How Trump won–and lost – 2020’s presidential election

Bret Stephens and then David Leonhardt offer two alternative visions of the news on 4 November, 2020

In the end, a bitterly fought election came down to the old political aphorism, popularised during Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 run against George HW Bush: “It’s the economy, stupid.” This time, however, it was the Republican incumbent, not his Democratic challenger, who benefited from that truism.

Donald Trump has been decisively re-elected as president of the United States, winning every state he carried in 2016 and adding Nevada, even as he once again failed, albeit narrowly, to gain a majority of the popular vote. Extraordinary turnout in California, New York, Illinois and other Democratic bastions could not compensate for the president’s abiding popularity in the states that still decide who gets to live in the White House: Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

Yet, unlike 2016, last night’s outcome came neither as a political upset nor as a global shock. Trump and vice-president Mike Pence have consistently polled ahead of Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and her running mate, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, since July. The New York Times correctly predicted the outcome of the race in every state, another marked change from 2016.

In exit poll interviews, Trump’s supporters frequently cited the state of the economy to explain their vote. “What part of Dow 30,000 do the liberals not understand?” Kevin O’reilly of Manchester, New Hampshire, told the Times.

Warren and Brown never seemed to find a compelling answer to that question, despite an economy that continues to struggle with painfully slow wage growth, spiraling budget deficits and multiplying trade wars that have hurt businesses as diverse as Ohio soybean farmers and California chipmakers.

Yet both Democrats are also sceptics of trade agreements such as NAFTA, which served to mute their differences with the president. And their signature proposals – Medicare for all and free college tuition for most American families – would have been expensive and would require tax increases on families making more than $200,000. Trump and other Republicans charged they would “bankrupt you and bankrupt the country”.

Meanwhile, the US economy grew at an annual rate of 3.2 per cent in the last quarter, the third consecutive quarter in which growth has exceeded 3 per cent. Unemployment remains low at 4.1 per cent.

With neither a recession nor a major war to run against, Democrats sought instead to cast the election in starkly moral terms. Yet by election day, the charge that Trump is morally or intellectually unfit for office had been made so often that it had lost most of its former edge among swing voters.

“I don’t care if he lies or exaggerates in his tweets or breaks his vows to his wife, so long as he keeps his promises to me,” Leah Rownan, a self-described social conservative from Nevada, told the Times, citing the economy and Trump’s Supreme Court nominations as decisive for her vote. “And he has.”

Many of Trump’s supporters also said they felt vindicated by the conclusions of Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. While the former FBI director painted a damning portrait of a campaign that was riddled with Kremlin sympathisers and a candidate whose real-estate ventures were beholden to Russian investors, no clear evidence of collusion