Sarah Isgur, a longtime Republican campaign operative — and my friend and a senior editor at The Dispatch — has a brilliant sports analogy for the process of campaigning. She compares it to … curling.
For those unfamiliar with the sport (which enjoys 15 minutes of fame every Winter Olympics), it involves sliding a very large, heavy “rock” toward a target on the ice. One person “throws” a 44-pound disc-shaped stone by sliding it along the ice, sweepers come in and frantically try to marginally change the speed and direction of the rock by brushing the ice with “brooms” that can melt just enough of the ice to make the rock travel farther or perhaps a little bit straighter.
The sweepers are important, no doubt, but they cannot control the rock enough to save a bad throw. It’s a matter of physics. The rock simply has too much momentum.
What does this have to do with politics? As Isgur writes, “The underlying dynamics of an election cycle (the economy, the popularity of the president, national events driving the news cycle) are like the 44-pound ‘stone.’ ” The candidates and the campaign team are the sweepers. They work frantically — and they can influence the stone — but they don’t control it.
One of the frustrating elements of political commentary is that we spend far too much time talking about the sweeping and far too little time talking about the stone. Political hobbyists in particular (and that includes journalists!) are very interested in ad campaigns, ground games and messaging.
Those things do matter, but when facing an election defeat this comprehensive, you know it was the stone that made the difference.
So, in 2024, what was the stone? It’s the same stone it almost always is: peace and prosperity. This is job one. A decisive number of Americans will put up with a politician’s quirks, foibles and even corruption, if he or she delivers peace and prosperity. There’s zero tolerance for scandal when they fail.
Republicans learned this lesson during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Evidence of sexual misconduct, perjury and even allegations of sexual assault, were largely politically meaningless compared with peace, a budget surplus, 4.5 percent growth in the gross domestic product and a 4.4 percent unemployment rate.
Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was first reported in January 1998. According to Gallup, Clinton had a 69 percent approval rating just before the scandal broke. By the end of the year — after he confessed to lying to the American public, after he settled the sexual harassment suit and as he was impeached — his approval rating was 73 percent.
Yes, you can ascribe some of his popularity to the hypocrisy and overreach of his enemies. Newt Gingrich and Robert Livingston — two Republican leaders in the House — had engaged in their own affairs, for example. But the bottom line is that peace and prosperity made Clinton politically bulletproof.
You can see this phenomenon up and down American politics. In hindsight, one harbinger of the 2024 election was a 2022 San Francisco school board recall. Voters recalled three members of the school board after the board voted to change the names of dozens of San Francisco schools.
Many of the name changes were absurd artifacts of an era that one might describe as “peak woke” (Dianne Feinstein and Abraham Lincoln were among the names removed), but that’s not the whole story. It was really an election about competence. The school board was voting to change school names while San Francisco schools were still closed — and schools in many other districts were open.
As Mother Jones’s Clara Jeffery wrote at the time, San Francisco recall voters were choosing “to put performance over performativeness.”
You can also feel the weight of the stone in global trends. The governments in power when inflation hit are all suffering from an electoral backlash. A spirit of anti-incumbency is sweeping away parties regardless of ideology. In fact, as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson posted last week, “For the first time since World War II, every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share.”
Think of Britain. In 2019, Boris Johnson and the Tories won a crushing victory over Labour. There was talk of realignment. The Tories had broken Labour’s “red wall” and won over the working class. In 2024 — as Britain’s economy remained stagnant — Labour wiped out the Tories. Apparently, the realignment was postponed.
In the days since Donald Trump’s victory, I’ve read a number of pieces about Democratic messaging, Democratic elitism and far-left intolerance that drove a number of people into MAGA’s open arms.
This level of self-reflection is important and wise — sweeping is important on the margins, after all — but I can’t help but think that if the withdrawal from Afghanistan hadn’t been a bloody mess (that’s when Joe Biden’s approval rating went underwater; it never came back), if inflation hadn’t spiked and if migration hadn’t surged at the border, then we’d be having a different conversation.
I know that the Harris campaign had answers for all these criticisms. The American people wanted to end the Afghan war and Biden was saddled with Trump’s terrible deal with the Taliban. Inflation was a global phenomenon and it was unfair to entirely blame Biden when by 2023 America had the lowest inflation rate among the Group of 7 countries. The Biden administration had finally cracked down on the border and had endorsed a tough new border bill.
They also rightly argued that Trump nostalgia was misplaced. It was wrong to give the former president a pass for the pandemic, or for the chaos and murder spikes of 2020. His term did not end in 2019, with peace and prosperity. It ended near the beginning of 2021 with disease, violence and cultural decay. Even the memories of the time before Covid are idealized. There was an immense amount of domestic turmoil before the pandemic.
To continue the curling analogy, the Harris campaign also argued that there was a different rock in play, one that was more important than peace and prosperity: democracy and the rule of law.
I agreed with the Harris campaign on this point. I believed the stakes changed after Jan. 6. I believed this was not a normal election and that many policy disagreements should have been put aside for a larger purpose. It wasn’t irrational to believe this argument might prevail. Republicans had underperformed in 2022 and Kamala Harris did win an overwhelming majority of voters who said democracy was their top issue in the election.
But no. The first rock was in play, and all the arguments about easing inflation, better border policies or the importance of NATO paled in the face of the facts: Americans want to end wars but not lose them, inflation bit so hard that it may not be until next year that wages fully recover and there was never a good explanation for permitting so very many migrants to enter the country.
When I consider why Trump won, I think of two different numbers — 17 million and 73 million. The first number represents Trump’s primary voters. That’s MAGA. Those are the people who were given a choice between Trump and a number of other accomplished Republicans and chose Trump again.
The 73 million are Trump’s general election voters. Many of them — maybe most — certainly do love Trump. Some are indeed outright racists and misogynists. But if you actually sit down and talk with many other Trump voters, you’ll hear some version of this: “Look, I didn’t like Jan. 6 — and I don’t want it to happen again — but it didn’t affect my life nearly as much as the price of eggs, milk and gas.”
This reality is reflected in the results. Trump narrowly won lower-income voters after Joe Biden won their votes decisively in 2020. He modestly improved his showing with minority voters. He assembled an actual multiethnic working-class coalition. He won a number of heavily Hispanic border counties in Texas. America’s most vulnerable communities faced the consequences of inflation without the financial cushion of wealthier families, and they’re still financially behind.
Understanding voters’ decisions is not the same thing as justifying them. I strongly disagree with the decision so many of my friends and neighbors made. Our experience teaches us that we can count on Trump to be performative, but we cannot count on him to perform. There was a reason voters tossed him out of office once before.
But now he’s back, and soon enough the MAGA true believers will realize that their ideological dreams will quickly die if they can’t deliver the peace and prosperity they promised. We read too much cultural significance into any given election. Every party and every movement can be one business cycle from defeat.
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