Why Did Trump Win? These Dems Have Discovered a Very Disturbing Answer

That’s because they didn’t believe Trump himself was sincerely anti-choice. “They didn’t find him personally responsible for the fall of Roe,” the first operative said, adding that these voters thought “he’s ambivalent” about abortion, perversely enough, because many didn’t think he had “core principles.” Perhaps partly as a result, a sizable subset of voters who supported robust abortion rights voted for Trump.

The result of all this was that these voters associated Trump’s first term with the economy before Covid, which they understandably remembered as a time of lower prices, and nothing else. “We needed to make the case that Trump was a failed president,” the Harris operative told me. “But by the time we got to Biden getting out and Harris being the nominee, that cake was too baked.”

None of this means there weren’t other big reasons for the outcome or other failures by Democrats. The loss was broad, as The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein explains: The whole electorate shifted toward Trump in all types of counties; Harris maintained Democratic strength in affluent, educated suburbs but slipped a bit even there relative to Biden; she didn’t put up good enough numbers with women; and Trump gained among Latinos and non-college educated whites.