But Reagan wouldn’t recognise the party today, it has gone so far to the right that Reagan, the Republican messiah would be considered too moderate and too centrist to run, let alone win a primary or the general.
President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House wasn’t exactly the Reagan landslides, but it was the second-closest to such a victory, winning the General Election, with over 300 electoral votes, sweeping all seven critical swing states. Furthermore, Trump won both the popular vote and the Electoral College, the first time winning the popular vote in his three election attempts and the first time a GOP candidate has won the popular vote in 20 years. Going back to George W. Bush (43) in 2004.
Trump’s resounding victory and return to the White House makes him both the 45th and the 47th President, a feat previously achieved by Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th President who was the only other President to have served non-consecutive terms.
History doesn’t always repeat itself but it does rhyme. Both times, Trump, painted as a narcissist by many of his critics beat women candidates in the polls.
In 2016, the juxtaposition was stark, then Secretary Hilary Clinton, who had the most polished and accomplished resume of all presidential candidates – a former First Lady, two-time Senator from New York, former Secretary of State, and the biggest Washington insider lost to a complete political outsider, someone who had never held public office, not even so much as managed Fifth Avenue, where Trump Tower is headquartered.
It baffled political pundits and pollsters. American presidential candidates of the 20th and 21st centuries were largely – pale, male, and Yale, they held public office and spoke in a regal gentlemanly manner. Barack Obama was the non-white exception, but had Harvard Law credentials, and was a junior Senator and orator par excellence.
Political amnesia is aplenty, but a reminder thatTrump’s GOP predecessor was then former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (now a Senator from Utah). Romney was painted as an out-of-touch Ivy League graduate, a corporate raider during his Bain private equity, and unable to appeal to the general public.
So how did Trump in 2016, a billionaire real estate mogul and celebrity TV show host from New York City, someone who eschews Republican conservative values in having had three marriages, wasn’t a conservative Christian suddenly appeal to the cornhusker from Nebraska or the steelworker from Pennsylvania? This was especially when Romney was seen as rich, but nowhere near Donald Trump’s opulence and failed to speak to the multitude.
The answer in a nutshell was that the poor hate the elite but aspire to be the rich. In 2016, Trump was seen as rich but not “elite”, he spoke the language of the masses, evoking the disenchantment and brazenly making incendiary statements that appealed to the GOP base. In four words, he wanted to “Make America Great Again”.
Romney was seen as “elite”, someone who wouldn’t enter a Burger King and break bread, but Trump was someone perceived to do so. Flashback to 2004, when Karl Rove running ‘Bush 43’ campaign evoked what a poll conducted then asked – “who would you rather have a beer with?”.
The poll found that overwhelmingly, 57% of swing voters would rather have a drink with Bush 43 than with John Kerry, the Senator from Massachusetts who would later become Obama’s Secretary of State. Kerry like Romney, suffered from the “elite” syndrome. Bush and Trump apparently didn’t.
The difference between 2016 and 2024 is stark. If we thought 2016 was one fine swallow (a one-off), then 2024 certainly wasn’t. In 2016, even in his Vice-Presidential pick, Donald Trump appealed to the Christian conservative base by picking, then Governor Mike Pence, from the deep red state of Indiana to be his deputy. Pence was viewed as a milquetoast white Christian evangelical and needed to appeal to the traditional base.
As evinced with the GOP convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin this time and the electoral outcome, Trump doesn’t need to appeal to a base anymore. He has become the base. It was no longer a GOP convention; it became a MAGA convention. Ergo, to tie it back to where I first started – Reagan wouldn’t get elected on the GOP platform today. Moderate Republicans in Mitt Romney, John Kasich, Larry Hogan, Charlie Baker, and Chris Christie are all ostracised and left in the GOP wilderness.
Lifelong Republicans, who once eviscerated Trump, are now singing the MAGA hymn to the MAGA choir – none more so than Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who publicly sparred with Donald Trump when they both ran in the GOP Primaries back in 2016.
During the contentious GOP bouts, Trump belittled his then opponent as “Little Marco,” and Senator Rubio responded with acerbic attacks. Today, Rubio is riding the MAGA train, a staunch Trump surrogate, and fierce campaigner, was also touted for the ticket as Vice President, and he is now Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State.
For the Democrats, it’s an internal election post-mortem as the blame game spars between Harris and Biden camp for the defeat. There is no doubt, that President Joe Biden looked enfeebled and not up to the task of campaigning let alone running the country for another four years. As I outlined earlier, Joe Biden has a Jimmy Carter problem, where “he looks old, frail, weak, and fragile. The American psyche during polling and voting reveals umbrage towards pusillanimity and pusillanimous foreign policy on the world stage.”
On the campaign strategy front, the Democrats ran confidently that abortion and Trump’s trial would be the coup-de-grace, but for voters, inflation and immigration at the southern border “Trumped” abortion.
An autopsy showed that in 2016 and 2024, the Democrats appealed to a centrist base or moved rightward. But in 2020, Biden despite being seen as a moderate courted progressives, since Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, leading voices of the progressive base moved the party leftwards.
Trump appealed to his far-right MAGA base, Kamala Harris and the Democrats didn’t appeal enough to their progressive base, except on cases of abortion and gender identity. One key issue is the Middle East crisis and the humanitarian toll on Gaza.
Dearborn and Hamtramck in Michigan, are two of the heaviest Arab-American cities in America and were incensed at the Biden administration’s apathy to reign back the onslaught on the besieged population of Gaza. The Democrats, simply scare mongered that Donald Trump would be worse on the issue, and no doubt so, but the Arab-American voters knew that. But that isn’t enough to win a base – votes are earned and not entitled. Many Arab-Americans who campaigned actively for Biden in 2020, this time, voted either uncommitted or for Trump or didn’t vote – thus sending Michigan red and costing the Democrats the famed “Blue Wall”.
Equally important to remember, Biden didn’t win because of this vision in 2020, but was seen as the veteran stable old hand who was the anti-Trump candidate who would bring back normalcy to Washington and the country.
Furthermore, one-term Presidents lose because of a major crisis during their time at the helm. Carter had the Iran hostage crisis, Bush 41 had the inflation, Herbert Hoover had the Great Depression, and the pandemic was a referendum on Trump’s poor handling of the crisis.
As I outlined, in 2020, for many, it was not that they loved Joe Biden, but that they loathed Donald Trump. And with Biden’s frail health, many saw his remaining days in office as a presidency without a President.
As one podcast host notes, Trump’s biggest asset is that even “in his incoherence, Trump is coherent” with his base.
As we approach the end of 2024 and prepare for inauguration day in January 2025, we are truly looking at two different Americas, people on opposite ends of the spectrum politically, and each side sees the other as an existential threat to their vision of America.
We’ve seen this movie before, between 2017-2021, however, if election results and Donald Trump’s behaviour have taught us anything, is that unpredictability remains the only predictability.
Akshobh Giridharadas is a Washington, D.C., based policy professional, a former journalist based out of Singapore, and a two-time TED-X speaker.
