What Trump Understood, and Harris Did Not

Ironically, it may have been Donald Trump’s discipline that won him a return trip to the White House.

The former and future president is infamous for his erratic approach to politics, which was on flagrant display in the past couple of weeks of the campaign. But Trump consistently offered a clear message that spoke to Americans’ frustration about the economy and the state of the country, and promised to fix it.

Throughout the campaign, Trump told voters that President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and undocumented immigrants were responsible for inflation, and that he would fix the problem. His proposals were often incoherent and nonsensical. For example, Trump promised to both whip inflation and also institute enormous tariffs, a combination nearly all economists agree is impossible. The mass deportation that Trump has promised would also likely drive up prices, rather than soothing the economy. But in a country where roughly three-quarters of Americans feel that things are on the wrong track, a pledge to fix things was potent.

[David Frum: Trump won. Now what?]

Trump may be the most negative mainstream candidate in American history. Observers including my colleague Peter Wehner have noted the contrast between Trump’s disposition and Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism. But in a strange way, Trump does offer a kind of hope. It is not a hope for women with complicated pregnancies or LGBTQ people or immigrants, even legal ones. But for those who fit under Stephen Miller’s rubric that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” Trump promised a way out.

“We’re going to help our country heal,” Trump said in remarks early this morning. “We’re going to help our country heal. We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country, and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that.”

You can contrast that with the message coming from Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, which was more outwardly hopeful but suffered from a serious, perhaps unfixable, flaw.

[Read: The night they hadn’t prepared for]

Harris won praise for her positive campaign message, especially in the immediate weeks after Joe Biden dropped out of the race and she became the nominee. Biden had spent months warning darkly about Trump’s threat to democracy, but Harris offered something more forward-looking—explicitly. “We’re not going back,” she told voters.

Harris promised to protect things like Social Security and Medicare, and warned that Trump would ruin everything that was great about America. This was a fundamentally conservative answer, coming from a Democratic Party that, as I wrote last year, has become strikingly conservative, but it came at a time when too many voters were disgusted with the status quo.

Democrats may have been slow to take seriously the economic pain of inflation. In its first two years, the Biden administration was single-mindedly focused on revving and restructuring the economy after COVID, and treated inflation more as a transitory annoyance than a long-term danger. But also, it seems to have concluded that it lacked a good answer to inflation. The administration argued with frustration that inflation was a worldwide trend, caused by COVID, and pointed out that inflation in the U.S. had dropped faster than in peer countries, and that the American economy was running better than any other. All of this was true and also politically unhelpful. You can’t argue people into feeling better with statistics.

[David A. Graham: The Democrats are now America’s conservative party]

In theory, the mid-summer switch from Harris to Biden gave Democrats a chance to reset. But Harris struggled to create distance from Biden. When she was offered chances to do so, she demurred. In early October, the hosts of The View asked her what she’d have done differently from the president, and she replied, “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.” Republicans were delighted and made that a staple of attack ads and stump speeches.

Whether this was out of loyalty to her boss or some other impulse, it’s not clear that Harris would have been able to pull off a more radical switch. She was still the Democratic nominee, and voters around the world have punished incumbent parties in recent elections. Her coalition meant she couldn’t run an aggressively protectionist or anti-immigrant campaign, even if she had been so inclined. Her strategic decision to court centrist and Republican voters closed off moving very far to the left on economics, though past campaigns do not offer clear evidence that would have been a winner either. Besides, Democrats had a good empirical case that what they had done to steward the economy was very successful. They just had no political case.

In a bitter turn for Democrats, Trump will now benefit from their governing successes. If he truly attempts to, or succeeds at, speedily deporting millions of people or instituting 60 percent tariffs, he will drive inflation higher and wreck the progress of Biden’s term, but Trump’s own political instincts and the influence of many very wealthy people around him may temper that. Having clearly promised to fix the problem and vanquished his enemies, he’ll now be able to declare a swift victory.