Why Trump won (a communications view)

Not only was Trump’s character a sunk cost since we’d had a decade of attacks on that character, the electorate wanted a presidential campaign that talked about their problems and circumstances

Donald Trump was - is - a weak candidate. Yet he has won two out of the last three US Presidential elections and only narrowly lost the third. Perhaps it is time to ask why this has happened rather than, as fans of John Burns-Murdoch as the FT seem to claim, putting it down to happenstance (or inflation). Now it is probably true that Kamala Harris was - is - also a weak candidate thereby cancelling out any advantage from Trump's vanity and bombast but there’s another problem for the Democrats and their cheerleaders. Despite the latter consisting of nearly all the world’s media.

We became fixated on Trump himself. The entire Democrat election campaign centred on the character of Donald Trump and on the argument that he is a uniquely bad person, a fascist, a racist and the owner of a hundred other flaws making him unfit to be president. This, pretty much, constituted the entire Democrat election campaign to the point where the Trump campaign itself could post a clip of Kamala Harris responding to every question with an answer beginning ‘Donald Trump’. And Trump, vain old buffoon that he is, loved all this because, if we know one thing about him, it is that he wants to be the centre of attention all the time. More importantly this campaign strategy from the Democrats meant they weren’t having a conversation with a troubled American electorate but just standing there pointing and shouting at Trump.

You don’t need to be a marketing genius to work out that, not only was Trump’s character a sunk cost since we’d had a decade of attacks on that character, the electorate wanted a presidential campaign that talked about their problems not one featuring lot of rich celebrities, academics and media anchors telling them the election was all about Trump. This was bad enough but, even worse, Trump led the Democrat by the nose, getting them to talk about him rather than about why voters were struggling with the mortgage, worrying about the cost of a week’s shopping and angry about a stream of illegal immigrants. And while the Democrat machine was salami slicing the electorate into target groups in a bizarre divide and rule strategy, Trump was actually talking to the electorate about their concerns.

Even from several thousand miles away we could hear the Trump message - tariffs to protect jobs and industry, lower taxes for middle class and working class Americans, clamping down on crime and illegal immigration and favouring the interests of workers over Net Zero. You don’t have to agree with what Trump proposes to recognise that his promises reflect the anxieties and concerns of many American voters, even ones who didn’t vote for him. This was what Trump’s ads, mailings, leaflets, emails and texts were telling people. Meanwhile the Democrats ran a campaign that took Trump’s bait every time and merely repeated to independent voters, the people who decide US elections, a mantra of “Trump is Bad Just Look at What he is Saying Now”. Harris, even when asked a direct question by a member of the public about their economic circumstances, was unable to give an answer that didn’t contain the words ‘Donald Trump’.

And as the election progressed and the polls refused to shift, the rhetoric about Trump got ever more shrill. Normally intelligent people began saying that, if he won, Trump would round up all the progressive media sorts and throw them into jail. Trump would, we were told, roll back gay rights, access to abortion and make women dress like in The Handmaid’s Tale. Plus, of course, a host of allegations about Trump’s crimes, from puffing the value of a hotel through assorted lies to actual rape. The sight of bright young people screaming at their mobile phones following Trump’s win reminds us that this long campaign to demonise Trump resulted in some truly deranged responses. And Trump loved it. It meant he was front and centre of the news every day. And it meant he had months of quiet, unchallenged campaigning on real issues around the economy, culture and the environment.

By the time the Democrats had dumped Biden and given Harris the candidacy, Trump and the Republicans had spent a year talking to actual voters about their actual concerns. Yes, Harris couldn’t really distance herself from Joe Biden’s failed agenda, but she could have set out a positive agenda responding to concerns about the price of energy, the cost of borrowing and the economic development of America. Instead the Democrats chose to talk about how they felt people’s pain and, by the way, you do know Donald Trump is a Really Bad Man. If all you have is faux-empathy and dumping on your opponent, especially when people have heard all that ad nauseum, then you aren’t going to win, even against a candidate as flawed as Donald Trump.

The Harris campaign, after a brief excursion into actual policy (rent controls, price gouging laws and other foolishness), resorted to being entirely reactionary. When the polls showed Trump leading among men they rolled out a (really bad) advert saying something like ‘real men vote Democrat’ or ‘real men don’t like Donald Trump’. Worse, they pretty much told women to lie to their husbands about voting. And told black men they wouldn’t get laid if they didn’t have a ‘plan to vote’ for Kamala. We saw celebrities rolled out to tell men that they should vote for Harris because that is what women want. The problem was that men - and women - were a darned sight more bothered about the cost of living than reproductive rights that, in all but a handful of states, weren’t remotely under threat.

We’ll see a lot said and written about why Harris lost and a great deal of it lies with the realities of people’s economic circumstances and their dissatisfaction with Joe Biden’s government. But Harris’s chance to break the worldwide pattern of governing parties being punished for pandemic-induced inflation was blown by her fixation with Donald Trump’s character and the utterly bizarre claims that somehow the election of Trump would mark the end of democracy in America. 

Americans knew about Trump’s character and got bored with being reminded of it every verse end. But instead of banking that advantage and setting out an agenda for a Kamala Hiarris administration, the Democrats chose to focus their attention more and more on Trump, his character flaws and, in the end, on a claim nobody believed (I suspect even those managing the campaign) that defeating Trump was about defending democracy. As James Carville famously advised Bill Clinton, ‘it’s the economy, stupid’. Harris and the Democrats forgot this truth and have paid the price. A price that could see them out of the White House for twelve years.