Shocker (November 6, 2024)
Welcome to a special edition of Home & Away. It is difficult not to be taken aback by last night’s results. An election that many judged to be too close to call and likely to produce razor thin margins that would take days to sort through turned out to be not that close at all. Donald Trump has won a decisive victory in the electoral college and apparently has come out on top in the popular vote as well, a feat he did not accomplish in 2016. Republicans have regained control of the Senate and appear poised to maintain their House majority .
I will let others focus on why the polls did not predict this outcome. Weeks ago, I described them as opaque rather than close and I think that was accurate. The more important question, though, is why the election turned out the way it did. So, we will begin with that.
The first thing to say is that the results were not an anomaly. Incumbents of every political stripe have lost nearly everywhere around the world in this year of elections, and Kamala Harris was the incumbent here. Yes, Donald Trump had been president, but he was seen yet again as a populist challenger to the status quo and the change candidate at a time when a majority of Americans rejected a future of more of the same.
Several issues explain this desire for change: post-Covid inflation, a border correctly seen as near out of control, a world in disarray. Trump may have been an undisciplined candidate, but he ran a mostly disciplined campaign with effective ads that concentrated on these issues along with jibes at a cultural wokeness that many Americans reject. Most Americans do not feel they were better off under Biden than they had been four years before even though the data reflects a strong economy.
Trump also won because the other side lost. Joe Biden did his vice president no favors by staying in a race he had no chance of winning for as long as he did. The delay limited her opportunity to develop as a candidate and to explain herself to the American people. Harris compounded this by never confronting head on why her positions had evolved as much as they had since her first run in 2020. In addition, she never took a “Sister Souljah” moment to distance herself from an overly progressive left. Choosing Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro for vice president made her appear beholden to that same left.
To sum up, Harris ran a careful campaign in which she too often seemed to sit on a lead she didn’t in fact have. I always thought the election would turn out to be a referendum on one of the two candidates, and that person would lose. In recent days, given what felt like numerous unforced errors, I thought that person might well be Trump, but despite everything Trump said and did, Harris turned out to be that candidate. All that said, Harris almost certainly would have lost even had she run a perfect campaign given the country's mood and mindset. Democrats wound be wise to reflect on this and more.
It is too soon to predict how Trump will govern. We will see what he says in the coming days and, more importantly, what he does in the way of making appointments. We also have to wait for the House results. If the House remains Republican, with the Senate back in Republican hands and a Supreme Court that has veered sharply to the right, Trump may well be heading a de facto parliamentary system with little in the way of effective opposition. He will be less constrained than he was during his first term. A Democratic House would not change these fundamentals, but divided government would offer up some checks and balances. I expect we will be hearing a good deal about mandates, but this is a deeply divided country, and I worry about overreach.
The one thing Trump won’t be able to control is his inheritance. The good news for him is that he will not have to contend with what Harris would have confronted if she had won, namely, a host of political and legal challenges to her legitimacy or even violence. What is more, Trump will be fortunate to enter office with a robust economy and low inflation. The real question here is whether he goes ahead with the policies he promised on the campaign trail (tariffs, tax cuts on the wealthy and big corporations, etc.) that would likely rekindle inflation and start something of a trade war. What would add to inflationary pressures (not to mention domestic strife) would be mass deportations that reduce available labor.
The foreign policy in-box is far less benign with conflict in both the Middle East and Europe, not to mention potential conflict in the Asia-Pacific, involving China, North Korea, or both. What is more, both the Middle East and European situations could easily deteriorate. The firing of Israel’s defense minister does not bode well for any end to the war in Gaza or the return of the hostages. And there are troubling noises that Iran may be contemplating new military action against Israel, something that would almost certainly trigger an escalatory Israeli response that the Biden administration would be less able to contain as a lame duck president being replaced by someone with no professed desire to do the same.
As for the war between Russia and Ukraine, it has recently shifted in Russia’s favor. President Trump will have to make some choices that will shape the future of this war, European security more broadly, and U.S. relations with both its allies and adversaries around the world. I put forward my thinking this week in Foreign Affairs on what he should do. A piece of good news is that there is a course between leaving Ukraine to its fate and staying with a strategy that cannot succeed. Hopefully President Trump will take it. Here as with much else we will know soon enough.
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Richard Haass in the news
Saturday, November 2: Bloomberg Wall Street Week
Monday, November 4: Foreign Affairs
Check out The Bill of Obligations: The Ten Habits of Good Citizens