How & Why Donald Trump Comfortably Won the 2024 US Presidential Election

By Oliver Green

Caveat: Trump did not win the 2024 US Presidential Election by a Landslide

Before I begin my dissection of how and why Donald Trump comfortably won the 2024 US Presidential Election, it is necessary for me to define what I mean by winning comfortably, because many journalists and political pundits had predicted a much tighter electoral outcome with possible legal challenges resulting from it, and as a result many have been declaring Trump’s victory a landslide, this is because most of them either haven’t the historical knowledge to put this election result into its proper historical context or they are not old enough to remember the 1980’s and as a result they don’t know what a landslide actually is. So I’ll define what a landslide in US Presidential electoral terms actually is in accordance with historical precedent. As we know, to win a US Presidential Election, the winning candidate must secure at least 270 out of the available 538 Electoral College votes, and in this 2024 US Presidential Election Trump achieved his comfortable victory margin with 312 Electoral Votes, which is only 8 more electoral votes than he won in the 2016 US Presidential Election, and considerably less than Barack Obama achieved in both the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections when he secured 365 and 332 Electoral College votes respectively, or Bill Clinton in both the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections, when he secured 370 and 379 Electoral College votes respectively.

To be in landslide territory, the winning presidential candidate needs to win a least 400 electoral college votes, and the last US President to achieve this was H W Bush in 1988 when he secured 426 Electoral College votes, carrying 40 states against his Democratic rival Michael Dukakis. However, this still pales in comparison to what Ronald Reagan achieved in the 1980 election when he secured a colossal 489 Electoral College votes, carrying 44 states over Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, which was later dwarfed when he secured re-election in the 1984 election with a gargantuan 525 Electoral College votes, carrying 49 states over Democratic challenger Walter Mondale, who apart from winning Washington DC, only managed to win Minnesota, which was not that remarkable given that it was his home state. There are of course many other examples of such landslide results going back further than 1980, but I think this has made the point and put the 2024 US Presidential Election result into its proper context, and gives the necessary clarification to what I am inferring when I credit Donald Trump and the Republican Party with comfortably winning the 2024 US Presidential Election,  which is nonetheless an impressive achievement given the almost unprecedented nature of a US President winning two non-consecutive terms in office, along with the domestic political backdrop of how polarised America appears to have become.

However, over the course of this article I’m going to show you why this result, including Trump’s clean sweep of all seven swing states and the Republicans securing both houses of Congress along with a clear majority of the Governor races is not that surprising, despite having almost no historical precedent, as only one other US President in history has ever managed to win re-election non-consecutively after being defeated, and that was Grover Cleveland way back in the late 19th Century who won the 1884 and 1892 US Presidential Elections, losing the 1888 election in between, and so serving as both the 22nd and 24th US President.

Why Donald Trump’s comfortable victory in the 2024 US Presidential Election is not surprising

Firstly there were a number of similarities to the 2016 Presidential Election when Trump became the 45th President Elect by also winning just over 300 Electoral College votes against Hillary Clinton, another deeply unpopular female Democratic Nominee running against her personal record in government, with Clinton and Kamala Harris having negative approval ratings among 55% of surveyed respondents in 2016 and 2024 respectively. In addition, both the Clinton and Harris campaigns out fundraised the Trump election campaigns by three to one in 2016 and as much as five to one in 2024. But despite this, Trump was the maverick outsider and disruptor in both elections, and each time succeeding in monopolising the vast bulk of media attention for free, rallying against the public frustration with the system, which in 2020 he could do as he was the system incumbent president. Furthermore, in both elections there was significant under-reporting and detection of Trump’s support in both nationwide and state polling, partly as a result of what I would describe as the suspicious and nervous Trump voters who were shunned and derided by the “Liberal Left” leaning elements of the mainstream media and society, coupled with the fact that a significant portion of Trump’s core base are very hard working blue collar workers with an naturally lower propensity to engage with pollsters for simply being too busy.

The current point in America’s Political Cycle was still on Trump’s side

As I wrote back in my 2016 article on how and why Donald Trump became the 45th US President, the point then reached in America’s political cycle was on Trump’s side. Because by far one of the biggest factors in Trump’s favour has nothing to do with him, his opponents or the campaigning at all. The main causal factors are undoubtedly cyclically historical in nature, both in the short and long terms. Both of Trump’s 2016 and 2024 ambitions for the highest office on Earth would have come to nothing were it not for the short and long term trends of disaffection of US voters, which Trump was well aware of. As a real estate developer and businessman, Trump knew first-hand the importance of timing in any business proposal or decision and knew that it applied every bit as much to the political climate as any business venture, which is why he would never have run in 2012, regardless of being too committed at the time with “Celebrity Apprentice”. Like in most democracies, the outcome of US national elections is decided every bit as much by the position of the “political cycle”, which determines how the party in power is favoured by the electorate regardless of who is running for office, which became much more significant after the World War II when the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution was passed by Congress in 1947 and then ratified by the states on February 27th 1951. The 22nd Amendment limited an elected president to two terms in office, a total of eight years, which after two terms removes any personal incumbency advantage there might be of the party in power.

Since the amendment had been introduced, HW Bush had been the only US President to succeed someone from his own party after 8 years in office, succeeding Ronald Reagan in 1989 as a result of the exceptional circumstances of the late eighties. The Republican administration at that time had been running high, having overseen massive structural economic reforms at home in the form of Reaganomics, coupled with the massive foreign policy coup of facing down the Soviet Union. But neither of those sorts of advantages applied to the Democrats in the 2016 or 2024 elections when on both occasions the incumbent President was not running for re-election, and in both cases the incumbent Democrats had no major foreign policy successes, such as the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Obama's first term and no significant breakthroughs in domestic policy, such as Obamacare in Obama’s first term. Consequently, both the outgoing 2016 Obama and 2024 Biden Democratic administrations had reached the end of their political shelf life’s, hence why the Republicans also won both houses of Congress on both the 2016 and 2024 elections, which again had nothing to do with Donald Trump, reinforced all the more by the fact that so many Senate and House Republicans had refused to support him in the 2016 Presidential campaign.

It was significantly because of this that once he became the Republican Nominee in 2016, Trump was then set to serve two consecutive four year terms in the White House, and partly why in my view many senior Democrats and potential Democratic candidates did not seriously expect to win the 2020 election, which paved the way for the nomination of the aged Joe Biden as their continuity candidate, coupled with the realisation that Trump was going to have the added advantage of incumbency when running for re-election. Therefore, I would argue that they were resigned to eight years of Trump, and secretly biding their time until the 2024 election when they would theoretically be seriously back in contention for the Oval Office. Then, a once in century Global Pandemic arrived totally out of left field, disrupting the US economy, throwing societies into turmoil and consequently distorting the natural flow of the political cycle, temporarily turning it against Trump and the incumbent governing Republican Party, playing entirely into the hands of the challenging Democrats, returning them to power at least four years earlier than was cyclically natural, even with Trump increasing his national share from 46.1% in 2016 to 46.8% in his subsequent 2020 election defeat. However, four years on with Covid firmly in the past, the Political Cycle was able to resume and rebound from its rude interruption and re-assert itself to produce a cyclical correction of re-running the 2020 election to produce the correct cyclical outcome, and it did so with a vengeance.

The point reached in the Global Economic Cycle firmly favoured Trump in 2024, much more than it already did in 2016

The point reached in the Global Economic Cycle at the moment of the 2024 US Presidential Election, strongly favoured Trump’s now well established new iteration of Republicanism post Covid than in 2016. Because just as significant is the position of America on the much longer term “Economic Cycle”, which determines how the performance of the political class as a whole over the previous 20 to 25 years or so is favoured by the electorate, which not surprisingly did not favour any western political class by 2016. Like the Democrats at the end of their second term in office, there had been no significant domestic or foreign policy shifts since the 1980’s, resulting in the relative stagnation of incomes, living standards and life chances, particularly of “Middle Americans”. The political class had also shown a prolonged disdain for properly transparent, balanced and fully representative political discourse and debate. The establishment as a whole had become more concerned with political correctness than discussing the issues that affected everyday people, which Trump exploited to great effect.

There had also been a relative decline of the United States in the 21st Century, both in terms of the relative growth in living standards and social mobility among many Americans themselves. Consequently, Trump wasted no time in exploiting this with his regular references to China as a “currency manipulator” and making it one of his promises during the 2016 election campaign to wage a trade war with Beijing and to put tariffs on them, which resonated and tied in with how negative and resentful many of the US electorate had become over the free trade deals of recent times, which they attributed as a major contributing factor of American jobs and corporate investment going overseas to places like China, as well as the stagnation of wages, living standards and life chances.

However, by the time of the 2024 election after the Covid Pandemic had run its course, China’s persistent and resultant accelerated economic slowdown, deflation, demographic decline, spiraling national debt and increasing Geo-Political aggression and isolation, coupled with the Biden administration’s decision to maintain the Trump China Trade Tariffs, has all accelerated China’s decline in manufacturing exports to considerably de-globalise the Global Economy to create the opportunity and growing necessity to re-shore of lot of manufacturing to the United States and significantly boost the incomes of Blue Collar Middle America, much of Trump’s core voter base, and which aligns perfectly with Trump’s new Mercantile iteration of Republicanism. Furthermore, western economies in general are in dire need of rejuvenation and reforms, and America is no exception, experiencing the same problems of a shrinking middle class and alienated working class which no longer have access to the living standards and social mobility once taken for granted by the earlier pre-internet generations growing up after World War II, further making Trump’s ant-establishment MAGA Republicanism more appealing.

The Democratisation and Decentralisation of mass media has continued to completely erode and bypass the monopoly of the establishment mainstream media since 2016

Even more significantly than in 2016 in my view, is how the internet and democratisation of mass media had totally eroded the monopoly of the mainstream media by the start of the 2024 election season. Because voters no longer have to rely solely on the “Liberal World View” of the major news corporations to get information. The Western public can now turn to a wide variety of smaller independent sources, which are not owned and controlled by the wealthy powerful interests, thanks to the incredibly liberating and egalitarian phenomenon of the internet, which is effectively a global communication network. Even by 2016, any small independent media outlet could already gain the same scale of following and consumption as the major news networks and practically free of charge. Social media is one undeniable aspect of this technological revolution, as it has allowed millions of people of all backgrounds and cultures to come together and formulate their own policy positions and popular movements beyond the control of the powerful, who traditionally had the exclusive rights to distribute and control the information people were given.

None of this has ever been lost on Donald Trump who knows that he has to embrace this new media of social networks, so as to outflank the inevitable opposition he faces from the wealthy mainstream media when taking on the establishment, leading to his exhaustive use of social media and doing interviews with the very sorts of independent broadcasters I’ve described. The same was true in the 2016 Brexit Referendum in Britain, when it was found that the amount of activity and engagement on social media from the Leave side significantly outperformed that of Remain. So, unlike Kamala Harris, both Donald Trump and his Vice Presidential running mate J D Vance did the courtesy of sitting down with highly influential Social Media Influencers like Joe Rogen who are respected and followed by tens of millions of crucial registered voters, while Harris refused to do so without strict limiting terms and conditions.

The Increasing Decline, Ineptitude & Unelectability of Joe Biden after 2020

As I’ve explained, Joe Biden was cyclically the wrong candidate to win the 2020 US Presidential Election, and was effectively elected by the once in a century Global Pandemic to be in my view the Covid President. Therefore, once Covid faded into history, Biden’s acute cognitive decline, resulting leadership failures and misguided and or out of step policy positions for the current eras of the global economic and American Political cycles became ever more apparent, such as his cancelling of domestic oil drilling licences in the United States, as well as cancelling completion of the Mexico border wall, whilst appointing Vice-President Harris as “Border Czar” with no obvious plan other than to let in millions more illegal migrants. In addition, his decision to waive sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 Baltic gas pipeline to Germany would later come back to bite him politically once Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. However, it was his disastrous Foreign Policy failure concerning America’s long overdue withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 that made an indelible blemish on his legacy in my view by hurriedly pulling out US troops before thousands of US and allied nationals could be evacuated first, whilst leaving around $7 Billion Dollars’ worth of military equipment, hardware and ammunition behind for the Taliban to seize.

The US Economy under President Biden

As stated, 81% of Americans cited the economy and inflation as their top concern before the election, factoring heavily in Trump’s return to the White House for an historic non-consecutive second term as President, and according to the Washington Post two thirds of US voters rated the economy under Biden as either “not so good” or in “poor shape”, with only one third rating it as “good” or “excellent”, with 69% of the voters who rated it poorly voting for Trump. In addition, the Washington Post also reported that economists had warned President Biden of the risks to inflation when coming out of the Covid Pandemic prior to him signing his large stimulus package into law, with many experts (including in the Democratic Party itself) warning that the stimulus package could very well cause the economy to overheat. Yet despite these warnings, Biden signed the Bill into law, and within days prices began to skyrocket, with inflation later peaking at 9% in June 2022, its highest level in four decades. Later the following year, The Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Report found that Biden’s fiscal stimulus had contributed half or more toward the historic inflation rate, by significantly contributing to the aggregate demand shocks after Covid, something also found in many other Western countries such as the UK, which also effectively shut down their economies and heavily subsidized their idle businesses and workforce's.

Trump increased his vote share among many demographics of the traditional democrat voting base, whilst maintaining his previous majority of his core demographics base

Trump’s successful tried and true campaign strategy of campaigning and leading on the priorities of a broad coalition of America’s vast and diverse demographics, enabled him and the Republican Party to eat into the traditional Democratic voting base, handing them all seven swing states, both houses of Congress, the Electoral College, eight out of the eleven Governorships up for election, and the popular vote, which the Republicans had not previously managed to do since George W Bush’s re-election over John Kerry in 2004. According to comparative NBC news exit polling data of the 2020 and 2024 US Presidential Elections, Trump increased his vote share among men overall from 53 to 54%, women overall from 42 to 44%, and among Asian Americans from 34 to 38%.

However, his most striking surge in support was among the Hispanic and Latino Americans situated in the southern Border States most directly impacted by the illegal migrant flows coming through and from Mexico, where he increased his vote share among 13% from 32 to 45% of registered Hispanic and Latino voters, while also increasing his vote share among other ethnic minority groups (excluding black Americans) from 41 to 53%. Then, when digging down deeper, they found that he also increased his vote share among black men from 19 to 20%, Hispanic/ Latino women from 30 to 37% and Hispanic/ Latino men by a staggering 18% from 36 to 54%. Also, quite significantly, he increased his vote share among young people between 18 and 29 years of age from 36 to 42%, whilst also increasing his more traditional core voter vote share of 45 to 64 year olds from 50 to 53%, those with no Associates College Degree from 54 to 62% and among those who attended College but without securing any Associates College Degree from 47 to 50%, whilst also increasing his vote share among those with an Associates College Degree from 50 to 55%, all of which helps to cultivate some of the conditions of the next couple of headline factors of Trump’s comfortable 2024 victory which I’m about to cover.

Bi-Partisan support for Trump & the Kennedy Factor

The highly polarised left leaning side of America’s mainstream media took every opportunity to highlight those fading elements of the traditional Republican Party opposed to Trump, otherwise known as the “Never Trumpers”, such as Dick Chaney and Mitt Romney. However, what they failed to highlight was that the opposite is also true and in my view much more significant at this time in America’s political cycle. What I’m referring to here is the traditional old school Classical Liberal/ Libertarian Democrats who have become disillusioned and alienated by the authoritarian woke identity political movement that the modern Democratic Party has morphed into. Consequently, highly prominent freedom loving Classical Liberals including Robert Kennedy Jnr and Former Democratic Presidential Candidate Tulsi Gabbard left the Democratic Party to become independents and eventually endorsed and campaigned for Donald Trump, once they realised that their values and policy positions on most major issues had become antithetical to what the modern Democratic Party had come to represent. Furthermore, once Kamala Harris and her team had point blank refused to even enter into any preliminary discussions with RFK Jnr on the possibility of collaborating, it became even easier for him to make the philosophical and political switch to Trump’s MAGA Republican Party. As a result, I believe that many academics, political pundits and the media severely underestimated the impact this would have, as according to the New York Times, Kennedy had been consistently polling at around 10% before suspending his campaign, and had even polled as high as 15% in July 2024.

In addition, the New York Times also found that around 18% of his support came from young people under 30, disillusioned with the Democratic Party, which helps to explain Trump’s 6% increase in support among 18 to 29 year olds since the 2020 election. The New York Times also discovered that the other voting demographic that Kennedy performed highly in were Latinos, which increased the most in their support for Trump by a whopping 13% since 2020. So I think it’s fair to say that with these classical independent minded Democrats supporting Trump, it became philosophically and emotionally easier, as well as much more socially acceptable and less taboo for many of their supporters to make the switch with them, to what has now became arguably a much more Libertarian Republican Party under Trump. It is also important to note however, that all of this realignment of voter loyalties and dislocation is not unique to America, but rather a common theme throughout the Western World at this current point in the aforementioned Global Economic Cycle, most notably in Britain, which mirrors the United States in so many aspects of its body politic.

Elon Musk

It would of course be most remiss of me not to include Elon Musk’s timely entry into the Trump campaign, given his massive personal following, celebrity appeal and immense wealth as the richest person on the planet by the end of November 2024, as according to Forbes, Musk was estimated to have a net worth of over $330 Billion, providing Trump with the equivalent wealth and resources of a small country supporting him. According to CNBC, Musk spent an estimated $130 million on the 2024 Trump election campaign, whilst also leveraging his X platform of around 200 million followers, along with spending lots of time campaigning on Trump’s behalf, and spending two weeks in the most crucial swing state of Pennsylvania.

In terms of identifying his motivation it’s easy to point to Trump’s promised trade tariffs on Chinese electric cars, but once you’ve become the wealthiest person on the face of the planet, short-term limited financial gain is no longer a sufficiently enticing personal driver of decision making in my view, especially given Musk’s track record of working to better the human condition and the long term survival of humanity, liberty and democracy from the threats of planetary extinction, artificial intelligence, woke authoritarian ideology and threat to free speech. It is these sort of longer term loftier goals which someone of Musk’s gargantuan wealth can afford to become focused upon and motivated by, and which Musk has demonstrated. He’s already demonstrated this firstly by his Space X project to build and develop cutting edge rockets to transport communities of people to other worlds in order to successfully colonise them and make humanity a multi-planetary species to ensure its long term survival, and which he does at great financial cost with no returns. Secondly, he purchased Twitter to the tune of $44 Billion with no financial returns, and shortly becoming worth less than half what he paid, which neatly leads onto the next point.

The Culture War

Firstly, this phenomenon is not unique to America, but is in my view most visible and starkly expressed in the United States. As in 2016, Trump has proficiently capitalised on the stark and ever growing discord and disconnect which the majority of “Middle America” feels toward an out of touch and increasingly dysfunctional set of national and globalist institutions in the areas of politics,  government, mainstream media and academia, which appear to have run out of credible solutions or ideas to address the stark inequalities and problems faced by contemporary society and become divorced from the legitimate concerns and interests  held by the majority of hard working “Middle Americans”, coupled with at best an apparent absence of concern for their way of life, or at worst a total hatred or antipathy toward their way of life. Consequently, these institutions appear to have become increasingly hijacked and utilised to impose a radical left socially Communist societal world view of identity politics on the general public, which is totally antithetical and in conflict in my view to the long held Western Liberal values of freedom, meritocracy, and democracy that the Liberal Democracies of the Western world were built and have depended upon for their survival and prosperity, and the Democratic Party in recent years has in my view become at best complicit in, or at worst an active and willing enforcer of this ideology, which views everything through the prism of identity politics.

To his credit, long-time Democrat Veteran and US Senator for Vermont Bernie Sanders made clear his view after the election that working class Americans were angry and stated on X the following;

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has long abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change and they are right.”

Furthermore, the Democratic Party’s complicity or culpability in this state of affairs has been exacerbated by its failure to learn from its earlier drubbing or under-performance in previous elections and to draw the right lessons from its 2016 defeat and Covid related win in 2020. Instead, they proceeded to focus much of their political capital, energy and time on attacking and pursuing Trump in blatantly partisan politically motivated law fare cases against the former President, rather than having the wisdom and humility to take stock and asses themselves, listen to “Middle America”, change course and perfect the statecraft of effectively governing the country and properly delivering for everyday Americans, had they’d instead been doing that over the previous four years, then they may have done somewhat better at the ballot box. But instead, they continued to maintain and perpetuate the public’s focus and attention on Trump and generate sympathy for him as a result, which also happened to coincide with the assignation attempts on his life making him an increasingly heroic and martyred figure.

Vice-President Kamala Harris was not a politically viable or sufficiently competent candidate to serve as Vice-President and Run as the 2024 Democratic Presidential Nominee

As stated earlier, in recent years much of the Democratic Party leadership has come to view the world through the prism of “Identity Politics”, which is antithetical to the true Liberal values of fairness and meritocracy which is what most fair minded people support, and what in my view enabled Barack Obama to rise to prominence, win the 2008 Democratic Primaries and serve two full relatively successful terms as the 44th President of the United States, comfortably winning both election in 2008 and then later also going on to comfortably win re-election in 2012. Obama is therefore living proof that when everyone is considered and properly tested for positions on the basis of their individual merits, qualities and attributes as human beings regardless of any externalities, they triumph regardless of race or religion. The same was equally true of the first British Female Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who went on to comfortably win three General Elections, serving a remarkably long and transformational period in office from 1979 to 1990 as arguably the most successful peace time Prime Minister in British history, proving that gender is also no barrier to political office when the individual is fairly and openly tested and judged on their individual merits and qualities as a human being.

However, this is precisely what Joe Biden failed to comprehend in my view when selecting Kamala Harris as his Vice-Presidential running mate in 2020, spurred on by a radical vocal section of Democrat supporters, who according to The New York Times in the August of that year made a final public push for a black woman to be chosen. In addition, early in the year CNN reported that Joe Biden was considering four black women to be his running mate after, and I quote; “pledging earlier to pick a woman for the job.” 

Consequently, Biden ended up choosing Kamala Harris as his running mate, despite the fact that when running for the Democratic Nomination in 2019 she had no coherent policy positions on anything other than abortion rights, and continued to flip flop on the crucial issue of Healthcare by periodically opposing private Healthcare and then supporting it until her own poll numbers and campaign funding had slumped so low that she was forced to suspend her campaign two months before even the first State Primary had got underway. Furthermore, after being sworn in as Vice-President she proceeded to fluctuate between opposing and supporting fracking, which was a particularly hot issue in crucial Swing States like Pennsylvania. Furthermore, none of this changed after her 2024 Presidential Nomination when she and the Democratic Party proceeded to say as little as possible and not formulate any clear policy positions other than on abortion rights and to pledge to continue pursuing the policies of President Biden, which as Vice-President she could not distance herself from anyway, along with her poor record in office in failing to competently address the illegal migration and security issues on America’s southern border, which she was personally charged with solving in her appointed role as “Boarder Czar”, and so was in my view inescapably associated with the policy failures of the Biden Administration.

She also proved once again to be a totally ineffective political operator, refusing to reach out beyond her loyal voter base and do proper interviews with the types of independent media which were followed by tens of millions of Americans, whilst she and the Democratic campaign directed much of their energy and focus on attacking Trump and gaining him further media attention and focus. It’s worth noting however, that on abortion rights she was on solid ground, as according to Pew Research 63% of Americans support legalised abortion. The problem is that abortion rights is not a priority among even many women voters and cannot sway a Presidential Election, as not surprisingly, Pew Research also found that 81% of Americans cited the economy and inflation as their top priority. However, despite Harris unsuitability, I don’t subscribe to the argument articulated by Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that had Biden withdrawn sooner from running to permit a Democratic Primary contest that another fresher Democratic candidate would have altered the outcome for the reasons I’ve covered throughout this article, but it probably did contribute towards to scale of Trump’s comfortable victory margin, and the Republican Party’s decisive electoral sweep across all three branches of government on 5th November, and why this and all the other factors I’ve covered in this article explain why Donald Trump comfortably won the 2024 US Presidential Election.