The New Yorker:

Donald Trump won votes across racial and class lines on Tuesday night. Are Republicans now the more diverse voice of the working class?

By Jay Caspian Kang

Someone needs to catch some blame here, but, when you lose this big, it’s hard to find the obvious culprit. For Kamala Harris’s campaign, the suspects will likely start with Harris herself, who, after an energetic start under impossible conditions, slowly revealed herself to be the candidate whom Democratic voters rejected back in 2019. In the coming months, I imagine there will be a robust interrogation of her staffers and an accounting of who gave what bad advice and whose sensible plans got ignored or run over. Then there is the game of blaming the voters, often broken down into identity-based categories, where a bunch of assumptions are made about what’s best for this or that group and then each is scolded for voting against their own interests. Latino voters, I imagine, will be told that they just elected the deporter-in-chief. Muslim and Arab voters in Michigan who either went for Donald Trump or Jill Stein will be told that Gaza will be turned into beachside condominiums for the Kushner family under a Trump Administration. Black men who voted for Trump will be reminded that they helped elect the same man who took out a full-page ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five.

I don’t think any of these criticisms, taken individually, can account for what happened on Tuesday. In the course of the past three months, I’ve been quite critical of the Harris campaign. It seemed far too wedded to specious polling, far too willing to invite unpopular Republican figures like the Cheney family into the fold, far too wary of media appearances and potentially difficult interviews, and unable to craft a meaningful message on immigration or foreign policy that didn’t involve just repeating the same talking points over and over. I don’t think any of these criticisms turned out to be wrong, but the margin of Trump’s victory suggests that, even if Harris had run a flawless campaign, she still probably would have lost. The headwinds of inflation, President Biden’s unpopularity, the impossibility of putting together an effective campaign in such a short amount of time, and what certainly looks like a broad, multiethnic political and cultural reorganization proved too strong.

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