Donald Trump won the 2024 election quite handily.
Trump took 312 Electoral College votes to Kamala Harris's 226. She lost every battleground state, including that of her running mate.
He also won the popular vote, gaining, as of this date, 77,193,105 votes to Harris's 74,898,009, or 49.9% of the popular vote to 48.4%.
Trump has a clear and unquestionable mandate to govern and to put in place his electoral platform.
How did we get here?
Let's look at the Democrats first.
Harris's biggest problem is that she can't communicate. She has no innate sense of how what she is saying is being heard by her audience. I can't state this strongly enough - if communication is key to political success, she is a political idiot. You can see the disconnect in her face when she speaks - her confusion and discomfort is masked by smiles and platitudes. It is totally bizarre. There is a reason why her handlers kept her under wraps - she may have been the worst presidential candidate in the history of the United States of America.
The Candidate - Bad Being Bad: Harris was a bad candidate when she ran to be the Democratic nominee in 2020. She ran a terrible campaign in 2024 and she was an equally terrible candidate. The key problem she had was that, after hiding from the press for the first month of her candidacy, she did a range of interviews which, even though they were staged with Democrat-friendly interviewers, allowed voters to get a sense of who she really is, and they were simply not impressed. After the throw-away propaganda lines, people craved content. She had very little to offer.
Her coronation as the Democratic candidate was not deserved. The Democratic Party needed to consider putting a democratic process in place to replace Biden. They didn't. The result was an incompetent candidate who lost them a very winnable election.
Lesson 1 - Let the People decide.
The Agenda - Bewake The Woke: Voters woke up to the Woke agenda. Human rights are supported by the vast majority of voters in America on the Left and the Right, but the continuing cult-like suppression of differing opinions, coupled with the seething passive-aggressive arrogance by which some proponents put forward the Woke agenda has turned many people off. Coming across as if everyone who even asks questions about the agenda is stupid, racist, misogynist, and deeply unacceptable, just doesn't win anyone any friends.
The people putting forward this agenda often seem to be truly awful people personally, who never seem to chat with anyone outside of their cult group. Couple this with societal changes that the Woke agenda pushes that most people do not yet support, and the Democrats created a recipe for electoral defeat.
One day, most people may support much of the Woke agenda. For now, the challenge for proponents is to gingerly and carefully get them there.
The art of politics is persuasion, not condemnation.
Lesson 2 - Let the People catch up.
The Enemy - The Big Bad Wolf: Are the people at The Lincoln Project insane? Some of their short videos, which were designed to encourage voters to abandon Trump, were and are borderline crazy. Do these people actually think that cops are going to pull over teenage girls crossing state lines so they can administer pregnancy tests, or that women will be required to report pregnancies to track them to prevent abortions? Even the Nazis didn't do that.
And CNN and MSNBC? How many times did they mention that Trump was a "felon"? Was it 5,000 times? Did that work?
In spite of these relentless assaults, Trump's popularity went up as the campaign progressed. Not many people seemed to care about Trump's convictions - he didn't commit any crimes against them personally, after all. With his popularity rising, these anti-Trump hucksters were challenged to pivot to a different approach that could have been more effective. They didn't pivot because they didn't believe the polls, and they didn't believe the polls because they didn't trust the people of American to not make a decision that they deeply opposed, and that they could not even fathom.
The result; they lost.
Lesson 3 - The People are always right - ignore them at your peril.
The Economy - Empathy, Now!: The Democrats seem to live in a bubble, almost entirely removed from the realities of the day-to-day lives of Americans. They spew their propaganda lines, no doubt carefully focus-group tested in advance, in trying to reach out to those whose votes they seek. Fewer and fewer people are listening, and many Americans are on to them now.
Part of the reason why the Democrats are so disconnected from ordinary people should be crystal clear - many of these people are the very ones who often oppose or at least question the Woke agenda. By ignoring, and even pillorying these people (the "Deplorables" of Clinton...the implicitly stupid according to Woke activists...), the Democrats made a conscious choice to put Woke ahead of Folk.
But there are way more Folk than Woke. Trump was happy to pick up the political gems from a crumbling Democratic historical and formerly empathetic political edifice.
Lesson 4 - When you don't make the basic concerns of the People the centre-point of your campaign, they don't vote for you. (One other challenge of politics is to create the illusion that everything you propose is about the People...hello Premier Ford...)
The Characteristics - The Racist, Sexist Bigots: Did Biden decide to get out of the race too late? No one knows, but the rapturous and borderline orgasmic reception that Harris received upon being nominated strongly suggests that she would have been anointed anyway.
In nominating Harris, the Democratic Party saw a Younger, Black, Indian Woman and thought they could run the electoral table with her by capturing every associated demographic subset. Specifically, she is Black, so they thought that sewed up the Black vote; she is Indian, so they thought that sewed up the Southeast Asian vote; she is a Woman, so that would sew up the female vote; and she Younger, so they thought that they would sew up the Youth vote.
If this theory of voter preference - that voters don't vote based on personal interests, but based on the colour of their skin, shape of their genitals, and ethnicity - is accurate, then the Democrats should be able to govern the United States of America forever.
Say hello to President Trump, again. The theory isn't accurate; they could have just asked Kim Campbell.
Now imagine, for a moment, a political party that catered to White Men; held out that it was The White Guy's Party, and based on putting forward White Male candidates, that party asserted that it would sew up the entire White Guy vote. The words to describe that approach would be Racist and Sexist.
Yup.
Lesson 5 - People mostly vote based on their interests, not their demographic profile.
And...
Lesson 6 - People do not appreciate being told who and what they are by people who don't know them at all.
Now let's look at the Republicans.
In general, Trump has always been very badly underestimated by his opponents. The only one to take him seriously was Biden - how did that turn out? Clinton and Harris were shocked that they lost to him; they shouldn't have been.
Trump is a very skilled politician who "reads the room" that is present American sentiments and predilections much better than just about everyone else.
Reality - love him or hate him, Donald J Trump is the preeminent American personality of this century, so far.
Channeling McLuhan - The Message is the Message - Quick! Name the top three things Harris wanted to do as President!? Crickets...did she even know?
Trump stuck to some simple messages, and just kept repeating them. Off the top of my head...tariffs on China; end the Ukraine war; tax cuts; smaller government; secure the border and expel illegal immigrants. Many voters disagree with what Trump wants to do, but at least they know what much of that actually is.
Lesson 7 - The People want to know what you stand for. Figure out the five big things you want to do, and just keep repeating them over and over whenever you can.
Channeling Reagan - The Lessor Communicator: Ronald Reagan was famously "The Great Communicator". Trump is a far less capable orator than Reagan, but like him he does understand the need to go to the People to communicate effectively. In Reagan's day, that meant mastering television. Today, it means dominating social media. On that, Trump has no equal in his exploitation of social media in order to get his message across.
Lesson 8 - The People will only see your message where they congregate. Go to the People if you want to get noticed.
Channeling Truman - Speak Their Language: Truman was famous for speaking plainly to Americans. Trump does the same. His events are boring, tedious and uninspiring, but they are also homey, familiar and strangely comfortable. He speaks as if he is talking directly to each and every member of his audience personally. He may be lying to their faces, but he comes across in a sincere way. His approach shows a tremendous respect for his audience by treating them almost as proverbial "members of the family."
In sum, his folksy style is devastatingly effective, especially with people who have not normally participated in a political process, and who are not used to discerning "political speak."
Lesson 9 - Speak to the People as they want to be spoken to and as they speak amongst themselves.
Or...
Lesson 10 - If you speak in a disingenuous and distant style designed to cover policy weaknesses, and if you obfuscate while appearing to be answering questions and addressing issues that you may not even understand, the People will think you're a fucking idiot. They literally HATE that shit.
Channeling Orwell - Rage On!: Americans are angry. The anger of this epoch in political history was predicted by George Orwell, who included the phenomenon of "Two Minutes Hate" in his novel, 1984. With reason gone and hate in ascendence, there is an opportunity for politicians who have no qualms about the moral implications of political hatred to exploit the situation. This is Trump, personified.
Is he the baddie?
Those who read this and think Trump is the issue should reflect on the fact that two people attempted to assassinate him during the campaign, and one person came within a hair's breath of actually doing so. He doesn't have a monopoly on hate, he just uses it better than anyone else.
Lesson 11 - Understand the political age in which you live, conduct yourself accordingly, and the People will follow.
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