The media is doing its post-mortem on how America could elect Donald Trump for the second time in three elections. At each outlet, “analysts” are debating how much to blame Biden, Harris, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, the “center left,” and the “far left”

Here’s what we know based on our conversations with hundreds of swing voters

Life is unaffordable for many Americans. Even if inflation has slowed, its cumulative impact has eviscerated people’s savings and their wages haven’t kept up

Frequent legacy news headlines like, “What's Wrong With the Economy? It's You, Not the Data” (The Wall Street Journal, April 2024) only reinforced the gap voters felt with the media and political establishment – an establishment that Trump campaigned against. Among younger and lower-earning voters, higher housing and stock prices have only made comfortable lives feel more out of reach. Trump was perceived as being more likely to fix this

We sensed a deep anger among voters about illegal immigration. Some linked it to crime, culture, or wages, but most frequently voters called it a sign of policymakers’ incompetence or indifference toward the state of the country. We heard this from whites, blacks, and Hispanics who were born in the US, as well as immigrants from Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa

As one Korean American immigrant in Georgia told us, “[Illegal immigration] really bothers me…they need to go through like everybody else. If they’re asking us to get our license, citizenship, and all that – I feel that the rules should apply to everybody”

People – and parents, in particular – repeatedly brought up the Democratic Party’s embrace of “trans rights,” including athletes competing with the gender they identify as, government-funding for transition surgery, and childhood transitions

While President Biden called trans rights the “civil rights issue of our time,” the Trump campaign spent tens of millions of dollars on ads that said, “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Based on our conversations, Trump’s message resonated more

Not a single Kamala Harris voter we spoke to cited her foreign policy. It only came up when people give it as a reason why they wouldn’t vote for her

We heard leftists and Arabs oppose Harris’ perceived support of Israel, Jews oppose her perceived lack of support for Israel, people in the inner-cities oppose funding Ukraine, and people all over express concern about World War 3. Almost everybody expressed that the world had “less chaos” when Trump was president

Other topics we repeatedly heard Trump voters mention were crime; alleged hostility to free speech among Democrats; support for RFK Jr., Elon Musk, and Tulsi Gabbard; and anger at a media they perceived as working for the Democrats

Meanwhile, the issues Democrats expected to galvanize support for Harris hardly came up among non-liberal voters. Trump’s character, January 6, and refusal to accept the election results, for example, were mentioned only by liberals and a handful of older Republicans

Abortion was mentioned only by people who identified themselves as liberal and would have likely voted for any Democratic candidate

If we had to boil down the issues on which Trump won, it’d be the economy, immigration, trans rights, and foreign policy

People around Trump have linked each of those issues to a much bigger ideological project, though, as the next installment will show

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