Opinion | How Trump Wins (and Harris and the Democrats Blow It)

It’s Nov. 6, 2024, the morning after Election Day.

The people in the Trump campaign should be counting their lucky stars for Donald Trump’s close victory, given the political incompetence they showed in July and August. In the six weeks between July 21, when Joe Biden dropped out, and Labor Day they had one job: to define Kamala Harris as an elite San Francisco liberal before she could define herself as a middle-class moderate. The Trump campaign did next to nothing. All they needed was to play the 2019 clips of Harris sounding like a wokester cliché, but they couldn’t even come up with an argument, let alone act upon it. Harris brilliantly defined herself in that vacuum.

This mistake could have been fatal for the Republicans, because Trump is the 46 percent man. That’s roughly the share of the popular vote he won in 2016 and 2020. He was never going to ride a majority wave to victory in 2024, so it would have been helpful to take his opponent down a few points.

And yet this is the pattern with Trump. He seems to do everything possible to sabotage his own campaigns, but still does surprisingly well in elections. Even with the fantastic weeks she had coming into Labor Day, Harris was not in as good a shape as Hillary Clinton was in 2016 or Biden was in 2020. Harris had a roughly two-point lead on Labor Day weekend, but Clinton led by about four or five percentage points at that stage and ended up losing. That’s in part because polls perennially underestimate Trump’s support — by about 2.2 percent in 2016 and 3.3 percent in 2020.

Just look at the swing states. According to the 2016 polls, Clinton led Michigan and Wisconsin by four to eight points going into the fall, but still lost on Election Day. In 2016, Clinton led in Pennsylvania at summer’s end by about six points, while in 2020 Biden led by between roughly three and four points, but Trump still beat Clinton there and came within a point of beating Biden.

Most of the election models had the 2024 campaign right on Labor Day: It was basically a tied race, even if Democratic exuberance gave the impression that Harris had some ineffable momentum.