The ultimate answer to why Donald Trump won: White Christians

The Democratic Party, the mainstream news media and the political class are conducting a political autopsy of the 2024 Election and how Donald Trump and the MAGA movement were able to easily triumph when the "conventional wisdom" suggested a historically close election. This political autopsy is even more urgent given that Trump and his MAGAfied Republicans will rule the country as authoritarians with control over all three branches of government and a Supreme Court that has decided that Trump is a de facto king who is above the law. Based on the people he is choosing for his Cabinet and for other senior roles in his administration, Trump is following the autocrat's playbook of surrounding himself with "yes men" and "yes women" whose loyalty is personally to him and not the Constitution, the American people, democracy, the rule of law and the common good. Almost all of Trump's choices are manifestly under-qualified, if not incompetent, for the vast amounts of power and responsibility they will be given to impact the lives, safety and future of the American people and the country.

The Democratic Party's autopsy of its defeat in the 2024 election is important, but they need to quickly move forward if they and the country's democracy and civil society are to have any chance of surviving the Trump MAGA autocracy and authoritarian regime.

Writing on X/Twitter, Tom Nichols counseled:

Uncharacteristically, I'll say that Dems should stop beating up on themselves and firing volleys back and forth. (They can get back to that later.) American voters - as I've been warning for years - are changing, and becoming more like Trump. That's hard to counteract...But no Dem can change the fact that millions of ungettable GOP votes are set in stone not because of economic conditions - which were the best any candidate could have hoped for - but because even relatively affluent voters have spent years marinating in complete craziness.

At The American Prospect, Thomas Nelson advises the Democratic Party to embrace an economic agenda that uplifts the American worker and fully embraces the labor movement :

A couple of years getting started with class-based policies can't compensate for 40 years of the opposite.

Pound for pound, dollar for dollar, no Democratic president measured up to the Biden-Harris administration's progressive street cred since LBJ's Great Society. But it's too early in the life cycle to expect a payoff. Sanders intimates a more important point. The beating heart of the Democratic Party is an economic, class-based coalition first and foremost....

The solution is not recriminations, finger-pointing, and hand-wringing but structural change. And it goes well beyond message. The tried-and-true way to close yawning gaps in income inequality, health care access, and worker satisfaction is with labor unions. Is it any wonder that as labor union membership plummeted, wealth inequality expanded, health care access dwindled, and paychecks stagnated?

The solution to rebuild the Democratic Party in the image of the worker is simple: Rebuild the labor movement.

While the Democratic Party is trying to make sense of how Kamala Harris' campaign can spend more than 1 billion dollars, suffer a decrease in voter turnout of 13 million people as compared to Biden in 2020, and lose key parts of its base to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, the American people are going to have to do a deep reassessment of their behavior as well.

With Trump's takeover and the country succumbing even faster to some form of fascism and autocracy, the American people are going to have their values, morals, character and personal relationships tested. Will they defend democracy or instead surrender and be collaborators and quislings? How will they respond when they see the rights and freedoms of their family members, friends, neighbors and other members of the community being taken away? Will they disengage from politics and sink into a state of learned helplessness (and self-medication and a culture of distraction and the attention economy) or instead become more engaged and active who have agency in their society and politics?

In an attempt to make sense of Trump's victory, our collective emotions in this time of trouble and dread, what this election reveals about American values and character, and what comes next when Trump takes power in January, I recently spoke with a range of experts.

Robert P. Jones is the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller " The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future ," as well as " White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity ."

It's been a heavy week. Looking at all the dead heat numbers down the home stretch of the election, I was never optimistic that the country would unite to block the second coming of Trump. But like most, I was surprised at the sweep of the swing states, the likely outright win of the popular vote and the decisive losses in the Senate. I've been down and distracted, not because a particular party won but because a majority of Americans have handed power back to someone who not only fails the basic test of human decency but who has openly tried to overturn an election he lost in 2020 and subvert democratic norms. On the professional front, I've been doing my own analysis of the election, writing to a great community of readers on my "White Too Long" Substack newsletter. My colleagues Jemar Tisby, Kristin Du Mez and Diana Butler Bass at "The Convocation Unscripted" are holding a space for conversations about faith and the future of democracy. We held a live webinar with over 1,000 registrants two days after the election and we'll be taking the conversation on the road at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Atlanta on November 17. I've also gone on walks, reached out to friends and gone on long rides on my bike — something I started during COVID but feels vitally important again.

On the one hand, we should all acknowledge that the pre-election polls were fairly accurate. They uniformly declared that the election was so tight, both at the national and state levels, that it was a coin toss. Pre-election polls are never good at — nor were they designed to be good at — predicting turnout, and by definition can't account for late deciders. And while it was generally a high-turnout election, we see that Trump supporters turned out in force. For example, while white evangelical Protestants are only 14% of the general population, the early exit polls indicate that they may have represented as many as one in five voters.

The biggest thing mainstream analysis refuses to comprehend is the continued power of a politics of racial grievance and religious nostalgia among white Christian Americans. Many pundits thought that a candidate who ran the most racist campaign since George Wallace in 1968 couldn't possibly move above a ceiling that would keep them far short of a majority. But in this election, most people who consider themselves to be good white Christians flatly declared that white supremacy was, at a minimum, not a deal breaker for them. As has been the case every time Trump has run, eight in ten white evangelicals cast their vote for him, as did six in ten white Catholics and six in ten white non-evangelical Protestants. By contrast, 86% of Black protestants voted for Harris.

The answer to the question on so many Americans' lips — "How did we get here?" — is straightforward. That answer won't be found in the margins of which group shifted toward Trump between 2020 and 2024. It is right in front of us. White evangelical Protestants, along with other conservative white Christians, were the principal actors who baptized, defended, rehabilitated and sustained Trump's candidacy. More than any other group, these white Christians, who once proudly called themselves "values voters," have provided moral and religious cover for the immoral and the profane. Even a modest shift among white Christian voters would have denied Trump the Republican nomination and the presidency. So, the responsibility for Trump's initial rise to power, his resurrection and everything that is now coming sits squarely with white Christian Americans.

It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of the dangers that will come our way beginning January 20, 2025. Some will be public and dramatic, and others will happen behind closed doors, with delayed effects. In Trump's closing message the day before Election Day, he boasted, "We stand on the verge of the four greatest years in American history." But if Trump follows through on even a fraction of the things he has promised — purging the civil service, instituting mass deportations including internment camps, jailing or even executing his political opponents — we will instead be witnessing the beginning of an unprecedented weakening of American democracy. Whether our democracy will still be standing four years from now depends on our willingness to defend it and protect those most vulnerable well before Trump's authoritarian policies reach most of us personally.

Matthew Dallek is a professor at George Washington's Graduate School of Political Management and author, most recently, of " Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right ."

Donald Trump's election to a second term reminds us of a stark truth: American democracy isn't providing for the basic needs of most of its citizens. As Franklin Roosevelt understood, democracy could only survive in the U.S. if enough Americans felt like their government was helping them find work, shelter and dignity. That compact between citizens and government has been broken for a long time, but now, more than ever in recent decades, it is shattered. Trump won because he was seen as the agent of change at a time when inflation was making it hard for Americans to afford food, rent and buy a home.

But his victory was also something else: a popular revulsion toward elites, a repudiation of government, a vote to smash all institutions. In hindsight, it's easy to see that this was, simply, a change election. Americans voted the Biden administration out of office. But questions need to be answered: How did the party of Franklin Roosevelt lose working-class voters so resoundingly? Will Americans vote for a woman for president? Why wasn't the Trump-inspired violence on January 6 disqualifying? The potential damage Trump could reap should not be underestimated. His mass deportation proposal would likely sow enormous pain for millions of families and economic hardship across the United States.

The post-WWII system of international alliances, underpinned by NATO, is now in grave peril of being unraveled. Isolationism, protectionism, nativism and autocracy have become popular forces that may well undo the pillars on which U.S. leadership and prosperity have rested since 1945. Disinformation, misinformation and conspiracy theories have also triumphed for the time being, routing the pro-reason, pro-science forces. Nonetheless, Trump's erraticism and sheer incompetence could be a saving grace. They might serve as a brake on some of his more extreme promises. His policies also may ultimately prove unpopular. Massive tariffs could lead to a new round of inflation. Mass deportations might bring economic growth to a standstill. Firing thousands of federal employees could cause all manner of disruptions in people's lives — Social Security checks delayed and IRS refunds wrongly denied.

How destructive his term will be remains unknowable, but his helter-skelter, vengeance-fueled approach to wielding power may have the ironic effect of impeding his ability to deliver on his more radical promises. In 2004, amid the quagmire in Iraq, George W. Bush won a commanding reelection victory. He quickly claimed a mandate in his second term and then moved with speed to privatize Social Security. By the end of 2008, his approval ratings were stuck in the 20s. Trump's popularity may prove surprisingly durable. But if the cost of living remains unaffordable for many and if the wars in Europe and the Middle East do not end soon after he takes office and if he blunders on the economy, he risks becoming unpopular again, making it harder for him to dismantle the very institutions he has promised to destroy.

One other thing to keep in mind: Trump's victory may have intensified a generational fight to defend values like pluralism, internationalism and human rights, ideals that has made the United States, for all its warts, a beacon to many around the world.

Investigative reporter Heidi Siegmund Cuda writes about US politics and culture for Byline Times and Byline Supplement. Her Substack site is Bette Dangerous .

America is dead to me. I am a woman without a country. Will I fight to reanimate her? Absolutely. I wanted this vampire soap opera to be over, but we are stuck somewhere between the living and the dead. We are 1990s Russia; it will be violent and chaotic. Those who didn't "like Trump but..." are gonna find out. Those who handed our country over to Putin and to US and foreign-born oligarchs because they couldn't vote for a Black woman or because "owning the libs" are gonna find out. I'm glad my dad didn't live to see it. He left post-war Germany for the American Dream, which he lived in full. They're manipulating the older people in this country.

Harris ran a flawless campaign. I believed women and young people would save us. I believed women didn't like seeing women bleeding out in parking lots and I believed young people cared about climate justice. And maybe some do. The Patriarchy dies hard. I knew we'd lost when Democrats ganged up on Joe Biden and those conservatives who hated Trump but would vote for Biden just simply couldn't bring themselves to vote for a California liberal like Harris. The churchy believe Democrats are baby-killing demons so they voted for Trump, whose anti-science beliefs led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands during COVID. I will manage my feelings by working to force Trump and the MAGA Republicans out of office at every turn.

Media is big business and big business typically backs fascism. Big business thinks it'll benefit from a fascist regime — don't have to worry about regulations or labor unions. All they have to do is look at Orbán's Hungary to be reminded that media owners had to "donate" their businesses to the state-run department. There is no free press in Hungary anymore so by not reporting the truth of the Trumpocene they made a choice that will destroy them.

Reporters should be biased and that bias is truth. Access journalists lie by omission or lie by minimizing threats. Journalists are supposed to alert you to the threat, not parrot the propagandists. By normalizing Trump as a candidate, the media became the biggest villain in this entire era. They had a duty to warn since 2015, but the ratings were just too delicious. Former head of CBS Les Moonves said the Trump campaign "may not have been good for America but it was damn good for CBS." The New York Times just wants to survive, tech billionaires just want to get richer — they're not in the business of trying to get it right or serve the people, they serve themselves. Anyone who pays attention to where people are getting their information knows that half the country was being radicalized online to be anti-democratic, anti-Ukraine and pro-Trump. The pundits missed it because they're still residing in the Land of the Norms

As for the character of the American people, if we took the digital poison away, people would snap out of their Trump-loving stupors pretty quickly. I am quite saddened because when we needed leadership to address the invisible war, we had none. No one wanted to tell the people that Russia and other hostile nations with direct access to the minds of our people have been moving them toward totalitarianism. By not putting a qualified woman in charge in 2016 and by not putting a qualified woman in charge in 2024, we revealed that the patriarchy dies hard, and with it, America. I was surprised that so many people of faith loved Trump, a man whose behavior is contrary to the values they claim to love so much. America is in very big trouble and it will last long after Donald Trump. The American people have been warned again.

Jackson Katz, Ph.D., is an educator, author and scholar-activist who has long been a major figure in the growing global movement of men working to promote gender equity and prevent gender-based violence. He is a frequent contributor to Ms. Magazine, where he writes about masculinities, politics and violence. Katz is the author of two books, including the bestseller "The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help." His next book, entitled "Every Man: Why Violence Against Women Is a Men's Issue", is scheduled to be published by Penguin Random House UK in February 2025.

I go back and forth between despairing and defiant. I also feel very badly and worried about undocumented and documented immigrants and many other vulnerable people who will be in deep trouble when Trump takes power. From the moment Trump announced his candidacy in 2015 I knew in my head that this country was capable of taking a sharply authoritarian turn, but in my heart, I couldn't fully accept it. In fact, from the moment Harris was nominated I let myself get my hopes up. I actually thought she had a chance to beat him, right until the ominous results started rolling in. I've been talking with many friends. I try to be supportive of my women friends and colleagues, some of whom still have PTSD from 2016. For someone of my generation, who knew Trump as a cartoonish New York City figure decades before he got into politics, it's truly unbelievable that he was and will be president again. I also know many people who have retreated (for now) and don't have much bandwidth for processing this debacle. I've also been writing relentlessly about the reasons for his victory. I'm sure the act of writing posts and s helps me feel less powerless.

The mainstream media and the pundits, those establishment voices keep getting the story wrong for a variety of reasons. I think a big factor is the ongoing transformation of the media ecosphere caused by the digital revolution and the ways in which Trumpism and MAGA are ideally suited to that new environment. Trump and the savviest of his advisors understand that politics in this media environment is all about identity and story. As Steve Bannon says, everything is narrative.

Also, the partial democratization of the information economy means that the old gatekeepers in corporate media no longer have anywhere near as much influence as they used to have. More viewpoints have the chance to be heard – including ones that challenge corporate power and its influence in our politics. This was one of the goals of the progressive media reform movement, which I was part of starting in the late 1980s. But the right has taken advantage of the opening that gave them to platform ideas even further to the right than corporate media and spread conspiracies and all sorts of nasty and abusive rhetoric and attacks against liberals, progressives, feminists and Democrats. And some key spaces on the internet, like the broadcast world and the manosphere, draw many millions of male listeners/viewers and provide an incredibly powerful megaphone for Trump and MAGA.

In 2020, the former high-level Republican strategist Stuart Stevens wrote that by embracing Donald Trump, people who created the modern Republican Party had egregiously betrayed the principles it claimed to represent. He asked: How did this happen? How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy and the national debt in a matter of months? His answer: You don't. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren't deeply held. That's part of it, but I also think the problem is widespread political illiteracy.

It's clear that many people don't really know what they're voting for, especially in terms of policy. That's in part why you have all this crazy ticket-splitting, where people vote for minimum wage increases and on the same ballot vote for Republicans who block those increases every time they come up for a vote . We know that a lot of the young men who voted for Trump this time were low-engagement, low-information voters. Was their support for Trump an indication of their racism, misogyny, or anti-immigrant bigotry? I hope there's a less depressing explanation — that Trump is just a really effective con man who knew how to convince a lot of highly impressionable young men that a "real man" had no other choice than to vote for him. What the success of that strategy revealed is that we have a ton of work to do to engage — and yes, educate — these young men next time.

It's going to be non-stop bad news on the political front for four long years. I worry that many people will choose to refrain from publicly expressing progressive political views out of fear. One thing we'll see is who in public life is principled and courageous, and who will bend the knee to Trump and degrade themselves? I don't want to be self-righteous; we all make compromises. Some are trivial and others are more weighty. But I think Trump 2.0 is going to present millions of people with difficult ethical and moral choices, because I fear he is going to wield power in sometimes unimaginably cruel and heartless ways. Elections have consequences.