2024 United States presidential election

Ah, shit, here we go again.

“”High-level Democrats are rallying to President Biden's reelection, not because they think it's in the best interest of the country to have an 82-year-old start a second term but because they fear the potential alternative: the nomination of Kamala Harris and election of Donald Trump.

—Johnathan Martin, Politico, 16 February 2023.

God, guns, and freedom U.S. Politics

Starting arguments over Thanksgiving dinner

Fairness Doctrine Dennis Hastert Interracial marriage in the United States COINTELPRO Blackwater Sam Brownback 2021 U.S. coup attempt

Persons of interest

Joe Arpaio 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination Eric Cantor Theodore Roosevelt George W. Bush John Tyler v - t - e

The 2024 United States presidential election was held on November 5, 2024 between incumbent Vice President and Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris and former President and Republican Party nominee Donald Trump. You would think that the last time would've been painful enough for the majority of Americans to have taught them something, but unfortunately, they would once again choose very poorly.

Despite polls seemingly indicating a close contest, Donald Trump overperformed the polls for the third consecutive time and decisively defeated Harris. By making gains with young and nonwhite voters and increasing his support in rural areas, Trump swept every swing state and became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Nevada and the popular vote in 20 years. Harris, on the other hand, lost suburban areas and underperformed in traditionally Democratic cities, resulting in a major rightward shift across the entire United States.

This election result will likely have generation-defining ramifications. With an extraordinarily conservative Supreme Court, Trump openly threatening far more overt displays of authoritarianism than he did the last time, and the looming threat of Project 2025 on the horizon, the consequences of his election victory will be severe.^{[citation NOT needed]}

Incumbent President Joe Biden initially made the poor choice of running for reelection despite his disastrous poll numbers and growing concern about his age. After bombing a debate against Donald Trump, Biden made the historically unprecedented choice of withdrawing from the race on the 21st of July despite having already won his party's primaries, giving Kamala a whopping 3 months to make a campaign. Sadly, Kamala Harris ultimately proved unsuited to the task of defeating Trump. While Harris swept to the nomination with a wave of relief and enthusiasm from Democrats, she squandered that goodwill by failing to establish a message of her own and failing to differentiate herself from the unpopular Joe Biden. She also pivoted to the right during the campaign by abandoning policies she previously supported, such as Medicare-for-All, and campaigning with stalwart conservative Liz Cheney while touting the endorsement of war criminal Dick Cheney. She even went as far as to say she would continue building Trump's wall! Her strategy resulted in the worst of both worlds. She failed to convince skeptical conservative-leaning independents that she had truly moved to the right, and she alienated the Democratic base to the point where turnout plummeted in key Democratic urban areas like Detroit and Philadelphia.

Trump, meanwhile, ran a typically deranged Trumpist campaign featuring anti-immigrant fearmongering and employing authoritarian and dehumanizing rhetoric. Oh, and he was also a convicted felon this time. And possibly had dementia. Despite its various missteps and shortcomings, Trump's campaign and his political alliance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. proved effective at reaching the large cohort of voters who expressed disgust and distrust in politics-as-usual and the media.

That said, the election was more of a repudiation of Harris herself than of the Democratic Party. Trump was quite unpopular despite winning, and Democratic Senate candidates won in four states Harris lost by touting their own records. After much money and effort by the Republicans, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives successfully went from razor-thin... to razor-thin. There were some additional positive signs of progress as well; Sarah McBride became the first openly-transgender person to win a seat in Congress, and there were other historic wins for LGBTQ+ candidates.

Of course, these facts amount to mere silver linings amid a disastrous defeat for the Democratic Party, whose options to combat the Trump administration and the Republican Congress will be extremely limited until at least the 2026 midterm elections. Curiously, 2024's election was a historical parallel to the 1968 election, in which an incumbent Democratic president who was partaking in foreign atrocities unexpectedly ended his reelection bid only to have their vice president run in his stead and ultimately lose to a Republican who ended up changing US politics for the worse.

Background

Harris meets with President Biden in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, 2021.

The failed Vice Presidency of Kamala Harris

The first seeds of disaster were sewn when Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris as his running mate in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Biden's campaign did Harris no favors when they openly admitted that he chose Harris because she was a Black woman during a period defined by the Black Lives Matter movement—despite facing very little pressure from the Democratic base to choose someone based on skin color. Biden was also open about the fact that he was choosing Harris as a governing partner rather than a future president, a strange move for a man as old as Biden.

Not long after she began her role as VP, Harris started burning through experienced staff members allegedly due to her toxic attitude and poor leadership. Amid this atmosphere of chaos from the VP office, Harris loyalists fumed that Biden's aides were choosing to sideline Harris rather than help her or prepare her for a potential rise to the presidency. Her inactivity became the subject of mockery by The Onion, who wrote the article "White House Urges Kamala Harris To Sit At Computer All Day In Case Emails Come Through" in October 2021. Biden then saddled her with the unenviable task of attempting to address the "root cause" of the rapidly-mounting undocumented immigration crisis at the southern border.

By January 2022, Harris' Vice Presidency was in crisis. Polls showed that her approval rating was an abysmal 28%, which was even lower than Dick Cheney. Through late 2023, her approval rating did not recover. Emblematic of the struggles of her Vice Presidency was an appearance in Germany in October 2023, in which Harris bombed a speech in front of foreign leaders, and Biden's staffers only half-heartedly tried to fill the resulting silence with some applause.

As election season started to heat up in 2023, many Democrats and party donors started to signal their lack of faith in the prospect of keeping Harris on the presidential ticket with Biden (or, god forbid, running her as their candidate). A significant motivating factor behind Biden's decision to run for reelection was his team's conviction that Harris would completely flop in an election contest against Donald Trump—a belief shaped and bolstered by Harris' failures in the 2020 Democratic primary contests and Harris' disastrous poll numbers as Vice President. Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi both drew ire from Harris' team for refusing to say that they thought Harris remained the strongest running mate for Biden in 2024. After Senator Elizabeth Warren snubbed Harris by hedging on the question of keeping Harris as VP during an interview, Harris refused to take her phone calls for some time afterward. The Biden administration finally decided to feature Harris in its advertising and send her on some high-profile assignments, but no amount of effort could completely erase the doubt.

The unlikely comeback of Donald Trump

Trump appears at Manhattan Criminal Court during his hush-money trial, May 2024.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, faced the prospect of a completely destroyed political career after inciting the 2021 U.S. coup attempt, enduring a second impeachment, and being confronted with a litany of civil and criminal legal proceedings. Trump's problems mounted further when the FBI raided his residence at the Mar-a-Lago and discovered that the former president had irresponsibly left boxes of classified documents lying around. After so many Trump-endorsed candidates failed during the 2022 midterm elections, Republican Party insiders started to call for the party to move on from Donald Trump. A New York jury also found Trump civilly liable for defaming and sexually assaulting advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.

Unfortunately, things changed completely in 2023. Being indicted three times that year—first in New York for financial crimes, then in federal court for mishandling classified documents, then again in federal court for attempting to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 U.S. presidential election—made Trump's popularity rebound with Republicans who percieved these charges as being mere politically-motivated persecution. The federal prosecution of Trump resulted in the worst of both worlds. The mere fact of the prosecution fueled Trump's popularity with Republicans as a "persecuted" outsider, and Attorney General Merrick Garland's feckless reluctance to fully commit to the effort resulted in the legal cases happening too late and too slow to have any effect on Trump's momentum. In May 2024, a grand jury convicted Trump on 34 felony counts related to falsifying business records to conceal that he had paid hush money to porn star to stop her from revealing his affair with her. This had little impact on a presidential contest that was now Trump's to lose.

The resurgence of support for Trump was reflected in his polling lead over Ron DeSantis in the upcoming Republican primaries, which was narrow in February and insurmountable in July. He dominated the Republican primary season even without trying; his opponents were asked about him during the debate in August despite Trump's absence. He went on to win the contests easily and secure the Republican nomination.

Then, on July 13th, Trump got another boost in support when a gunman attempted to assassinate him and fatally shot one of Trump's supporters during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Another gunman was apprehended after setting up a "sniper's nest" near Trump's Florida residence.

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  Classified documents found by the FBI in Mar-a-Lago.

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  Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley debate during the primaries.

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  2024 Republican primary results.

    Donald Trump

    Nikki Haley
• 

  Trump at a rally in Arizona, June 2024.

The disastrous decisions of Joe Biden

Biden explains his unprecedented decision to end his reelection campaign after winning his party's primaries, 24 July 2024.

“”We finally beat Medicare.

—One of the numerous gaffes from Biden's disastrous debate performance.

On 25 April 2023, Biden announced his decision to seek reelection, despite the fact that he would be 86 at the end of a potential second term and his approval rating at the point of this announcement had slipped to its lowest point ever at 37%.

Probably thanks to the lingering memory of what happened to President Jimmy Carter after Ted Kennedy tried to unseat him in the 1980 Democratic primaries, Joe Biden faced little formal opposition in the 2024 Democratic contests. Joke candidates like Marianne Williamson and liquor magnate Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota both announced their intent to challenge Biden for the Democratic nomination (alongside some even bigger joke candidates). Williamson didn't win a single delegate and Phillips' best finish was 19.7% of the vote in New Hampshire, which sounds good on its face for a challenger to an incumbent until you consider that Joe Biden didn't campaign in New Hampshire due to his dissatisfaction with local rules, wasn't even on the ballot, and won 63.8% of the vote as a write-in candidate. Biden's biggest primary challenge ended up being nobody at all. A protest campaign encouraging primary voters to cast "uncommitted" ballots to signal that Biden had lost their support over his enabling of Israel's war crimes in Gaza gained some attention by winning over 100,000 "uncommitted" ballots in the critical swing state of Michigan, meaning that "uncomitted" actually technically won delegates. "Uncommitted" also received 12.7% in North Carolina, 19% in Minnesota and 29% (!) in Hawaii. In New York, which does not have an "uncommitted" option, 11.5% of voters returned blank ballots. So while Biden didn't do badly as Carter did in 1980, this was still a very ominous sign for an incumbent president seeking reelection.

Biden also decided to face Donald Trump in a formal debate on June 27, before either of them had been officially nominated by their parties. With concerns over Biden's age at fever-pitch and the president's poll numbers reaching new lows, the stakes for Biden heading into that debate could not have been higher. He failed utterly, instead appearing forgetful and barely coherent. Panic ensued from inside the Democratic Party as Biden's bad poll numbers against Trump fell even further to the point where Democratic leaders, donors, voters, and strategists feared Biden's failure would cause a total wipeout of Democrats in down-ballot races. Biden later admitted that he had "screwed up" during the debate.

Over the next 25 days, Biden endured pressure from top-level Democrats to drop out of the race despite having already won the Democratic primaries. He unwisely stayed firm in his decision to stay in until former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Biden's former boss Barack Obama both got involved. On 21 July, Biden dropped out and endorsed Kamala Harris as his successor; Harris staged a complete takeover of the Democratic nomination within 48 hours. Biden was the first president to end an ongoing reelection bid since Lyndon Johnson in 1968, and he was the first president ever to do so after already having won his party's primaries.

This left Harris, a weak candidate in her own right, facing a disastrous situation. She had much less time than usual to organize a campaign, she had to pull the Democrats back from the brink of oblivion (Biden was apparently on track to lose over 400 electoral votes), and come up with a winning message against Donald Trump. It would take a damn good candidate to accomplish these things. Harris wasn't that candidate.

• 

  Please don't.

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  2024 Democratic primary results.

    Joe Biden

    Jason Palmer
• 

  Joe Biden looking lost during his debate with Trump.

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  Kamala Harris at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

Campaign issues

Trump at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

It's the economy, stupid

“”For me, it’s work. It’s the economy. It’s groceries.

—Pennsylvania voter Regino Cruz explains why he voted for Trump.

Harris' campaign heavily suffered from negative perceptions about the economy. Despite economic numbers looking nice on paper, everyday Americans struggled with a tougher job market, increased prices, much higher debts, and much lower savings. Not to mention record-high homelessness and evictions, and the administration's abandonment of renters experiencing the crushing burden of paying for a place to live.

The Biden administration's attempts to spin the economy as being good based on government's on-paper numbers came off as being very tone-deaf, and Harris failed to adequately explain to voters how she would address these problems. Harris' lack of engagement on the economy frustrated Black and Latino voters, who had been saying for over a year that they were experiencing a much greater degree of financial hardship than the Biden's administration's rosy numbers would indicate.

Trump, meanwhile, exploited the economy issue by unveiling a broad array of vague promises, such as cutting taxes, placing tariffs on imports, and eliminating regulations to encourage home-building. A closer look at his tax proposals revealed that they would actually raise taxes on all but the top 5%. While experts warned that his economic plan would both worsen inflation and damage the economy, frustrated voters responded to the mere fact that Trump was promising any change at all.

Trump also integrated a few populist proposals into his pitch to voters. He promised to eliminate taxes on tips while rallying in Nevada, a state where 25% of the workforce are employed in the hospitality industry. Belatedly realizing this was an effective idea, Harris echoed the proposal while also in Nevada. He also promised to eliminate taxes on Social Security payments and on overtime pay. While seemingly simple, these policies would actually cause serious consequences like causing tipping expectations to proliferate even more, add tens of billions to the deficit, and deprive Social Security of a major source of income.

Threats to democracy

“”Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.

—Joe Biden, 6 January 2024.

After Trump's involvement with January 6th, his denial of and attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and his increasingly fascistic tone on the campaign trail, it was a fairly obvious line of attack for Democrats to cast Trump as a threat to American democracy. Throwing Project 2025, the Supreme Court's decision that sitting presidents are immune from prosecution, and Trump's promises to drastically increase the size of the federal government into the mix, and the "democracy is under threat" line of attack ought to have become quite compelling.

Harris outright called Trump a fascist during an October town hall event in Pennsylvania. By the end of the campaign cycle, it appeared to be working, an ABC News/Ipsos poll found that about 49% of registered voters saw Trump as a wannabe fascist.

The democracy message ultimately fell flat. While most voters didn't like Trump's rhetoric or his authoritarian tendencies, they perceived the Harris campaign's focus on the democracy message as an effort to ignore tangible issues in favor of focusing on abstract hypotheticals. The Harris campaign failed to make Trump's threat to democracy seem real to voters. For many Republican-supporters, Trump's campaign also successfully flipped the narrative by describing Democrats as a threat to democracy for "weaponizing the Justice Department" against Donald Trump. Early in the campaign, Trump had nonsensically called Joe Biden "the destroyer of American democracy."

Abortion

Harris campaigns on abortion rights in Wisconsin.

See the main article on this topic: Abortion

One of the bigger faceplants from the Harris campaign was placing too many eggs into the "abortion" basket. Democratic successes in the 2022 midterm elections after the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision left Democratic strategists with a fatally overinflated sense of how much abortion would matter to women and to voters in general. Democrats also understood that abortion was one of the very few issues where they had the upper hand in 2024. While the economy and immigration issues could be easily tied to the Biden administration, the ongoing political chaos and mounting death-count due to the end of nationwide legal abortion could be laid at Trump's doorstep due to his appointment of the Supreme Court justices who made that decision.

In October, Democratic campaigns spent about $214 million on broadcast TV ads focusing on abortion, which amounted to 45% of all ad expenditures. This absolutely dwarfed expenditures on advertisements focusing on any other issue. To the contrary, polls showed that 51% of voters viewed the economy as the most pressing issue, with abortion at a paltry 15%.

To further capitalize on the abortion issue, Democrats successfully placed ballot referendums to protect abortion rights in ten states around the country in the hopes of further driving up turnout. Instead of helping Harris win, it seems like the referendums backfired by allowing voters to support Trump while simultaneously voting for the referendums to protect abortion rights. The referendums gave pro-choice Republicans the perfect excuse to justify voting for Trump while still thinking that abortion would be safe. Trump's messaging—disavowing a national abortion ban and punting the issue to state-level politics—once again proved effective with voters. The abortion-rights referendums performed better than Harris in every state in which they appeared.

Immigration (they're eating the dogs!)

Trump tours the US-Mexico border in Arizona, August 2024.

See the main article on this topic: Undocumented immigration

Almost from the moment Biden took office, illegal border crossings spiked dramatically to the point where the year 2022 set an all-time record with 2.21 million people being apprehended at the southern border. The Democratic mayors of large cities like New York and Chicago started begging the administration for financial and material assistance to cope with the massive influx of over 200,000 migrants filling their homeless shelters. New York governor Kathy Hochul asked for and received $2.4 billion to assist New York City with caring for migrants while city mayor Eric Adams claimed the sum wasn't even half of what the city needed. Texas governor Greg Abbott took advantage of the situation by sending thousands more migrants who crossed the border into his state on buses to New York City. After the city's homeless shelters filled up, the city started paying to house migrants in hotels, sparking public outrage at the cost to the city budget and genuine expressions of helplessness from Democratic officials.

This is a story that played out again in major Democratic cities like Chicago, Washington DC, Denver, and El Paso. The state of New Jersey, in which many migrants were dropped off on the way to New York City, signaled very strongly that it wanted nothing to do with the migrants. Amid widespread public fury in the critical swing state of Arizona, politicians from both parties said their state was in crisis. As cities cried for help, federal aid proved insufficient, leading to real fears that some of these cities could end up in serious financial crises.

All of this fueled a major nationwide backlash to immigration; a July 2024 Gallup poll showed that 63% of American voters supported increasing border security and limiting asylum claims and 55% wanted overall immigration levels sharply reduced. A month earlier, Biden had signed an executive order harshly limiting the number of migrants who could apply for asylum. It is unfortunate but true: this is the kind of national environment in which Republicans thrive.

New York Republicans, and even many Democrats, campaigned on resolving the migrant crisis and helping to secure the southern border. In his typically nasty and dehumanizing way, Trump campaigned vigorously against immigration and successfully placed it at the forefront of the national conversation. Although Trump muddled his message with strange claims like the infamous "they're eating the dogs!" his message resonated with voters and especially among those who lived in the impacted cities. The immigration issue even fueled major shifts towards Trump from traditionally Democratic-leaning demographics like Black Americans, Asian-Americans, and especially Latino Americans.

Foreign policy

"No Genocide Joe in Chicago": protesters oppose Chicago hosting the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

American enabling of Israeli atrocities

The October 7^th 2023 attack on Israel by the terrorist group Hamas and the subsequent genocidal onslaught by Israel on Palestine, specifically the Gaza Strip, irreversibly destroyed Joe Biden's reputation amongst young voters as well as ruining the already tattered international reputation of the United States. Not good. The Biden administration was blindly supportive of Israel and delivered billions of dollars of military aid allowing Israel to enact genocide on the people of Gaza despite numerous attempts from international organizations, activist groups, politicians and even other countries to persuade them otherwise.

Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden pledged to support Israel, with Trump even telling Israel to "finish the job" and claiming that he would crush pro-Palestine protests and deport demonstrators. Trump also his close partnership with pro-Israel billionaire Miriam Adelson, who influenced his decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem during his first term.

Unfortunately, Harris failed to differentiate herself from Joe Biden on Gaza. The Democratic National Committee firmly ruled out the possibility of allowing a Palestinian speaker, which resulted in Harris losing support from the many supporters of the uncommitted movement and the quickly-dissolved "Muslim Women for Harris" group. During interviews, Harris flat-out stated that she would not limit the supply of American weapons to Israel and would not approach Israel in a substantively different manner than Biden. Another major faux-pas came when security at a Harris event in Michigan kicked a Muslim attendee out of the venue for no reason while threatening him with arrest. In a last desperate appeal on November 4th, Harris promised to end the Israel-Gaza War while speaking in Michigan, but she did not explain how she would accomplish this.

It is unclear how much of an impact the Gaza issue had on the final election result, although it is clear that Democratic turnout sharply dropped across the board while Trump managed to win the heavily Arab-American city of Dearborn, Michigan (which Biden had won with 70% of the vote in 2020). In contrast, Michigan's Democratic Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin won her election; she had called for conditioning aid to Israel. Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib also handily won reelection with over 62% of the vote from Dearborn, which, again, Trump won. It should be clearly stated here, that this result is the fault of Kamala Harris and her campaign, not Muslim-American voters.

NATO and Ukraine

Whereas Harris signaled that she would follow Biden's course on aiding Ukraine in its conflict with Russia and continue supporting NATO, Trump promised an "America First" foreign policy agenda that would see the United States behave in a transactional nature towards both allies and adversaries. Trump also once again signaled skepticism towards NATO and said the US should "fundamentally reevaluate" NATO's mission. Trump, naturally, did not explain what this meant.

Additionally, Trump not only advocated for revoking military aid to Ukraine, but to "negotiate peace between the two". This would, in reality, entail leaving Ukraine as a sitting duck whilst Russia installs a puppet government. He justified this stance by with his descriptions of Ukraine as a "demolished" country that could not hope to resist the Russian invasion any longer and by blaming Biden and Harris for having "egged it all on" by supplying arms to Ukraine. Zelensky, for his part, was conciliatory towards Trump and said in October 2024 that, "Trump talks a lot, but I didn’t hear him say he would reduce support for Ukraine."

Trump's cognitive decline

Trump has shown noticeable cognitive decline since he first ran for president. The mainstream media has largely chosen to ignore this. According to Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, the mainstream media rationale for this is:

“”It works like this: Trump sounds nuts, but he can’t be nuts, because he’s the presumptive nominee for president of a major party, and no major party would nominate someone who is nuts. Therefore, it is our responsibility to sand down his rhetoric, to identify any kernel of meaning, to make light of his bizarro statements, to rationalize.

Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote:

“”[The] false claim by Trump that Harris is generating fake big crowds with AI was a true Captain Queeg moment, maybe the most bat-guano crazy thing I’ve seen in 40 years of covering presidential elections.

The campaign trail

2024 Democratic Party ticket
Kamala Harris	Tim Walz
for President	for Vice President
Vice President of the United States	Governor of Minnesota

The Harris campaign: a comedy of errors (but the joke was on all of us)

Harris had an extraordinarily strong start once she took Biden's place as the presumptive nominee due to a wave of relief from Democrats who had resigned themselves to defeat after Biden's disastrous summer. Biden's dismal polls against Trump quickly rebounded into a healthy lead for Harris by the time August rolled around. Hidden within that enthusiasm was the hope that Harris would differentiate herself from Joe Biden. She initially did this. On the economy, an issue that hobbled Biden's campaign from the start, Harris was able to flip the script and go on the offensive by (rightfully) blaming corporate greed and price-gouging for rising prices and then labeling Trump as a servant of those same Big Business interests.

So what went wrong? First, corporate media started bitching. Like, a lot. Second, Harris' brother-in-law Tony West, an executive at Uber, got involved in her campaign and advised her to tone down the attacks on Big Business, because of course he fucking would. Billionaires like Mike Bloomberg (former mayor of NYC), Mark Cuban (the Shark Tank guy), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Sheryl Sandberg (former COO of Meta), and David Ellison (overseer of a major corporate merger between Skydance and Paramount) rewarded the new direction of her campaign with endorsements and big-money donations. She ended up with over a billion dollars, and she blew it all! To continue courting those donations and attempt to appeal to moderate voters, Harris shifted her message rightwards. She didn't even pivot in any meaningful way, but she did it instead by replacing popular Democratic policies with vague platitudes. As political science professor and Slate contributor David Faris wrote in September,

“”To its credit, the Harris–Walz campaign finally put up a policy page over the weekend. But when you actually click on the various links, they don’t offer much detail that you couldn’t glean from one of their stump speeches. The campaign’s health care "plan," for example, is 256 words long and consists largely of a recap of the Biden administration’s very limited accomplishments. Apart from a vague promise to cancel medical debt, it seems to rest on the laurels of past reforms and communicates no interest in or commitment to further improving America’s nightmare health care system. The child care plan promises only that a President Harris would work on "ensuring hardworking families can afford high-quality child care, all while ensuring that care workers are paid a living wage and treated with the dignity and respect they deserve." That's a lot of "ensuring" without very much "planning."

An unjustifiably cheerful Kamala Harris campaigns with Liz Cheney in Wisconsin, 3 October 2024.

By October, the damage was done. As billionaire campaign surrogate Mark Cuban giddily put it,

“”She says she's open to inputs from independents and Republicans, she means it. People are trying to say, 'Here are the progressive and liberal principles that have always been the principles of the Democratic Party.' Those are gone. It’s Kamala Harris's party now.

Harris tried to fill the gap in messaging with more shiny endorsements, such as her touting of a report from investment banking firm Goldman Sachs that viewed her economic plan favorably compared to Trump's. It should go without saying that no candidate, especially a Democrat, should ever go around saying "this Fortune 500 investment banking company run by and for rich assholes thinks my economic plan is great!" She doubled down by touting the endorsement of Iraq War architect and torture enthusiast Dick Cheney while campaigning with his arch-conservative daughter Liz. We don't know who the hell that was supposed to appeal to, but it actually appealed to nobody. Touting endorsements from banks and conservatives alienated the Democratic base and ate up valuable time that could have been spent reaching out to blue-collar workers and Latino voters. Harris also put time and effort into campaigning with celebrities like Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey, Megan Thee Stallion, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, and various others. The only thing this accomplished was adding credence to Trump's argument that Harris cared more about out-of-touch elitists than the working class. It turns out that campaigning with fabulously rich people while the average American is struggling with debt and grocery bills isn't a good look.

Then, if that all wasn't enough, she decided to make one of the most catastrophic gaffes in modern campaign history. During an October 8th appearance on The View, a friendly talk show environment, Harris answered a softball question about what she would have done differently from Biden had she been president with the astoundingly bad answer,

“”"There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of – and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done."

Scarcely believing their luck, Trump's staffers immediately cut together an ad using that quote to tie her to the unpopular decisions of Joe Biden and spent millions broadcasting it across the battleground states.

The results of this strategy are damning. Harris spent half as much time focusing on the most important issues—prices and the cost of living—than did Donald Trump. Black and young voters said they felt frustrated and unheard. Her momentum in the polls stalled and then turned negative in October as voters started to notice that the only arguments of real substance from her campaign were just the same old attacks on Trump. One of the biggest tragedies of this election cycle was that Tim Walz, who did a pretty good job, ended up shackled to an ideologically-bankrupt and uninspiring campaign that didn't let him fully employ his skills or his ideas.

The Trump campaign: they did everything wrong, but everything went right

2024 Republican Party ticket
Donald Trump	JD Vance
for President	for Vice President
45th President of the United States	U.S. Senator from Ohio

This is RationalWiki. We're not going to tell you that Trump ran a good campaign. His campaign was vile, stupid, and morally reprehensible. He promised to weaponize the Justice Department against his political enemies. He promised a batshit plan to place tariffs on most imports, thereby drastically raising consumer prices. He promised to gut the federal government at every level, abolish the Department of Education, and order the United States Armed Forces to assist in the the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.

Accompanying Trump's idiotic plans were his even more idiotic statements. He said people can't eat bacon anymore because of wind energy, he said the Democrats want to take away people's windows, he said that immigrants from Haiti were eating people's pets (they weren't), announced "I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT" on Truth Social, and he said he'd win California if Jesus Christ counted the votes.

Other Trump statements were more ominous. He said he never sexually assaulted E. Jean Caroll because she "wouldn't have been the chosen one." He said people "should be put in jail" for criticizing his Supreme Court justices. He said crime should be addressed with "one real rough, nasty, violent day." He said that Jews would have "a lot to do with" his potential election defeat because they were "voting for the enemy," called his political opponents "vermin," and said that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our nation." All too many attacks against Harris from Trump and other Republicans were rooted in racism and sexism. It was a hateful, stupid campaign, and every second Trump stayed in the race was an insult to the United States.

But he won.

Trump's campaign strategy targeted alienated Americans who were disgusted with the state of politics and the new media, to whom Trump's antics and the backlash they inspired only proved that he was an enemy of the system they hated. He appealed to young men, who for one reason or another felt left behind by the Democratics. His campaign exploited divisions in the Democratic coalition with tactics like airing ads urging Arab-Americans to spurn Harris and vote for Jill Stein. Trump personally appeared on numerous podcasts, including Joe Rogan's, to spread his message to people who were disconnected from traditional political outreach. His anti-establishment appeals stood in sharp contrast to Kamala Harris, who presented herself as a defender of "institutions," shied away from unscripted interviews, and gave a non sequitur "I'm from a middle class family" response to any question she didn't want to deal with.

His victory exposed a major flaw in Harris' campaign strategy: focusing too much on attacking Trump and not enough time on explaining her own plans. So many of Harris' attacks on Trump, despite being truthful (and 8 years old at this point), fell flat. Trump is a xenophobe? He won Latino men. Full stop. He won them. Trump's sexist? He did better with women than he did in either of his last two campaigns. Trump's a racist? He made significant inroads with Black voters. Trump's a threat to democracy? He actually won a decent chunk of voters who listed "democracy" as their first concern.

Results

The Harris campaign's abandoned watch party on the morning of November 6th. Harris did not address her supporters until late in the afternoon.

The real takeaway here is that the enlightened establishment Democrats, while correctly lambasting Trump as a fascistic moron who doesn't know anything about anything, fucking lost to him twice. But that's okay, right? At least the Democratic consultants got their payout!

Trump's victory was decisive. He was the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004, and he was the first president to return to the White House after previously losing reelection since Grover Cleveland in 1892. Trump improved his margins in every single state from 2020, with the largest rightward shifts being seen in California, New York, New Jersey, Texas, and Florida.

The realignment based on socioeconomic class was stark: Trump outright (but narrowly) won the cohort of voters who make less than $50,000 per year and the cohort of voters who make between $50,000 and $99,000 per year. Meanwhile, voters who make more than $100,000 per year significantly shifted towards Harris, a major reversal from what the Democratic Party's base of support should look like.

Harris also lost a massive amount of support from most key Democratic demographics. While Biden won Latino men by 23 points in 2020, Trump won them by 10 in 2024 and flipped the most Hispanic county in America into the Republican column for the first time since 1896. He also won the previously Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade County in Florida. Compared to Biden, Harris also lost 20 points with Latina women, 4 points with Black men, and 13 points with voters between 18 and 29 years old. Although Harris gained a small amount of support from Black women in 2024 compared to Biden, she still did 5 points worse with them than Hillary Clinton had in 2016. Trump's strategy of targeting low-propensity voters also manifested in the final results: while Biden won first-time voters by 32 points in 2020, Trump won them by 11 points in 2024. Asian-American voters also shifted towards Trump by 5 points, causing Trump to win Merced County, California, which has one of the highest Asian-American populations in the United States and was previously a Democratic stronghold.

The loss of support for Harris had a significant impact on traditionally-Democratic states. New Jersey, for example, saw its closest margin for a Democrat (5.9 points, far short of Biden's 16 points) since Bill Clinton's narrow victory in that state in 1992 (2.37 points) due to decreased Democratic turnout. New York also shifted massively to the right. In New York City, Trump gained about 94,000 more votes than he had in 2020 while Harris won around 573,000 fewer than Biden had. The working-class borough of Queens jumped 35% to the right. Despite having a home state advantage in California, Harris also lost 5 points and 10 counties compared to Biden. Much of California's shift towards Trump is also attributable to the state's worsening attitude towards crime, as demonstrated by the overwhelming voter support for Proposition 36, imposing harsher sentences on theft and drug crimes, and the ouster of progressive District Attorneys in Democratic strongholds like Alameda County and Los Angeles County.

In most cities across the country that shifted significantly towards Trump, decreased Democratic turnout was the cause. Alongside winning 573,000 fewer votes in New York City than Biden had, Harris fell short by 137,000 in Florida's Miami-Dade County, 295,000 in Illinois' Cook County, 620,000 in Los Angeles County, and 115,000 in Texas' Harris County. Chicago's turnout in a presidential election hadn't been this low since 1996, and before that since 1944.

The reaction to this decisive loss for most liberal Americans, notably, was not despairing shock like it was last time, but rather anger; the biggest takeaway they had from this election is a matter of the Democrat Party's leaders having a total disconnect from the working class. The reason why Trump won despite running such an insanely abysmal campaign - fucking twice, no less - is that the current status quo is too broken for most Americans to be worth keeping around without mandating a massive overhaul of the current system on all levels. Assuming that they want to start winning elections, this means cutting out the billionaires from the equation altogether and making a campaign centered around radical change and redistributing of the wealth disparity of this country. Time will tell, however, if the Democrats will actually listen and don't take the exact wrong lessons from it.

Maps

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  Electoral College votes from each state and the District of Columbia.

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  Results by county, shaded by the winner's vote share. Note the major shifts in southern Texas, greater New York City, and inland California.

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  Results by margin of victory in each state.

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  Swing in county margins from 2020 to 2024.

Close states

States where the margin of victory was under 1%:

1. Wisconsin, 0.86% (29,397 votes) – 10 electoral votes

States where the margin of victory was between 1% and 5%:

1. Michigan, 1.41% (80,103 votes) – 15 electoral votes
2. Pennsylvania, 1.71% (120,266 votes) – 19 electoral votes (tipping-point state)
3. Georgia, 2.19% (115,100 votes) – 16 electoral votes
4. New Hampshire, 2.78% (22,965 votes) – 4 electoral votes
5. Nevada, 3.10% (46,008 votes) – 6 electoral votes
6. North Carolina, 3.21% (183,046 votes) – 16 electoral votes
7. Minnesota, 4.24% (137,947 votes) – 10 electoral votes
8. Nebraska's 2nd congressional district, 4.59% (14,636 votes) – 1 electoral vote

States/districts where the margin of victory was between 5% and 10%:

1. Arizona, 5.53% (187,382 votes) – 11 electoral votes
2. Virginia, 5.78% (260,310 votes) – 13 electoral votes
3. New Jersey, 5.89% (252,450 votes) – 14 electoral votes
4. New Mexico, 6.00% (55,411 votes) – 5 electoral votes
5. Maine, 6.92% (57,514 votes) – 2 electoral votes
6. Maine's 2nd congressional district, 8.99% (35,425 votes) – 1 electoral vote

Concurrent elections

2024 House results. Solid colors are flipped seats.

House of Representatives

See the main article on this topic: United States House of Representatives

Despite a national shift towards the Republicans, House Democrats actually held up pretty well. Despite having to contend with North Carolina's new gerrymander that cut three seats out from beneath them before the election even started, the Democrats prevented the Republicans from keeping anything more than a razor-slim majority. The final House races took weeks to count (because of California), but the final result came in December: a 220-seat Republican majority and 215 Democratic seats. 2024 was therefore a net loss of one seat for Republicans.

Due to Trump's victories in the Rust Belt, Republicans for the first time since 2016 have won a majority of the Congressional delegation in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Democrats, meanwhile, picked up two seats in the South due to a series of Supreme Court decisions ruling that Republicans in Alabama and Louisiana had unfairly limited the number of Black-majority House districts in violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. New York Democrats redeemed themselves after their poor showing in the 2022 midterms by winning back four of the five seats they lost that year.

Some House Democrats also scored impressive victories after fighting to hold their seats in Republican-leaning districts that Trump had won easily. Marcy Kaptur held her seat in Ohio-9 by slightly over 0.5%, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez held Washington-3 after unexpectedly flipping the safe-Republican seat two years ago, and Jared Golden survived by the skin of his teeth due to ranked choice voting in Maine-2, a seat that has voted heavily for Trump three times in a row.

Senate

Unfortunately, Democrats lost four seats in the Senate in 2024 with the final result at 53 Republican seats and 45 Democratic and Democratic-aligned seats. All of the lost Democratic seats were in states that Trump won, and three were in states that are overwhelmingly Republican: Tim Sheehy defeated John Tester in Montana, car-salesman Bernie Moreno defeated left-populist Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Jim Justice won the seat in West Virginia vacated by the retiring Joe Manchin (essentially a freebie for Republicans). Additionally, David McCormick defeated Bob Casey Jr. in Pennsylvania by a razor-thin margin of 0.2% and 16,000 votes.

In most races, Senate Democrats did far better in their states than Kamala Harris. Despite losing their seats, Tester did 7 points better than Harris in Montana, Brown did 4 points better than Harris in Ohio, and Casey did 1 point better than Harris in Pennsylvania. Senate Democrats also won their races in four states Harris lost: Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, Jacky Rosen in Nevada, and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. Baldwin's victory was especially satisfying, as her Republican opponent had focused on attacking her sexual orientation.

These results made the Senate elections somewhat unusual, as a greater number of states voted in different parties for Senate and President than 2020 and 2022 combined—states have stayed more consistently loyal to each party as political polarization has increased over the years. The results strongly indicate that voters repudiated Harris more so than the Democratic Party itself.

As for other interesting races, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota ran over 12 points ahead of Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren slightly underperformed compared to Harris (both are pretty old to be running in an election where old age was a major issue for both parties). Former governor Larry Hogan also performed significantly better than Trump in Maryland thanks to his personal popularity and moderate credentials. Finally, independent labor union leader Dan Osborn made the Senate race in deep-red Nebraska startlingly close by running a working-class focused campaign and hammering incumbent Deb Fischer for using the office to increase her personal wealth. It's really too bad he lost.

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  2024 Senate results. Solid colors are flipped seats (Arizona is shown as Democratic gain from Independent).

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  Harris vs. Senate Democrats comparison (the 3 independents are also in blue). In blue counties, the Senate Democratic candidate did better than Harris, and in red counties, they did worse than her.

Full list of presidential candidates

Democrats

• Vice President Kamala Harris of California, following Biden's withdrawal on July 21, 2024. ("You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?")

Withdrawn

• President Joe Biden of Delaware
• Convicted felon Joe Exotic of Oklahoma
• Antivaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — later changed to run as an independent before endorsing Trump
• Congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota (endorsed Biden)
• Venture capitalist Jason Palmer of Maryland (endorsed Biden)
• Political commentator Cenk Uygur of California
• Spiritual writer and perennial candidate Marianne Williamson of California (suspended, un-suspended, re-suspended, then re-un-suspended her campaign — because perennialism)

Republicans

• Former President Donald Trump of Florida

Withdrawn

• Nondenominational pastor Ryan Binkley of Texas (endorsed Trump)
• Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota (endorsed Trump)
• Former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey
• Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida (endorsed Trump)
• Talk radio host Larry Elder of California (endorsed Trump)
• Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley of South Carolina
• Former Congressman Will Hurd of Texas
• Former Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas
• Bishop E. W. Jackson of Virginia (endorsed Trump)
• Businessman Perry Johnson of Michigan
• Former Vice President Mike Pence of Indiana
• Investor Vivek Ramaswamy of Ohio (endorsed Trump)
• Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina (endorsed Trump)
• Miami Mayor Francis Suarez of Florida

Independent/Third Party

• Activist Claudia De la Cruz of New York (Party for Socialism and Liberation)
• Traditionalist Catholic podcaster Taylor Marshall of Texas
• Activist Chase Oliver of Georgia (Libertarian Party)
• Physician Jill Stein of Massachusetts (Green Party)
• Local politician Peter Sonski of Connecticut (Solidarity Party)
• Performance artist Vermin Supreme of Massachusetts (Pirate Party)
• Anti-abortion activist Randall Terry of West Virginia (Constitution Party)
• Philosopher Cornel West of California

Withdrawn

• Attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of California (American Independent Party, Reform Party) (endorsed Trump)

See also

• 2020 U.S. presidential election
• 2016 U.S. presidential election
• 2024 United Kingdom general election

External links

• Green Day - American Idiot

References

2024 United States presidential election articles on RationalWiki

Topics: Abortion - Inflation - Israel/Palestine - Project 2025 - Supreme Court - Ukraine - Undocumented immigration
Parties: Democratic Party - Green Party of the United States - Libertarian Party - Republican Party
Candidates: Biden (D) - Burgum (R) - Christie (R) - DeSantis (R) - Elder (R) - Haley (R) - Harris (D) - Kennedy Jr. (Independent) - Pence (R) - Ramaswamy (R) - Stein (Green) - Trump (R) - West (Independent) - Williamson (D) • Running mates: Walz (D) - Vance (R)
Winner: Donald Trump