'Breathless' commentary on Trump belies the real — and simple — reason he won: analyst
Republicans and Democrats alike have scrambled to come up with ever-fancier theories of why Donald Trump was re-elected to the presidency, but the real answer is staring everyone in the face, a senior fellow with the left-leaning Center for American Progress said on MSNBC's "The Beat" on Wednesday evening.
"The basic idea here, which I've been pinging around, is like what happened in this election basically, was it Trump's message or Trump himself had some kind of unique political appeal, or was he there with his own ability at the time of this essentially anti-incumbent frustration?" asked anchor Chris Hayes. "And you make a pretty convincing case it really is that one."
"Right," confirmed Michael Podhorzer. "I think that it was as close as it was because of how unpopular he is. Like, if it had been a fresh candidate, I think it would've looked much more like the backlashes against incumbents around the rest of the world."
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The data bear this out, Podhorzer said.
"The point I make is that when you look at the actual number of people going out to vote, there were about 19 million people who had voted for Biden four years ago who just didn't vote this time," he said. "Really, think about that, right? Part of the problem, too, is when we look at each election result just in this very narrow context of what did each campaign do, we missed the larger picture of, really, the 21st century, where, for the first time, we've had nine of the last 10 elections firing the party in power, right? That hasn't happened. We haven't had three consecutive flips in the White House since the 19th century, right?"
The bottom line, he concluded, is that "people don't like the choices that they're being offered, and basically the best way to win this election is to have lost the last one. And I think the commentary, which is breathless, about Trump winning gives the false impression that individual Americans have decided they like what he has to offer. It's just not the case."
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