Early morning on Nov. 6, Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States, making him the second president in U.S. history to win a second term non-consecutively after Grover Cleveland in 1892. This was also the first time since 2004 that a Republican candidate won the popular vote.
Millions across the country are shocked at the results after seeing how much publicity was given to Kamala Harris’ campaign and how much effort was put into encouraging people to go out and vote.
Not only did Trump win the presidency, Republicans have also secured a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. In addition, thanks to Trump’s previous term, the majority of the Supreme Court is also Conservative. This essentially makes it a lot easier for Trump to accomplish many of the goals he promised voters.
There are many factors as to why Harris lost the election and why Trump won. The main culprit is the economy. Many claim that the Democratic Party ignored the working class it claimed to advocate for. Instead, members of the party surrounded themselves with elites and shamed those who either didn’t understand or didn’t prioritize the key issues that the Democratic Party ran on.
A lot of Harris’ campaign was centered around the issue of reproductive rights, for instance. When landmark case Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, with three of the deciding justices having been appointed by Trump, there was an understandable blame put on Trump for attacking women’s right to choose.
Trump has stated throughout his life that he didn’t support a national abortion ban and he has repeated this sentiment throughout the 2024 election cycle, but for many the damage has been done.
Yet, this issue was far from being at the forefront of many voters’ minds. “In the end, abortion did not rate as highly as Democrats might have hoped,” ABC News reported. “Only 14 percent rated it as their biggest concern.” If one were to break down the math, this isn’t too surprising.
Approximately half of the country is female. The male half has been targeted by the Trump campaign more than anything, between UFC fight appearances and male-centered podcasts like Joe Rogan’s. Within the female half, there are many who consider themselves to be “pro-life” and those who are “pro-choice” often have other things to worry about above social issues.
“If you are struggling to pay your rent or feed your kids, you don’t have the privilege of thinking about things like LGBTQ rights,” CBS News wrote. “Unless you’ve got somebody in your own family that’s personally affected, you don’t have the luxury of thinking about reproductive rights.”
All in all, any social issues in this election, no matter how important, have been overshadowed by the economy. Families across the U.S. saw the prices of groceries rising and saw their politicians ignoring their concerns. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, food prices increased by 5.8% in 2023. Many Americans claimed that despite their grocery lists remaining unchanged, the receipts amounted to much larger sums.
The COVID-19 pandemic that the Biden-Harris administration had come into office during, as well as the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflicts, had a monumental impact on U.S. economy.
However, it would be inaccurate to dismiss Americans’ distrust in Harris when this administration did directly affect the economy as well. “Biden did not cause inflation, but his American Rescue Plan did make it worse,” Vox reported. “Which resulted in higher prices and necessitated bigger interest rate hikes than would have happened otherwise.”
It didn’t help that the Harris campaign used their budget to funnel in a long list of celebrity endorsements, people who haven’t experienced the life of an average American in years, if not decades — or ever at all.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote in a post on X.
