Trump lost the 2020 election as a result of his shambolic response to the virus. How do I know that? Because the rest of the GOP ran well ahead of him.
Harris lost the 2024 election because Biden was blamed for the high inflation of 2021 and 2022. Most of the inflation was a worldwide phenomenon that was outside of the US government’s control, and the rest of it was a side effect of a recovery that was the fastest in the world, but the electorate didn’t see it that way.
Trump was elected to bring back the economy of 2019. Instead, he took his narrow victory as a mandate to start wars on a whim and govern despotically at home. While the stock market went up, so did inflation and interest rates. As a result, the GOP is likely to take a bad beating in the midterms.
The overall message here is that, while most Americans vote on the basis of identity politics, elections are actually won by persuading swing voters without a strong party affiliation whose primary interest is in the state of the economy. In other words, in the end, results matter more than ideology and identity, even in today’s badly polarized society.
That’s normal, and it should be reassuring, except that Germans didn’t vote for Nazis in 1932 because they wanted a world war and the extermination of the Jews. When you open Pandora’s Box, lots of nasty stuff that you didn’t foresee flies out.