coalition is clearly a viable competitor. Indeed, the coalition just won the White House — and the Senate. The coalition has proved its ability to retain strong support with the working class, rural, non-college-educated base, still attract most of the rest of the older Republican electorate, and has demonstrated the capacity to grow into new areas such as Latino and Black men.
Early predictions of inevitable demographic shifts toward the Democrats missed how identity is complex, and how it can change. In our era of intense polarization, coalitions don’t have to be overwhelming. They just need to be big enough to push a party over in the swing states.
Trump, Zelizer argued, will have wide latitude to pursue his agenda:
The first time a person is elected, for example, Reagan in 1980, we vote based on promise, aspiration and potential. The re-election campaign, which this is more comparable to, for Trump, is about legitimation. Voters know what they are getting and say that is who they want in office.
Trump, Zelizer pointed out, “has been extraordinarily transparent about his hostility toward core democratic principles — the peaceful transition of power, confidence in the election system, limitations on presidential power and more.”
Many of those I contacted stressed the breadth and depth of Trump’s victory, perhaps best demonstrated in this Times graphic, which shows that Trump improved on his 2020 vote margins in 2,367 counties so far compared with Harris improving on Biden’s 2020 margins in 240 counties.
“When you win an election this broadly,” Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, argued in an email, “you’re entitled to move ahead with your agenda. The only limitations will be capacity (hard to deport 11 million people) and the courts which haven’t been completely made subservient.”
Fukuyama went on to say:
The move of the working class to the Republicans is now much more entrenched. For Blacks and Hispanics voting for Trump, class was much more important than identity, and Democrats failed to understand that. I really think that the importance of the transgender issue was underappreciated by the Democrats. They simply thought it was the latest civil rights issue when the actual policy was really crazy and offensive to working class voters.
In a post-election exchange with Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, transcribed on Mounk’s Substack, Fukuyama elaborates on his views:
There was an expectation that once Trump became a one-term president and Biden was elected that the world would kind of snap back to something like what it was before 2016. But now it’s not just the fact that Trump succeeded in getting re-elected. He didn’t squeak his way in. He really won a pretty resounding victory. He defeated Kamala Harris in all of the swing states that were up for grabs. They got the Senate. They already control the Supreme Court. So conservative power is consolidated in a way that makes the Biden administration look like the fluke, the last gasp of a dying order.
The MAGA coalition, in contrast,
doesn’t feel like the last stand of a dying electorate, at all since Trump actually has managed to diversify the Republican electorate in a broad way. And doesn’t seem like the tyranny of a minority, because — though tyranny it may turn into — it would be the tyranny of the majority, since it looks like he’s clearly on track to win the popular vote.
The primary threat Trump poses, Fukuyama argues,
is to the rule of law. He’s been very clear in the last few months and weeks that he’s really out for revenge. He wants to take revenge on all the people that he believes have been prosecuting him and or persecuting him. And I think that this is where Schedule F (Trump’s proposal to politicize the top ranks of the civil service) really matters. I think he’s going to put people in key positions in the Justice Department that will enable them to open up investigations.
Fukuyama expects Hungary’s Viktor Orban to provide Trump a governing model with “this kind of steady, slow erosion of one check and balance against executive power after another.”
William Galston, a Democrat and senior fellow at Brookings, analyzed the election in a Nov. 6 essay, “Why Donald Trump Won and Kamala Harris Lost.”
Galston makes the case that
Trump won a personal victory in the 2024 election, sweeping all the swing states, improving his vote share just about everywhere, and — unlike his 2016 victory — garnering an outright majority of the popular vote. In addition, he led the Republican Party to a larger-than-expected Senate majority and, although many House races remain to be called, an expanded House majority may result as well. These gains are more than incremental; indeed, they may signal a new era in American politics.
Donald Trump’s theory of the case was broadly correct. He and his campaign managers believed that it was possible to build on Republicans’ growing strength among white working-class voters to create a multiethnic working-class coalition. He was right: he made strides among Latinos and African Americans, especially men. He increased his share of the Black male vote from 12 percent to 20 percent and carried Hispanic men by nine points, 54 percent to 45 percent.
The Trump campaign, Galston goes on to say,
decided that Harris’ stance on transgender issues was the Willie Horton of 2024 and invested heavily in negative advertising that dominated the airwaves. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this campaign helped weaken Harris’s effort to portray herself as a common-sense center-left candidate rather than an emissary from San Francisco.
For Trump, the election outcome is both politically and personally significant.
Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, wrote by email that
The election has given Trump both vindication and a Republican congress. It is inconceivable that he won’t try to use it. Some of the things he wants to do such as cut taxes once again, or cut agency staff and regulations, are things he is sure to attempt and likely to succeed in to some degree. Other things like big tariffs or cutting off Ukraine funds may be more divisive within Republican ranks and turn out to be bargaining positions leading to party compromises (e.g., like NAFTA last time). Massive immigrant deportation and vetoing national anti-abortion legislation might be highly divisive and problematic.
How big a role did gender play in Harris’s defeat?
“Many men and non-college-educated women,” Cain argued, “still equate women with weakness and blustery masculinity with strength.”
Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, argued in an email that the election outcome was less a mandate for Trump than a rejection of Democratic policies under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris:
The scale of Trump’s electoral success and the red shift in Congress makes it clear that Americans have rejected the policies and priorities of the Democratic Party. Many voters cast their ballots based on their perceptions of the economy. Although Harris attempted to highlight improvements in macroeconomic indicators, voters struggling with rising costs for essentials like milk, bread, and gas felt little connection between their financial troubles and abstract measures like G.D.P. growth.
According to Westwood, “What seems to unify the majority of voters is dissatisfaction with the vision of America articulated by Harris and the Democratic Party.”
The election outcome suggests that voters did not place much weight on the fear that Trump would undermine a “vision of America,” despite his history of doing just that.
Yphtach Lelkes, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, provided some explanation for this seeming indifference:
The election results are in line with work suggesting that people care more about policy outcomes than democracy. Research shows that when people are asked whether they want a candidate that supports their preferred policy but subverts democracy versus a candidate that doesn’t support their preferred policy but is more democratic, they tend to choose the former. Policy trumps democracy.
Lelkes wrote that “the results clearly show that, more than ever, the MAGA coalition is a viable competitor in the two-party system, in part, because it is now a bigger tent. If the exit polls are correct, the MAGA coalition made significant inroads with groups of people that Democrats could traditionally rely on.”
The problem now facing Democrats, Lelkes noted, is that they “will have to grapple with the fact that they are seen as the cultural elite and this is off-putting to a majority of the country, who do not see their values represented by highly educated city dwellers.”
While most of the experts I contacted view the 2024 election as a major, and perhaps realigning, development in American politics, some were more cautious in their views.
Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, wrote by email:
I would caution against over-interpreting the results of the 2024 elections. I understand the psychological impulse to assign large-scale meaning to a set of outcomes that will have such profound effects on the country and the world. But my reading of 2024 is that this was a pedestrian “time for a change” election.
Polling, she added,
had long shown that voters were very sour on the direction of the country, the high cost of living after the Covid shocks, and the scale of undocumented immigration. Polls were clear that Trump was more trusted on all those issues. Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6, 2021 probably was troubling to at least some of those who voted for him, as was his divisive rhetoric. But in a two-party system, voters’ choices were severely limited. They could either support Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president of an administration they blamed for the state of the country, or former President Trump, the only alternative on offer.
While “Trump obviously expanded his coalition in 2024 relative to 2020,” Lee wrote,
much of that expansion can be understood as swing voters moving against an unpopular administration. Harris underperformed Biden with almost all demographic groups. I wouldn’t see the voters who joined the Trump column this year as permanent parts of the Trump coalition. We need to see this expanded coalition hold together for additional cycles before we can draw firm conclusions about change in the G.O.P. generally.
Along similar lines, Alexander Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, wrote:
There will certainly be the usual efforts to interpret the results in service of recrimination or mandate manufacturing. These narratives that emerge will often support the pet argument of their source.
Americans, in poll after poll, told us how this result should be interpreted — as a reaction to inflation and personal economic unease among many voters. Experts may understand that inflation was an inevitable outcome of successful efforts to save the economy during a global pandemic, that it is now largely under control in the United States, and that we fared better than most peer nations. But, average Americans have been feeling it in their pocketbooks for the last few years. It is incredibly difficult for the incumbent party to win when voters feel their spending power has decreased.
Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, offered the most overarching view of the 2024 election, and he is on the side of those who believe the 2024 election will prove consequential:
After building up over more than 40 years, the 2024 U.S. presidential election marks the capstone and ultimate high-water mark of the rise of a new populist radical right in the entire Western Hemisphere.
Donald Trump’s recasting of the Republican Party achieved a decisive victory over the combined forces of moderate center-left and radical left-libertarian political currents uneasily cohabiting under the umbrella of the Democratic Party. Historians may place the 2024 election, or the 2016-24 sequence, in significance for the United States on a par with the elections of 1860, 1876, 1896 and 1932.
The New Deal party system that was in full force until 1964 has been fully replaced by a new alignment. 2024 ratifies a lasting realignment in the American party system.
Driving the transformation of politics here and abroad, in Kitschelt’s view, are “changing ‘labor markets’ and changing ‘marriage/family markets.’ ”
These changes, according to Kitschelt,
have produced new “winners” and “losers.” Changing labor markets have eroded the earnings potential of less educated people, and particularly those in occupations that were in demand in manufacturing. Changing marriage markets have reduced the bargaining power of men to dominate gender relations and the choice of offspring.
Young men of lesser education are hit twice, both in marriage and in labor markets. It is not surprising that they are most likely to voice their grievances in expressions of political dissatisfaction with the status quo. Add onto this that almost without exception around the Western Hemisphere women now constitute the majority of college students and graduates and the full picture of change comes into view.
How do these developments relate to the 2024 election?
First, Kitschelt argued,
The moderate and progressive left in the United States thought it could count on disadvantaged minorities as fixed components of a left-wing “rainbow coalition.” But it now turns out in the United States — and elsewhere — that these ethnic groups are internally divided by the same kinds of knowledge-society-induced divisions based on education, occupation and gender that run through the ethnic majority population. And right-wing populist authoritarians are increasingly skilled to sense these divisions and make their appeals resonate among the aggrieved elements of these minorities, especially younger people without college education, particularly young men.
Second, Kitschelt said, the populist right has gained control of the agenda:
The rise of Trumpism in the United States — and right-wing populist authoritarianism around the world — throws down the gauntlet to the remaining liberal and progressive forces to come up with new ideas for institutional innovation and policy reform that include those who have hitherto been losers of multiple decades of social change. The 2024 U.S. election is a signal that the political projects of the existing left have failed.
The result?
The pool of new “losers” is not represented by the Democratic Party and was not by the old Republican Party. A political entrepreneur — Donald Trump — has managed to activate them to drive his ascent. Aggrieved people look for an outlet and recently found one in Donald Trump, many of them never previously Republicans, but now Trumpists.
Kitschelt’s conclusion is both dark and bleak, suggesting that if Trump’s policies fail to produce a boom economy, his inclination toward authoritarianism will intensify as he tries to hold power in the face of growing public opposition:
Republicans’ support, Kitschelt wrote,
Trump’s current ideas to soothe the ills of the knowledge society through tariffs and eviction of immigrants. But there is a strong probability that these policies will disappoint the president’s core constituencies.
Few jobs will be created through re-industrialization and the absence of immigrants will hurt — instead of improve — the labor market payoffs of many natives. All the while the real incomes of the less well-off will be reduced by a surge of tariff-induced inflation that bond and gold markets are now already anticipating.
When backed into a corner by policy failure, the greatest danger, then, becomes Donald Trump’s and his strategists’ inclination to suffocate opposition.
It is at this moment of policy failure, Kitschelt wrote, that
The hour of political authoritarianism arrives, when the new wagers to create economic affluence among the less well-off and to resurrect the old kinship relations of industrial society turn sour and generate disenchantment among Trump’s own following.
Trump then may well want to make sure that his disenchanted supporters — as well as those who always opposed Trumpism — will not get another chance to express their opinions.
If the scenario Kitschelt depicts comes to pass, American voters will finally get to see the real Donald Trump — when it may be too late to do anything about it.
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