Perhaps the most surprising part of the 2024 election was that for all the talk of a close election, it really was not that close. The former president won every swing state and the popular vote.

When President Joe Biden was still in the race, I believed Donald Trump would win. This belief was momentarily shaken after Vice President Kamala Harris became the nominee, but my previous confidence returned by September and throughout October I was even more convinced that Grover Cleveland would no longer be the only president to serve two nonconsecutive terms.

For years, Democrats privately expressed concern over Harris’ campaigning skills, with history painting an unimpressive picture. In 2010, Harris barely won California’s attorney general election, significantly unperforming all other Democrats running in statewide elections. Then there was her 2020 presidential campaign, which floundered before the primaries even began. When it was decided that Harris would be the nominee, my skepticism of her abilities remained unchanged. Of course, we were soon inundated with images of the vice president in front of cheering crowds in the tens of thousands and numerous articles saying she had grown as a candidate and proved the critics wrong. While this initially gave me pause, I was still skeptical of just how real this hype for Harris was, agreeing more with political commentator Auron MacIntyre that Harris’ new image was just a Potemkin village. With Americans increasingly angry at inflation and immigration, I doubted Harris could overcome the frustration with the Biden administration.

Trump should have been the clear favorite to win based on the polling in the months before Nov. 5. In the last two elections, Trump significantly outperformed his polling numbers, allowing him to overcome Clinton (who was around 3-4 points ahead in the polls). While Trump came up short against Biden (6 or more points ahead in 2020), it was still closer than anyone tracking the polls would have expected. This time, Trump was at worst only a point or two behind Harris in the polls while often ahead or tied. With that hindsight, I reckoned pollsters would again underestimate Trump’s support and with the polls so close he would win handily.

Furthermore, there was little evidence that Harris would be able to win the support of enough white working-class voters who were key in Biden’s 2020 win and now both of Trump’s victories. While Biden’s working-class origins are at best greatly exaggerated, he and his media supporters knew how to sell the story of the boy from Scranton with his aw-shucks personality and cultural Catholicism. Trump in his own way also appealed to those same white voters. By contrast, Harris of California was the perfect representative of what George Packer called the “Smart America” so resented by the white working class, and she seemed to write off trying to win their votes. That the Teamsters and the International Association of Fire Fighters refused to endorse Harris was another poor sign for her chances.

Then there was Trump’s increasing inroads with nonwhites. The former president’s growing appeal to Hispanic voters has been reported for years, but in 2024 he cast an even wider net. Last year, I wrote about the growing divide between the Democratic Party and Muslim voters over the party’s increasingly inflexible social liberalism. Democrat Amer Ghalib, the mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, who endorsed Trump, was the perfect example of this trend.

Harris also carried baggage from her 2020 presidential primary campaign, when she and every other Democratic candidate tried to out “woke” the other, signing on to every ridiculous policy, like paying for transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants, to show their progressive bona fides.

This bled into this year when Harris made abortion one of if not the central issue of her campaign. This led to the party taking the most absolutist stance on the issue, unwilling to compromise even an inch. While many claimed that abortion was the reason for the GOP’s underwhelming performance in the 2022 midterms, in Florida and Ohio Republicans who signed into law abortion restrictions easily won reelection. Despite Democrats framing this election as a battle over the fate of democracy, their refusal to give any ground to pro-lifers revealed the whole message as a cynical scam.

The election has left Democrats stunned, but they should have seen this loss coming; the signs were everywhere. Going forward, they will need to find a way to win back the votes lost to Trump. While shedding some of the party’s outlandish and uncompromising social progressivism would seem one of the smartest routes, the party’s activist base remains determined to fight tooth and nail against any deviation. Blaming the voter will not work. Many believe that the party is nothing more than arrogant elites, the worst thing the Democrats can do is prove them right.

Paul Macrae (macrae@cua.edu) is a writer from Brookeville and a recent graduate of the Catholic University of America. He worked for the campaign of former Democratic Illinois Congressman Dan Lipinski.