Who voted for Donald Trump? How did he manage to execute such an improbable comeback? How did Kamala Harris lose? Why didn’t Democrats gain traction among working class voters? What was the role of the news media during the election? How different will a second Trump term be? 

These were some of the questions at the heart of a special event we organised in partnership with the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. The panel, moderated by RAI’s Director Adam Smith, featured journalist Clare Malone, campaign strategist Mike Murphy and experts Jason Casellas and Kimberley Johnson. Here are seven takeaways from the event.

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1. Was 2024 just a classic wave election?

Most of our panellists think it was. Murphy was the most eloquent in making the case, comparing 2024 with the 1980 presidential election, when an unpopular Jimmy Carter lost against an ascendant Ronald Reagan. Carter’s advisers, Murphy said, assumed there was no way a senile actor who made movies with chimpanzees in Hollywood was going to win. But a country pushed the big red ejector button and voted Carter out. 

Harris’ campaign officials presented the vote as a different kind of choice, Murphy explained. They tried to remind people Trump was a threat to democracy and presented the election as “a race between Ted Lasso and Lord Voldemort.” At the end of the day, though, Harris refused to distance herself from Biden and got battered by the anti-establishment mood. 

“In many ways, it was a normal election,” Murphy said. “Up to 70% thought things were going in the wrong direction, so we had an angry electorate ready for change. That usually means that the party in power gets wiped out. Prices touched voters and Trump made incredible inroads amongst Latinos and working class voters. For regular voters, big, simple stuff counts.”

Murphy said it was all about firing Biden. Trump, though unpopular, was still seen as acceptable: many voters were still willing to take a chance and vote for him. 

“Trump rode a wave he didn’t create,” Murphy explained. “American politics has been a two-lane highway for a long time. In one lane you have a lot of people who used to be Democratic. They belong to non-public employee unions and they are going towards Trump based on populism at 100 miles an hour. In the other lane, you have white college educated voters that used to be pretty reliably Republican. They are now racing over towards Democrats because of all the arguments about Trump being unfit.”

2. How did class matter? 

One of the biggest stories of the election is the shift of working class voters of all races towards Trump, who promised simple solutions for complex problems facing the economy and the American immigration system right now. 

Malone, who recently published this long piece about a blue-collar county in Pennsylvania, said that the election result has revealed “a little bit of a class war” in American society.

“In Pennsylvania you see people who think of themselves as Kennedy Democrats, saying the Democratic Party isn’t the party of their father or their mother,” she said. “The phrase I use is political pheromones. Do you like the cut of the candidate? Do you want to have a beer with them? It doesn’t have a lot to do with policy. A lot of rank-and-file union members support Trump for cultural identification more than anything else.”

Casellas pointed to Trump’s messaging as one of the reasons these kinds of voters shifted away from Democrats in this cycle. 

“Trump has done a better job of speaking to the anxieties of these people who have been at the losing end of globalisation,” he said. “These working class swing voters are more concerned with the price of a gallon of milk than with anything else, and they are very easily swayed by saying, ‘When I was president, the prices were lower, and I’ll end inflation when I become president again.’”

3. Why did Latinos shift to Donald Trump?

One of the most striking details of this year’s election is the gains Trump made among Latinos, and especially among Latino men. The most stunning example is the Miami-Dade county in Florida, which Hillary Clinton won by 24 points in 2016 and Trump  won by 11 points in 2024. But Miami-Dade is not an isolated case, with many Latino districts around the border in Texas and Arizona showing huge shifts. 

Casellas didn’t find this trend surprising. But he didn’t think it would happen so rapidly as it did. “The issues Democrats are talking about don’t appeal to many of these working class Latinos,” he said. “In Texas, we had a competitive Senate race and the Democratic candidate spent a lot of time running ads on abortion, trying to appeal to suburban women and get them to vote for him. But this may have turned off a lot of Latino men, while working class pocketbook issues were just not seen.”

Casellas explained how Republicans are beginning to select Latino candidates in Latino majority districts in South Texas and how this is changing the voting dynamics in this part of the country. “Democrats should be worried about these shifts, and try to figure out strategies to try to compete,” he said. 

Murphy echoed this point. “Democrats have gone from a 33% margin among Latinos to a 7% one,” he said. “This is the most dynamic and rapidly growing voting block in the country. We’ve got these complicated arguments about democracy and Trump’s character, but the average voter is like, ‘All I know is everything costs too much, and things were better under Trump. And I don’t really know Harris, and I don’t really like her, but I want change and I want to punish somebody.’”

Perhaps surprisingly, Johnson pointed to immigration as one of the things that may have shifted voters of colour away from Harris. “Looking at the shifts in places like Brooklyn and Queens, the issue of immigration was huge,” she said. “The movement of immigrants to Chicago and New York put a huge strain on neighbourhoods. This fueled a sense of anger and there was a disconnect between Democratic elites and what was happening in certain communities of colour.”

4. Why wasn’t abortion a winning issue for Harris?

Abortion was supposed to be a key issue for Democrats in this election. In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion in the US. After the court’s decision, Republican governors and legislatures approved measures to restrict reproductive rights in several states. 

Encouraged by the result of the 2022 midterm elections, Harris leaned heavily into this issue, spending millions of dollars in TV advertising, hosting events aimed to attract women, and even doing a big rally in Houston with Beyoncé. 

Why did their efforts fall short? “Abortion wasn’t the dominant issue to the extent the economy was. So Harris’ store was open on something that was in lesser demand,” Murphy said. “The other thing I’d say is that one group of American voters that’s totally invisible is pro-life women. Women who favour more abortion restrictions do exist. You won't find them in popular culture, but they outnumber African American women three to one. So you’ve got maybe 17% of the electorate who are women and are pro-life.”

5. Was Harris the right candidate?

After Biden dropped out in mid-July, Democrats quickly coalesced around Harris and ensured she got the nomination before the Democratic National Convention. No one dared compete against the Vice President, who was designated by Biden and was much more known by the average voter than any of the alternatives Democrats had. 

Was she the right person for the job? “She made the best of a bad situation,” said Johnson.  “Biden left very late in the game, and she wasn't a particularly popular Vice President. So part of the issue for her was that people just didn't know who she was and the way that she crafted, or tried to craft, a sense of excitement was exciting to the media. They like spectacle. But I don’t think it necessarily resonated with this sort of average working class person.”

Malone retold the story of Harris’ short-lived presidential campaign four years ago, and stressed it didn’t get any traction and was not very well run. But she also said she feared this year’s defeat would make it less likely for the Democrats to nominate a third woman for the presidency in the years to come. 

“Someone like [Michigan governor] Gretchen Whitmer might have a chance,” she said. “She and [Pennsylvania governor] Josh Shapiro were the most obvious choices in that sort of weird period of 12 hours before Harris locked the nomination. Those were the people everyone was talking about: swing state governors, competent, popular. Maybe those people could do the job, and you could imagine a world where they could have been the candidates with an open primary.”

Johnson made a different point about Harris: the implicit sexism she needed to overcome. 

“Both Clinton and Harris had to be hyper-competent and leant into their plans,” she said. “But people look at women saying ‘I have a plan’ and say, ‘Oh my God, it’s mom! She wants me to do some work! It’s terrible, but I think that mattered. You can’t appear emotional because then you are not confident. But if you are hyper-competent, then you are sort of cold and you are scolding. It is a terrible problem that both Clinton and Harris couldn’t solve.”

6. What was the role of the news media?

One of the issues Americans are pondering as they enter the second coming of the Trump era is the role of the news media both in the campaign and in the years to come. Trumpism has often been linked to the rise of news deserts in small town America and media critics have criticised the political coverage of mainstream newspapers both from the left and from the right. 

Malone pointed to one thing that made this campaign a bit different: the fact that Trump is such a huge figure in popular culture gave him access to audiences that are often out of reach for big news organisations, especially young people who get their news from podcasters or influencers on YouTube or TikTok. 

“After the election, I’ve been thinking a lot about who’s actually reading good quality news, and who actually does need to get it,” Malone said. “Not everyone is going to read a New Yorker story. In fact, very few people will. So how does that reporting trickle down into cable news and maybe even into TikTok? We have to think about the way our citizenry is actually consuming news.”

This point was echoed by Casellas, who compared Harris’ emphasis on mainstream channels with Trump’s unusual strategy of chasing young male voters. “Younger people don’t vote at a high rate, and they get their news from sources like Joe Rogan. They are more easily swayed to consider different alternatives and much more open to experiment.” 

Rogan’s endorsement of Trump was huge, according to Johnson, who explained this micro-targeting of young men is something Republicans also leaned into in 2016 by posting their messages and buying ads in places you would never expect.   

“Because of their networks, Democrats are still very much wedded to legacy media, and that becomes an echo chamber,” she said. “They are getting a lot of attention from the Washington Post and the New York Times, but they are not speaking to the people who are wanting to hear something from them.” 

7. What’s next for the MAGA movement? 

Trump will reenter the White House as a 78-year-old man and he won’t be able to run again. So the first few years of his second term will also be an open battle for the future of the MAGA movement. 

“J. D. Vance will try to grab Trump’s mantle,” Murphy said. “Vance is now the son Trump always wanted. But Trump is Stalin. He doesn’t really like other bright lights in his orbit. See how it worked for Steve Bannon, who was out of the White House in a crate the minute he got three clips about how he was the brains of the operation.”

Murphy thinks the midterm elections will be key for what happens next, and the most likely outcome is that the Democrats at least manage to get control of the House of Representatives. 

“Trump was elected saying ‘Things were better under me, I’m going to put money in your pocket.’ If he goes into tariff wars, he could get more inflation and a recession, the opposite of what he sold people. And you have a pre-built national protest election only 24 months away. So soon the Democrats can be a scary force and curve the Republican influence in Congress,” Murphy said. 

So Trump’s position might be more fragile than it seems. “MAGA is going to get wrapped up a little,” Murphy said. “The best day of Trump's political career was last Tuesday, and the slope of the decline is the question. We just don’t know yet.”