This is an edited transcript of an audio essay for “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the essay in the player above, or by subscribing to the podcast on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Musicjili777, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
I find myself thinking about the 2004 election. In my lifetime, until today, that was the most total rejection liberals experienced. In 2000, George W. Bush was this accidental president. He’d lost the popular vote. He’d won the Electoral College after winning Florida by a few hundred votes. But by 2004, the lies and the failures and travesties of his administration were clear. The disaster of the Iraq war was clear. And the result was that Bush went from accidental president to unquestioned victor. He won the popular vote cleanly. On the electoral maps, the center of the country was a sea of red. What made that loss hurt so much for liberals was that by 2004, Americans knew who Bush was and what he had done. They chose him anyway.
That is roughly what happened Tuesday night. Donald Trump’s victory was not one of the grand landslides of American political history. As I write this, estimates suggest that he is on track for a 1.5-percentage-point margin in the popular vote. If that holds — and it may change as California is counted — it is smaller than Barack Obama’s win in 2008 or 2012, Bush’s in 2004 and Bill Clinton’s in 1992 or 1996. It may prove smaller than Hillary Clinton’s margin in 2016.
But it is a huge gain compared with 2020, when Trump lost the popular vote by nearly five points. And yes, I know, presidential elections are not decided by the popular vote. But it matters where the mood of America is moving, and the popular vote tells us more about that than the few hundred thousand voters who swing Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
So what’s behind Trump’s gain? One theory is that this is the postpandemic, postinflation, anti-incumbent backlash. We’ve seen it in country after country. Whoever was in power in 2021 and 2022 is getting annihilated in elections. This is true for parties on the right and parties on the left. In Britain the Tories had their worst election ever. In Japan the Liberal Democratic Party — which is, confusingly for us, a conservative party — had one of its worst elections ever. Left-of-center governments have fallen in Sweden and Finland and Portugal. Look a bit north, and Canada’s Justin Trudeau is hideously unpopular. As Matthew Yglesias wrote, if you look at this internationally, the interesting question might be why Trump didn’t win in a landslide. If Nikki Haley had been running, she probably would have.
But Trump didn’t just win this election. Democrats lost it. President Biden, at 81 years old and hovering beneath 40 percent favorability in most polls, should never have run for re-election. And for months and months and months, the leaders of the Democratic Party, with very few exceptions — shout-out to Dean Phillips — refused to say that. As poll after poll showed supermajorities of voters thought Biden was too old for this job, the party continued to suppress any serious challenge to him. It suppressed its own doubts. It ignored its own voters, to say nothing of the voters it was going to need to win in 2024.
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