Despite our best efforts, a clear majority of Americans voted for fascism.

Ultimately, every explanation that journalists, pundits, academics, and political scientists offer for what happened on November 5 comes back to the fact that President-elect Donald Trump won not only a clear majority of the Electoral College, but he also won the national popular vote — a first for any Republican presidential candidate since George W. Bush in 2004. California is still not done with its count as of this writing, but it’s unlikely that Vice President Kamala Harris will top Trump’s current popular vote lead of more than three million ballots. 

The American people clearly spoke. And across the country, a majority of the American public said in no uncertain terms that they prefer a 78 year-old convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and adjudicated fraudster with three other ongoing state and federal criminal cases to the 60 year-old incumbent vice president, former U.S. senator, and former top law enforcement official from America’s largest state. Voters also elected a Republican U.S. Senate, and almost certainly re-elected a Republican majority in the House of Representatives. We can be unhappy about the result, but democracy is when a majority picks the government they want, and that’s precisely what happened on November 5.

Unlike Florida in 2000, there was no recount that was halted by the Supreme Court. Unlike Ohio in 2004, there weren’t any voting machine companies who assured the Republican candidate that they would deliver him a victory. And unlike 2016, there was no leftist third-party candidate who got more votes than Trump’s margin of victory over the Democratic nominee in a critical handful of swing states. 74 million Americans checked Trump’s name on their ballot, and 71 Americans checked Harris’ name. It’s critical to understand that blame for the horrors of the next four years rests squarely on the shoulders of 74 million Americans across all 50 states (and the 31 states Trump specifically won), and not with any particular bloc of voters.

To be clear, Trump won a little over 74 million total votes in both 2024 and 2020, so his coalition remained relatively solid over the past four years. However, approximately 10 million fewer Democrats voted for Harris than voted for President Joe Biden in 2020. Anyone trying to convince you that Harris and the Democratic Party got trounced because they didn’t cater to their specific pet issue is missing the forest for the trees. A loss of this magnitude is not because of any one or two reasons. Rather, we have to acknowledge that the drubbing Democrats received is a multifaceted issue that requires looking beyond just issue polls, voting patterns, campaign strategy, or get-out-the-vote tactics. 

There are multiple deep, structural obstacles Democrats have to contend with if they hope to win a national election again. This article could easily include more than 5 reasons, but these five are extremely important to understanding the fundamentals of why Democrats got embarrassed at the polls this election.

1. America is a deeply racist and sexist country not ready to elect a woman of color to its highest office

The foundation of Democrats’ loss is clearly rooted in racism and misogyny. One stubborn fact is that in the three elections Donald Trump ran, he won two of them against female candidates. The one election he lost was to an elderly vanilla white man. 

Joe Biden wasn’t a particularly inspiring candidate in 2020. As Pew Research noted in 2021, his four-point popular vote edge over Trump was smaller than the nine-point edge Democrats had over Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections. Voters consistently told pollsters in the 2020 Democratic primary that they simply viewed the former two-term vice president and 36-year veteran of the U.S. Senate as the most electable.

“He’s only there because Democrats believed he was the most electable. And they were willing to push aside a lot of other candidates because they believed he was the only one who could do this,” Denver University political scientist Seth Masket told NBC News in July.

The Associated Press quantified the role sexism played in the 2024 election. In a September poll, 38% of respondents — a plurality — said that Harris’ gender would hurt her candidacy, while only 34% said it would help. And in October, the Washington Post’s Maeve Reston and Ashley Parker listed several obstacles female candidates face that male candidates don’t have to consider:

“The likability tightrope — where a woman must constantly demonstrate she is strong enough to be commander in chief, but she can’t appear too tough for fear that she will come off as unlikable.

“The résumé bar — where it is often enough for a male candidate to have potential, but his female counterpart must have already met hers.

“The motherhood bias — where if a female candidate has young children, voters question how she will care for them while serving.

“And the ethical pedestal — where women candidates are believed to be more honest and trustworthy than their male counterparts, but if they’re knocked off the pedestal, it’s often harder for them to climb back up.”

It could be argued that sexism played an even larger role than racism in 2024. The United States, after all, elected Barack Obama to two consecutive terms as the first Black president of the United States in 2008 and 2012. And as American history showed, while Black Americans were technically given the right to vote in 1870 after the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (though racist state laws and racist institutions like Jim Crow still disenfranchised many Black voters, which necessitated the Voting Rights Act of 1965), women weren’t given universal suffrage until 1920. 

Kamala Harris deserves credit, just as Hillary Clinton did, for her efforts to crack the glass ceiling standing in between women and the presidency. But it may be a long time before that glass ceiling actually shatters.

2. Joe Biden was too stubborn and arrogant to step down when it could have made a difference

Biden unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic presidential nomination three times in 1984, 1988, and 2008 before finally winning the 2020 nomination and the presidency that fall. And for someone who has sought the nation’s highest office so many times only to fall short, it would almost certainly be difficult for that person to willingly abdicate that power in order to pass the torch to a younger candidate.

As the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner recalled, Biden ran in 2020 specifically to oust Trump from the White House, citing the racist and anti-Semitic 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia as what prompted him to seek the presidency for the fourth time. He expressly promised aides he would only serve a single term if elected, as he was already in his late seventies at the time he declared his candidacy in 2019.

“This makes Biden a good transition figure,” an unnamed Biden adviser told Politico in 2019. “I’d love to have an election this year for the next generation of leaders, but if I have to wait four years [in order to] to get rid of Trump, I’m willing to do it.”

Biden was correct to exit the 2024 race after his disastrous June debate against Trump, in which the octogenarian president appeared confused, lethargic, and gave garbled and meandering responses to moderators’ questions. His campaign was all but doomed before he announced he was no longer seeking a second term, with Pod Save America host Jon Favreau — a former Obama White House speechwriter — recently telling listeners that Biden’s internal polling showed Trump winning 400 Electoral College votes.

To his credit, the 46th president of the United States notched several historic legislative achievements, like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (which will improve American roads, bridges, and airports and expand on other projects like rural broadband internet access), the Inflation Reduction Act (which made massive investments in clean energy infrastructure and allowed Medicare to negotiate prices for prescription drugs), and the CHIPS and Science Act (which created more than 115,000 new jobs in the semiconductor manufacturing industry). He presided over the best economy in decades, adding 16 million jobs during his tenure, overseeing a significant increase in real (inflation-adjusted) wages, getting inflation back down to 2018 levels, and canceling more than $175 billion in federal student debt. It’s understandable that he would want to build on that legacy rather than hand off the reins to someone else. 

But Biden’s accomplishments ultimately took a backseat to his obvious decline. Rather than announcing in the spring of 2023 that he would be running for another term, he could have announced that he would be retiring in January of 2025, allowing Democrats to run a competitive 50-state primary and showcase their impressive depth of political talent. 

Any nominee who would have emerged from a lengthy primary would have been battle-tested and fared much better against Trump in the general election. Instead, Harris was Democrats’ only real option after Biden’s late July exit, given that she was the only candidate by law who could inherit his campaign war chest. But Harris had just 108 days to build a competitive campaign, whereas Trump has been constantly campaigning for roughly nine years.

Looking back, Harris’ extremely truncated window was likely a huge contributor to her undoing. Biden’s legislative legacy will almost certainly be undone by his successor. His lasting legacy may end up being his slowness to get out of the race and allow Democrats to have a proper fighting chance against Trump.

3. Biden and Harris are just the latest incumbents across the world to get voted out of office

When zooming out, Democrats’ loss is less of a shock when considering how incumbent regimes around the globe have fared in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting economic instability that accompanied it.

As the Guardian reported, the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party, New Zealand’s Labour Party, Japan’s LDP-led government, and South Africa’s ANC also suffered significant electoral losses in addition to the Democratic Party in the United States. Voters angry about paying more for basic needs like food, gasoline, housing, and healthcare all wanted someone to blame, and they took it out on the incumbent political party in numerous national elections this year. Incumbents in Canada and Germany are also poised to lose significantly when voters there head to the polls in 2025.

“Prices are up, a lot, everywhere. The post-Covid reopening drove a surge in consumer demand which in turn has spiked prices higher, an inflationary trend accelerated by disruption to energy supplies after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the next spring,” political scientist Robert Ford wrote for the Guardian. “Polls everywhere show voters unhappy about rising prices, and incumbents’ electoral fortunes began to crater soon after inflation took off.”

Democrats had to fight an uphill battle given how prevalent voters’ concerns about prices were in 2024. The Biden administration routinely touted how the Federal Reserve has been incrementally lowering interest rates and how it achieved the rare feat of a “soft landing,” which in economic parlance means getting inflation back to normal rates without a sharp increase in unemployment. But Americans don’t parse economic data with graphs and charts — they simply notice that food costs a lot more than it used to, and that the elected officials currently in power should be held accountable for it. Harris did her best to acknowledge Americans’ economic struggles, but she was unable to articulate an effective economic message that was different enough from Biden given that she was in the White House with him for the past three and a half years.

4. Far-right propaganda and disinformation is free, while good journalism is paywalled

Americans’ poor media diet and insufficient media literacy is chiefly to blame for which narratives spread and get attention and which ones get ignored. In September, Pew Research found that 54% of Americans say they sometimes or often get their news from social media. Facebook and YouTube are the primary destinations for Americans getting their news. But 20% of respondents said they got their news from Instagram, with another 17% saying TikTok was their main social media news source, and another 12% preferring Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter). 

Pew then analyzed demographic groups based on their news consumption on social media and how they voted. For the majority of survey respondents who said they preferred Facebook and YouTube, they tended to vote for Republicans over Democrats by a 50-43 margin and a 50-45 margin, respectively. Billionaire-owned platforms are allowing anyone with a camera and a microphone to speak to millions of people without having to conform to a standard of credibility that most news outlets require of their journalists. This means that there are tens of millions of Americans who are being fed a steady stream of lies directly from their smartphone to their brain, with no regulation or accountability.

The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper pointed out that progressive policies performed well even in deep-red states that voted for Trump, who is adamantly opposed to such policies: 

• In Kentucky, a ballot question that would have directed public money to private schools failed by a nearly two-to-one margin. 

• In Missouri, a majority of voters approved ballot measures that increased the minimum wage, provided paid sick leave, and guaranteed abortion rights. 

• Nebraska voters approved mandatory paid sick leave by a whopping 74-25 margin. 

• Voters in Travis County, Texas approved of higher taxes to fund child care. 

• Abortion rights passed in Montana, even as voters elected anti-abortion presidential and U.S. Senate candidates.

• A Florida ballot measure that would have enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution failed to meet the required 60% threshold, but nonetheless won 57% support. 

Cooper theorized that this glaring disconnect is a prime example of American voters being poorly informed. 

“Voting to protect abortion rights, while voting for a president who is entirely responsible for taking those rights away, is at a minimum peculiar,” Cooper wrote. “Anecdotally, many voters simply have not heard of Trump’s deranged behavior, or dismiss the possibility that he means business about his many psychotic promises. Some migrants seeking asylum even told a reporter recently that they would have voted for Trump, trusting that he wouldn’t deport them because they just want to work.”

There’s no simple answer to the crisis facing Democrats in terms of fighting the information war. Elon Musk buying Twitter and turning it into what NBC News called a “pro-Trump echo chamber” proved to be hugely consequential, as most journalists at mainstream news outlets still maintain a presence there and use it for newsgathering. There are good alternatives like Bluesky, though its user base of roughly 14 million accounts is still paltry compared to X’s roughly 250 million active users.

Meanwhile, most credible legacy media outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Financial Times, the Economist, and big-city newspapers in swing states like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Arizona Republic, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Detroit News, and many others only make their content available to paying subscribers. In 2018, the Post’s Megan McArdle lamented that “the battle for the open Internet was lost” as more news publishers reverted to paywalls. This year, even more major news publishers added paywalls, including CNN and Reuters. Vox Media added a paywall to tech publication The Verge, with more potentially coming next year. 

It’s understandable that publishers are paywalling their content in order to generate more revenue, as a bulk of the ad revenue publishers used to be able to count on has now been mostly gobbled up by Facebook and Google, who are the primary platforms for delivering news online. But anyone who wants to understand why so many of their fellow Americans are so poorly informed should engage in an exercise: Google a current event and look at your choices. Nearly every time, your choice is a paywalled link from a legacy media outlet, or a free link from a far-right site like Fox News, Breitbart, the Daily Wire, the New York Post, the Daily Caller, or Blaze Media. If you want to read about current events and don’t want to pay a subscription fee, which one would you click?

The far right has an inherent advantage in the media space, due to the prevalence of ideologically driven billionaires like the Wilks Brothers — two far-right Texas fracking barons who funded Ben Shapiro’s the Daily Wire and Dennis Prager’s PragerU at a loss for years simply out of commitment to the mission. Democrats can’t count on billionaire funding for their media, as billionaires are obviously opposed to funding work aimed at undermining their influence and decreasing their net worth. However, collective Democratic money could, in a way, create an aggregate billionaire: Democrats spent roughly $5 billion losing to Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Had they spent just 10% of that on funding media aimed at advancing their goals and interests, that would go a long way to countering the far-right propaganda machine.

5. Conventional campaign wisdom is outdated and irrelevant

Perhaps the most stunning part of Harris’ loss was that she got routed despite doing all the right things that have traditionally won campaigns in the past. OpenSecrets found that Harris and outside groups backing her collectively raised more than $1.6 billion in the 2024 cycle, whereas Trump and GOP-aligned outside groups trailed their haul by roughly $600 million. 

Harris also put that money to good use. While one prevailing (and incorrect) consensus is that the vice president didn’t do enough messaging on her economic platform, the New Republic’s Greg Sargent reported that actually, Harris outspent Trump by a significant margin on economic messaging. While Trump’s spent around $130 million on economy-related ads, Harris spent roughly $200 million on ads specifically touting her economic plans like a $6,000 tax credit for new parents, $25,000 for new homebuyers, and additional resources for small business owners. She left it all on the table, with her campaign reportedly $20 million in debt despite raising a 10-figure sum.

Democrats also ran an efficient, thoroughly staffed, and well-funded ground game. Journalist Ronald Brownstein reported on the nine suburban counties where Democrats were specifically focusing on their get-out-the-vote efforts, like the so-called “collar counties” surrounding Philadelphia (Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties), Oakland County in Michigan (the Detroit suburbs), and Dane, Ozaukee, Washington, and Waukesha Counties in Wisconsin. While Harris enlisted more than 170,000 volunteers in the week after Biden dropped out of the race, Trump outsourced most of his ground game to Elon Musk’s America PAC and far-right activist Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA.

Musk’s PAC spent roughly $200 million on contacting voters in key swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. According to a report in Wired magazine, these efforts depended on canvassers using an app that wasn’t available for download on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store, and that didn’t have basic features like geo-tracking, which lets field directors track neighborhoods where canvassers are walking. One unnamed Trump advisor complained to the outlet that the important work of voter outreach was in the hands of “a bunch of grifters.” The Guardian reported that some of the PAC’s canvassers were even fraudulently logging voter contacts, saying that they were walking neighborhoods when they were actually sitting at restaurants.

Trump’s decisive win shows that conventional thinking around political campaigns, like raising large sums of money, spending it on ad blitzes in swing states to promote a candidate, and pounding the pavement to knock on voters’ doors, may actually matter far less than previously thought. There are numerous reasons why 10 million fewer Democrats came out to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 than they did for Joe Biden in 2020, but we now know that raising more money, running more ads, and knocking on more doors wouldn’t have made the difference.

Fascism has been voted into power, and it won’t be easily voted out in four years unless opposition politicians learn the right lessons. It’s important now more than ever that Democrats seek out as much advice as possible from the electorate, and soak in answers to their questions like a sponge. In the meantime, the Democratic Party has to be ready to apply these lessons to its defensive strategy against what will almost surely be a far-right Republican trifecta for at least two more years.

Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.