The election of former President Donald Trump after losing the 2020 round to President Joe Biden is likely to go down in the annals of American history as a monumental event that will have serious consequences for the United States. Following his defeat in 2020, Trump vowed to return to the Oval Office to exact revenge on those he deemed to be personal and political enemies. He also promised a new politics in the country that focuses on nativist principles and ideas and a different inward-looking governing philosophy that is likely to diminish the American role in international affairs. In essence, a new Trump term is expected to be at least as tumultuous and chaotic as his first between 2017 and 2021, if not more, as he deals with the pressures of office and the responsibility to manage complicated domestic and external issues.
Trump’s winning the presidency was the culmination of a successful electoral strategy that outperformed that of his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris. His victory was also helped by inherent problems in Harris’s campaign that only kicked into gear last July after President Biden ended his presidential bid, essentially giving her less than four months to assemble a winning team and run a successful operation. She also was dogged by political difficulties resulting from her almost total adherence to Biden’s policies and performance. In the end, and despite the enthusiasm and momentum surrounding her bid—as was apparent in her campaign rallies— and successful fundraising, Harris failed to cross the finish line ahead of her rival.
Arab Center Washington DC (ACW) asked its analysts and fellows to provide their distilled opinions about why Trump won the presidency. Their responses are below.
None of It Mattered
Yara M. Asi, ACW Non-resident Fellow
On paper, the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris was as tight an operation as had ever been: massive fundraising, endless celebrity endorsements, and a ground game working at maximum efficiency.
But none of it mattered. Harris lost against a candidate with no discipline, no cohesive vision for the country, and with record unpopularity. His campaign should never work, according to the pundits. But it did, and resoundingly so.
Campaigns cannot just work on paper. Harris was handicapped as a nominee the minute President Biden announced he would run for a second term. By the time his inevitable replacement was necessary, there was no time for a robust primary process that could find a candidate in whom people believed. It did not help that Harris had not made much of a name for herself as a vice president and was unpopular in her own run for president in 2020.
But there was still a sense of hope when her candidacy was announced; it was seen as a chance for something different. This could have included a recalculation of Biden’s ironclad support for Israel’s campaign of deprivation and violence against Palestinians, since multiple polls demonstrated that the base of the Democratic Party was against supplying the weapons and political support that made it possible. But none of the protestations of these voters mattered, either.
Harris almost immediately squandered that hope, committing to the economic and political trajectory her boss has set forth, and outright refusing to differentiate herself in any way. Ultimately, voters believed Trump’s promises about “fixing” the economy, and Harris did not do enough to dispute them. The door knocking, the endorsements, and even Trump’s own abysmal record—none of it mattered. People wanted change, for reasons logical or not, and Harris promised none.
A Core Constituency for Trump
Imad K. Harb, ACW Director of Research and Analysis
Dissecting the corpse of the Harris campaign for president will certainly be a task many analysts will undertake over the next few weeks and months. Sympathetic ones will probably blame her defeat on the fact that she had a short time to mount an effective campaign between President Biden’s ending his bid last July and her assuming the Democratic mantle. Others may opine that the American electorate is not yet ready for a woman president, and a female of mixed Indian and African American heritage at that. Yet others may think that Biden’s legacy as president who faced insalubrious economic and political problems was a heavy lift she could not carry. On the other hand, unsympathetic opinions may simply see that Donald Trump was an unstoppable force this time around and Harris was just too weak and inexperienced to challenge him to the presidency.
But whatever the possible tactical explanations for Harris’s defeat and Trump’s victory may be, the outcome of the election was made possible by an extant unwelcome and unfortunate reality in American society today. A core constituency of voters has decided to accept to be represented in the White House by a racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, misogynistic, and convicted felon who evinces no discernible knowledge of government and promises to exact revenge on real and imagined opponents. Early estimates of the popular vote that Trump won this time around (about 73 million) proves that he gained no new adherents since his 2020 run. (Harris’s share was some 68 million, 13 million less than what Biden received in 2020, indicating that she was not near the perfect candidate to represent the change needed in the United States today.) Choosing Trump indicates that something is terribly wrong in how American voters look at politics and what they expect from it. To keen observers, such a reality means that the United States may be on a path of self-destruction the return from which is extremely hard to fathom.
The Democratic Party’s Blame Game
Khalil E. Jahshan, ACW Executive Director
In a remarkable comeback on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, former President Donald J. Trump easily and decisively won the race to the White House by quickly mustering 295 Electoral College votes to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 226 votes and winning the national popular vote. Endless questions are being raised about the surprising results that gave the Republican Party total control of the Executive and Legislative branches of government. First and foremost, among these questions is the issue of who is to blame.
In their attempt to answer this complex question, analysts are pointing their fingers at various issues ranging from the “woke left,” to dissatisfied American youth, disenfranchised immigrant communities, and even to Joe Biden. In my humble judgment, the outgoing Democratic president must shoulder the bulk of the responsibility for this historic failure. Three main reasons come to mind.
First, the Biden administration’s record for the past four years has been lackluster at best, particularly concerning the two eye words, namely inflation and immigration, the most divisive national issues successfully used against the Democratic candidate in this election.
Second, Biden’s controlling approach returned to haunt him significantly on two separate tracks. Historically uncharacteristic of Democratic administrations, Mr. Biden hogged the decision-making process and personalized it to the extent that the public equated him, and later Harris, with his administration’s limited economic achievements and foreign policy failures. These included the administration’s overall handling of US-Israeli relations and the Gaza war, where personal presidential preferences and biases were left unchecked to the detriment of US national interest and future Democratic electoral prospects.
Third, by marginalizing Harris’s role since 2021, for essentially personal political ambitions and plans, Biden ended up undermining her candidacy after she replaced him on the Democratic Party ticket. The Trump campaign used this issue quite effectively to raise serious public doubts about her capabilities and qualifications to manage the office of president of the United States.
The Democratic Party’s Identity Crisis
Tamara Kharroub, ACW Deputy Executive Director and Senior Fellow
Several factors contributed to former President Donald Trump’s victory and Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss in the 2024 presidential election, with which the Democratic Party will have to reckon for years to come. While Trump maintained his same voter base from 2020, Harris’s performance was abysmal largely due to lower voter turnout for the Democratic candidate. The fact that the Democrats lost the election to a fascist, misogynist, racist, and incompetent convicted felon says more about the Democratic Party than about president-elect Trump. While Trumpism is alive and well, and there is no question about the appeal of these views or at least willingness to tolerate them by a large enough American constituency (after all significantly higher percentages of Black and Hispanic men voted for Trump this round), what is clear is that the Democratic Party is losing its base.
During the last few years, the Democratic Party has struggled to balance appealing to both progressive and centrist voters in the party, which led to mixed messaging and alienating groups of Americans that many long-time Democrats felt increasingly politically homeless. On one hand, progressive messaging on social issues has alienated the moderate camp in the party, while its establishment politics and appeasing the economic and political elites (not least of which is supporting Israel’s genocide) have alienated its progressive base. For a party based on diversity and service to the people, it failed to address the grievances of its constituents, even to the point of insulting voters. Meanwhile, the only coherent strategy the Democratic Party held is providing a “Not-Trump” option. At the same time, political polarization and disinformation are rampant in the media and political discourse with little scrutiny or pushbacks, and nuanced policy discussions have taken a back seat. This election makes it more urgent than ever to reform the political system, refocus on policies that serve the people, and provide options to the American voter.
Trump Did Not Win, Harris Lost
Yousef Munayyer, ACW Senior Fellow and Head of the Palestine/Israel Program
When Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket from President Joe Biden, she had the opportunity to right the slow-motion train wreck that was his presidential campaign. However, instead of switching tracks, she simply became the new conductor on a path inevitably destined for failure. Biden was a historically unpopular incumbent for a whole range of reasons. Americans wanted change. While Harris was a different person than Biden, her failure to clearly articulate where and how a Harris administration would govern differently left too many American voters unconvinced and uninspired. There is no doubt that the Biden-Harris policy supporting Israel’s genocide alienated significant swaths of Arab- and Muslim-American voters, but also young and other voters of color.
A more comprehensive analysis will surely be done in the days and weeks to come but the results suggest strongly that this was not really an election Donald Trump won and more an election that Kamala Harris lost. Trump largely recreated his vote totals from 2020 while Harris fell some 13 million votes behind the totals achieved by Biden that year. Those 13 million voters did not switch to Trump; instead, they largely sat out the election, allowing Trump to be the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years. A key Democratic message in this election was that it was essential for the preservation of American democracy. Yet millions of Americans who voted in 2020 did not find that message credible enough to vote at all. Democrats managed to lose, again, to Donald Trump whom, unlike in 2016, Americans knew full well and who was a convicted felon who attempted to overthrow the 2020 election because he lost it. This makes the extent of the loss to Trump even more catastrophic for Democrats who will likely have to rework many of their core assumptions around election strategy to be competitive again.
Voters Wanted Change from Biden Policies
Annelle Sheline, ACW Non-resident Fellow
Donald Trump portrayed himself as the “change” candidate. Kamala Harris tried to distinguish herself from Biden while adhering to all of his policy positions. Some 80 percent of polled voters said they wanted “change.”
The Democratic establishment seemed to believe that they did not need to address voters’ concerns. Compared to 2021, poverty in 2024 increased by almost 70 percent, while food insecurity increased by 40 percent. To be clear, poverty rates had risen under Trump, but were significantly cut by pandemic relief measures in 2020 and 2021 that made historic gains in poverty reduction. Yet Democrats largely ignored voters who consistently cited the high cost of living as their primary concern, instead focusing on the threat Trump posed to democracy. The Trump campaign spent millions on ads featuring Harris touting the economic successes of the Biden administration.
Beyond economic stress, many voters felt that the country and the world had grown more chaotic under Biden, driven by fears about immigration, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza. Harris’s unwillingness to signal any distance from Biden’s policies on these issues offered voters little hope for a different path.
Unfortunately, Trump’s plans for America are likely to bring about more economic pain, more chaos at home and abroad, and—as the Democrats futilely warned—potentially destroy American democratic institutions.
Featured image credit: Shutterstock/Jonah Elkowitz
