E.J. Fagan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He studies political parties, Congress, think tanks, agenda setting, lobbying, and punctuated equilibrium theory.
What was the biggest factor affecting election results?
It’s still the economy. We saw a 3-4 point movement toward Trump pretty much everywhere in the country. Voters were responding to the inflation of the 2021-2023 period, especially working class voters impacted most severely by higher prices. Very little else mattered – campaigns, ads, issue positions, candidates, strategies – other than on the margins.
How does the incumbent party come into play?
Pretty much every democracy in the world has seen a similar shift against the incumbent party, regardless of whether the incumbent party is left or right. Democrats arguably held on better than incumbent parties in places like Canada, the UK, Germany and France.
Our closely divided, polarized electorate make small shifts feel huge, but ultimately we saw a normal-to-small electoral shift. We don’t know if these shifts will be durable. Donald Trump outran almost every statewide Republican. I think there is a risk of the media over-interpreting what happened in this election. Trump has shown an ability to turn out low propensity voters that no other Republican has ever replicated. He will never be on a ballot again.
How did Donald Trump win?
Donald Trump has promised a radical change to American public policy: huge taxes on imported goods, mass deportations, abandoning American allies, just to name a few. He believes that he can do most of what he has promised without working with Congress within America’s separation of powers system. The courts will ultimately determine the extent of what he can do.
American politics are thermostatic. That’s a bad term for a simple idea: voters respond to changes in public policy that they feel are extreme by voting for the other party. We saw an immediate thermostatic reaction to Trump in 2018, and a moderate reaction to Biden in 2022. If Trump succeeds at accomplishing his agenda, I suspect that we’ll see a similarly strong reaction to Trump in the elections to come.
What will happen now?
American democracy is not dead, but it is more threatened than at any point in most of our lifetimes. Donald Trump promised during the campaign to kill or imprison his political opponents, shut down the free press and deploy the U.S. military against protesters. He will have fewer guardrails than during his first term, but his power is not unlimited. A lot will depend on whether Democrats hold on to the House of Representatives and how many Senate seats they have. They did much better down ballot than on the top of the ticket. Democrats still control electoral institutions in swing states. They will have a chance to make their case to American voters and have their votes counted fairly.
