In its dramatic outlines, the 2024 election of Donald Trump did not merely provide a dark sequel to 2016, but, in the anguished imagination of American liberals, enacted the more primordial horror of repetition. Once again Trump appeared in the role of challenger and insurgent, slayer of established pieties and establishment Republicans, undisguised bullshit artist and speaker of unspeakable truths. It was a remarkable feat of prestidigitation for a man who had already served as President of the United States for four years, and whose core political programme—lower taxes, higher tariffs and a hard border—had hardly changed since he and his party last commanded the presidency and both chambers of Congress eight years ago.
Of course, he had considerable assistance in this makeover, not just from the wayward bullet of a would-be assassin. The Democrats collaborated eagerly in restoring Trump’s mythic aura of rebellion, transforming him from ex-president to rogue outsider, once again summoning his legions to overthrow the deep state. In every way the Democratic campaign followed the 2016 script, altering it only to up the stakes. Thus while Hillary Clinton and her allies spoke of ‘character’, ‘bigotry’ and the unwinding of ‘norms’, the keywords this year were ‘criminal’, ‘fascism’ and the danger to ‘democracy’. While in 2016 liberal institutionalists sat in judgement of Trump’s boorish behaviour, in 2024 actual liberal institutions convicted him of thirty-four felonies for concealing hush-money payments to a pornographic actress, and indicted him on fifty-two other federal and state charges.
As in 2016, the last election featuring a Democratic incumbent, the party leadership imposed its candidate of choice, this time not bothering with a meaningful primary process; when President Biden was revealed to be manifestly unfit, they replaced him with Vice President Kamala Harris, who was also coronated rather than elected. Like Clinton (and Biden in 2020), Harris far outpaced Trump in the money race, winning robust support from Wall Street, Silicon Valley and other bastions of blue-state capitalism; and like Clinton she concluded her campaign with a defence of the existing order against Trump’s dangerous challenge.
On 7 November 2016 in Philadelphia, flanked by the Obamas, Clinton had decried Trump’s ‘derogatory and insulting comments’, boasted of her service in Obama’s cabinet, and framed the election as a choice ‘between strong, steady leadership or a loose cannon who could put everything at risk’.footnote1 Harris gripped the status quo even more tightly, choosing to give her last major speech at the Ellipse in Washington, just outside the Democratic-held White House she had served in for the last four years. Where Clinton had insisted that ‘America has never stopped being great’, Harris went one better: ‘The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised’. The Vice President offered herself as the guardian of American freedom against a ‘petty tyrant’ and ‘wannabe dictator’, a figure of chaos and leader of armed mobs who is ‘unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power . . . America, I am here tonight to say that is not who we are! That is not who we are! That is not who we are!’footnote2
In substance as in form, the 2024 election reconstituted the essential features of 2016. Trump won his first victory by preserving the Republican base cemented by George W. Bush—white voters in rural areas, small towns and outer-ring suburbs—while adding a strategic slice of support in the deindustrialized Midwest. Yet if the first Make America Great Again campaign inspired genuine zeal in some places, including Florida’s Gulf Coast and the Anthracite Coal Region of Pennsylvania, Trump’s decisive success in the Rust Belt in 2016 was accomplished largely by a collapse in Democratic turnout.
In Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota, where the overall participation rate fell, Clinton’s tally was 1.3 million short of Obama’s total in 2012. Trump picked up about 400,000 of those voters, mainly white and blue-collar; but the larger share, nearly 900,000, simply dropped out of the electorate.footnote3 The unprecedented support Clinton gained among prosperous and well-educated suburbanites was not enough to make up for these defections and disappearances. Fundamentally, the Democrats’ failure to motivate the economically depressed layers of the Obama coalition—as evident in downtown Detroit or Milwaukee as in Sandusky or Saginaw—handed Trump the presidency.footnote4
On first glance, Trump’s second victory map looks rather different from the first. This year’s most dramatic ‘red shifts’ came not in the Rust Belt but in an improbably far-flung set of locations: the Mexican border region of South Texas (where Hidalgo County, 92 per cent Hispanic, swung to Trump by 20 points), outer-borough New York City (where supermajority Asian precincts in Queens swung 34 points), black belt Alabama (where Montgomery, cradle of the civil rights movement, swung 16 points), and the Yupik districts of Alaska along the Bering Sea (also 16 points).footnote5 In the crucial swing state of North Carolina, the single largest shift to Trump came not in the rural white piedmont or the buzzing suburbs of Charlotte, but Robeson County in the swampy southeast, home to the largest American Indian tribe east of the Mississippi. About forty per cent native Lumbee and twenty per cent black, Robeson had quietly entered Trump’s column in 2016; this year his margins ballooned by a further nine points, four times the statewide swing.