How Did Trump Pull Off a Red Landslide?

Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. . . again. It was a historic political comeback for a candidate rejected by the people just four years ago. But this time, Trump took almost every coveted state. The entire blue wall. . . turned red. And, unlike 2016, this was not just an electoral college victory. Surprising pollsters and betting markets alike, Trump also won the popular vote. To top it off, Republicans took control of the Senate. 

Simply put, it was a red landslide. 

It is extremely rare in our history for a president to come back after losing a reelection bid so badly. In fact, Trump’s rebound is bigger than Nixon’s, and bigger than Napoleon’s in 1815. 

And yet it happened on Tuesday night with the most flawed candidate American politics has ever seen. How did he do it?

If you were only watching cable news over the last few years, you would be shocked by the outcome. But if you had been reading The Free Press, you probably were not surprised. Yes, Kamala had the support of Beyoncé, Oprah, Taylor Swift, and almost every A-lister with a pulse. She outraised Trump by around $600 million. She was endorsed by industry leaders in science and economics. But it’s been clear for some time now that the Democrats do not have the buy-in or trust of the American people. Free Press senior editor Peter Savodnik said it best: “They didn’t lose because they didn’t spend enough money. They didn’t lose because they failed to trot out enough celebrity influencers. They lost because they were consumed by their own self-flattery, their own sense of self-importance.”

Still, in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, CNN and MSNBC tried to explain away Trump’s appeal, and the profound failure of the left, with accusations that the American people are the ones to blame.

But those explanations are not right. 

As exit polls came in, Trump showed strength with black and Latino voters. CNN exit polls showed he won about 13 percent of black voters (up from 8 percent in 2020) and 45 percent of Latino voters (up from 32 percent last election). It was a massive pickup. He won among voters who make less than $100,000 and, compared to 2020, Trump improved in cities, in rural areas, and in suburbs.

Helping us make sense of it all are Free Press contributor and Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, pundit and political powerhouse Brianna Wu, and Free Press senior editor Peter Savodnik. We reflect on why Democrats lost so dramatically and decisively, how Trump’s comeback happened, how he found success with black and Latino voters; what the next four years might look like with Trump returning to the White House; and if this will be a wake-up call for Democrats. 

Click below to listen to the podcast, or scroll down for an edited transcript of our conversation.

Bari: I want to start by understanding how each of you are feeling, because I think each of you represents a different segment of the American electorate. Brianna, let’s start with you. 

Brianna: I’m terrified as a trans woman. The Republicans spent $250 million on ads specifically targeting me. They’ve been taught a lesson that this is a strategy that works. It seems to be a winning strategy for them. But even beyond what happens to me personally, I’m really concerned about the U.S. economy and I’m really worried about NATO. I don’t want to live in a world where China and Russia are free to do whatever they want. It’s very clear he wants to reshape the U.S. relationship with NATO and scale that back. On every single front, I’m afraid for my country. But I’ve also been through this before. And you know, I feel like I’m more prepared for it this time. 

Batya: I wanted Trump to win. I think he’s going to be an amazing president. But to me, what’s really important here is that he won a mandate. He won the popular vote as well as the electoral college. And that was the thing I was praying for the most, was not so much that he would win, but that whoever won would win in a big and indisputable way, so that as a country we can start to heal and come together again. And the fact that the people who made him win were voters of color and women. You know, it was everybody that we had been told to expect to go for Harris. These narratives of who is a Democrat and who is a Republican have been totally shuffled. 

Peter: I feel good in the sense that there is a clear outcome. I think, like most people, I was most concerned about the possibility of a hotly, highly disputed outcome, that it was going to be weeks or months of uncertainty and wondering, “Is there going to be another January 6–like event?” I think the likelihood of anything like all that happening now is exceedingly low because it’s not just that Trump won. It’s that Republicans won across the board. The correct move now for Democrats from Kamala Harris to the county commissioner is to say, “We lost fair and square and we will move forward and take a very long, hard look in the mirror and ask how we arrived at this juncture.” 

On the crisis in the Democratic Party:

Bari: Why did Kamala Harris [and the Democrats] lose this election? 

Brianna: The Democratic Party, if you work with it up close, is gross and fake and weird and not real at all. It’s just not. You will sit there and you’ll work with the top politicians and you’ll find out they’re just utterly messaged. There’s nothing true behind what they’re saying. The problem is when you’ve got a party that doesn’t truly stand for anything, the American people pick up on that. They know that it’s a fake party. It can say it stands for working-class people, but it doesn’t feel that that’s true culturally. And you know, it is this culture in the Democratic Party of coding us for the most elite nonsense possible. I’ll give you a very specific example. Land acknowledgments. I cannot tell you how many Democratic events I’ve been to where it opens up and someone stands up there and they go, “We just want to acknowledge here in Massachusetts that this land belonged to this Indian.” And you’re just sitting there looking around at some bunch of white people like me. It’s the most, I hope I can say this word, masturbatory, self-indulgent, moralistic nonsense I’ve ever seen. So until we retreat away from this window dressing and get back to being something real, where people know what we’re actually standing for, the Republicans are going to clean our clocks. Until the Democrats grow a spine and are willing to say, you know what? We’re actually going to piss off the communists. We’re actually not going to stand with the Hamas sympathizers. We actually are going to tailor our message for working people and not the perpetually upset, green-haired college student. Until we have the backbone to do that, we’re going to continue to lose. 

Peter: The Democrats have been talking about all the wrong things. For the most part, it is still where Trump’s Republican primary rivals were onstage back in the fall of 2015, with all these professional politicians, the Marco Rubios and Chris Christies and all those people, looking utterly flabbergasted and kind of bemused and obviously not really taking Trump seriously. They don’t get it. Over the course of the next year they all got it because they had to. And they quickly came around to figuring out that this is where their base was. The Democratic Party is still there, they’re still in the fall of 2015, and they haven’t figured out that Trump is not tapping into, or not simply tapping into, deep racist, xenophobic feelings coursing through the American ethos or consciousness. He’s talking about things in his own frenetic, crazy, amorphous way that matter a lot to millions of Americans. He’s asking kind of the question at the heart of it all, which is why are we declining and how do we reverse that?

Batya: For the average, everyday, working-class American, they’re voting on their economic interests, which Trump 100 percent represents. Trump got the Democrats’ old base, the multiracial working class, because he picked up the Democrats’ old agenda. Strong border, let’s limit the supply of labor and protect wages, tariffs, and trade war with China. Let’s put American workers first, American labor first. Let’s have a strong manufacturing base. No more wars. The Republicans cast themselves as the anti-war party. And what did Kamala Harris do in order to challenge that? She brought Liz Cheney on board to campaign with her. 

The surprise of Trump outperforming with women:

Bari: Trump massively overperformed with minorities in the working class, and he also didn’t have as much of a deficit as we would have expected with educated suburban and women voters. What do you think those women saw in him that they didn’t see in the last election? Because the assumption, of course, and the conventional wisdom going into this election was that Donald Trump needed to get out the men, the Joe Rogan voter, and Kamala Harris needed women to show up because they were scared of Donald Trump and passionate about abortion. And that just didn’t come to pass. Why did these women go for Trump? 

Batya: I think that there was just a competing narrative about the threat to women, to their bodies and to themselves, posed by the excesses of the trans movement and the ways that they have been so fully embraced by the Democratic Party. What has happened since 2020 is we have seen images of young women being harmed in sports settings. We have been exposed to this idea that this should be normalized and that it’s somehow transphobic to oppose that, which, of course, Brianna can tell you that it’s not. And so I think that there was a competing sense of what it would mean to protect girls and women.

Why the Democrats failed to explain who they are:

Bari: Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, love them or hate them, they made themselves massively available to podcasters for long-form conversations. There was almost no one they didn’t talk to and for Kamala Harris, it seemed the strategy up until the end was to avoid everything and to win by basically being not the other guy. Brianna, talk to us a little bit about that strategy, from your more insider position. 

Brianna: This is a problem across the board with the entire party. We are so used to telling the American people how terrible the Republicans are, the Democratic Party has never developed a message of what we stand for. It’s not just the candidates. It’s the culture within the party. 

Bari: Help me understand it. Like, how could there not have been a better strategy than what they offered? 

Brianna: The thing about the Democratic Party you need to understand right now is everyone that rose to a senior level right now came from the Obama 2008 campaign. So they’re really frozen in that world. The problem is there’s this Democratic consultant class that is so conservative with everything they recommend, which is exactly why she did not go on Joe Rogan. We are tremendously risk-averse and we are tremendously incentivized not to try anything new. 

On Biden’s withdrawal and whether the Democrats could have picked a better candidate:

Bari: Let’s just try a counterfactual. If after Joe Biden dropped out, there had been the kind of mini-primary that a lot of people were talking about and Donald Trump had been running against a stronger candidate.

Peter: What happened last night was a lot of voters saying to the Democratic Party, “We hate you. We hate you in a kind of visceral way.” And it’s not just the Democratic Party. This is about the whole progressive firmament and ecosystem, the institutions, the culture, the anthropology behind all this. It’s rotten. And it’s illiberal. And there’s a fundamental disconnect with the American people. And I think what happened last night is that millions of voters said, “We are done with that.” 

Bari: If I’m a historian in decades to come, do you think that I would look back and say that the biggest character of this election wasn’t actually Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, but Joe Biden? How much of the Democrats’ loss last night was because of Biden’s or rather, the Biden White House’s refusal to get him out earlier in the game? 

Batya: I actually don’t think that Joe Biden leaving when he did had much of an impact. If you look at who flipped for Trump and what issues they said they flipped for him on, it was immigration, the economy, and it was the working class. Now, the Democrats have abandoned those voters to cater to the very poor and the very rich. There’s very little the Democrats could have done short of totally revolutionizing who they are to stop this tsunami of support from. . . . Look who flipped for Trump. He got the majority of Latino men, unheard of for a Republican. 

Explaining the Trump comeback:

Bari: How did Trump turn around, and four years later, win the very states he lost in the last election?

Brianna: Whatever you think of Trump, he has set the tone of the Republican Party very consistently since 2015 and 2016. If you’re a Republican today, you know who you are and what you are standing for. It is Trumpism and that poke in the eye to the elites. You’re voting for a party that is going to smash the machinery that is making your life unappealing because the elites are running it. The problem is that the Democrats have just been like the ship at sea, just floating wherever the tide takes us for the last four years because we don’t have a leader. Biden has done an excellent job on policy from behind the scenes, but that’s not what people vote on. 

Bari: This is like the greatest political comeback story in American history, to go from where he was in 2020, the impeachments, he’s a convicted felon, all the different lawsuits, to now. Is the answer simply immigration, inflation, and foreign policy, or is there some deeper vibe shift that occurred over the past four years?

Peter: I think it’s a mistake to view what happened last night as a refutation of or a reversal of 2020. It’s more a continuation of 2016. The reason that the Democrats captured the White House in 2020 is simple. It was Covid and they nominated the one guy, Scranton Joe, who was closer to that kind of traditional Democratic working-class base. They had the packaging but the substance was all wrong. And if they were actually substantive, then, yes, last night’s results might have been very different. It’s not just the Democrat consultant class, all of whom should be fired. It’s not just them. It’s the whole left-wing world that has to ask itself, what role do you play in contemporary America? Why do we have universities? Why do we have newspapers and other media? Until you stop seeing yourself as furthering some kind of progressive agenda and you start seeing yourselves as members of a three-dimensional society or polity, then you’re going to continue kind of hemorrhaging support and losing.

Batya: Donald Trump showed up and said, “They don’t hate me, they hate you, the American people.” And this morning, the left and the Democrats went on Twitter and went on cable news and literally said, “It’s not an indictment of Trump, it’s an indictment of the American people.” They have the same interpretation of the Trump phenomenon, which is that he is, you know, the candidate of the masses and represents to a certain degree where the American people are at. And you either love the American people and thus love him for representing them, or you hate the American people because they chose him. And I think that that is really what we’re seeing here. And I think that that was really exposed with all of this Hitler talk. When you call somebody Hitler or a fascist who now we know has won the popular vote, that is not a smear on him. That is a smear on the American people. And we should not tolerate it from anybody. 

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