Alex Landy

Op-ed: Why did Trump really win? Zooming in on the fundamentals

Despite legal troubles and persistent personal scandals, former President Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris at the ballot box —and it wasn’t as close as the polls had projected. Ultimately, Trump won the national popular vote — the first Republican to do so since 2004 — and secured a commanding Electoral College victory. The avalanche of op-eds and post-mortems explaining Trump’s victory will no doubt continue to circulate in the months ahead. These well-informed perspectives should not obscure the fundamentals of the 2024 election. While we cannot put ourselves in the mind of every Trump voter to explain his victory, here is what we do know: Voters’ perceptions of the state of the economy and the direction of the country tilted this race in Trump’s favor from the onset.