Aftermath

 A few thoughts in the wake of Tuesday's election:

1.  The basic story: the voters who put Trump over the top in 2024 were expecting something like his first term, which was a pretty standard Republican administration in terms of policy, although not in terms of style.  His second term has been much more radical, and people reacted against that.  

2.  Paul Krugman writes "the 2024 election was mainly about economics", particularly inflation, and that 2025 was too.  This overstates the importance of inflation and understates the importance of immigration in 2024.  I'm not sure about the overall impact of immigration in 2025:  most voters like the reduction in illegal immigration, but regard Trump's methods as too harsh.  But in 2024 the sense that the Biden administration had let things get out of control definitely helped Trump. 

3.  Jamelle Bouie writes "As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump is a phenomenally effective vote-winner, capable of turning out millions of otherwise infrequent voters to deliver the White House and Congress to the Republican Party."  I think this is wrong--his record in the 2016 and 2020 general elections was very poor.  In 2016, he got 45.9% of the vote against Hillary Clinton's 48%, even though Clinton was one of the weakest major-party candidates in a long time.  In 2020 he got 46.8% against Joe Biden's 51.2--it was only the peculiarities of the Electoral College that made it a close election.  This time, Trump had the advantage of incumbency, which should have been even larger than usual because people tend to rally around leaders in a crisis.  All Trump had to do was act like he was taking Covid seriously, but he couldn't bring himself to do tat.  Bouie is right that Trump turned out millions of infrequent voters, but many (or most) turned out in opposition to him.  

This leads to the question of why the party renominated him.  People sometimes say that it was because he was so popular among ordinary Republican voters that he couldn't be stopped.  I don't think that this is it.  The figure shows very favorable ratings (4 or 5 on a -5 to +5 scale of major party presidential candidates since 1952:

31% gave Trump a very favorable rating in 2024, which was better than 2016, but still pretty ordinary--Mitt Romney had 30% in 2012 and George W. Bush had 34% in 2004.  Trump was only a slightly ahead of Harris, who had 29%.*

I think the major reason for Trump's renomination is that leading Republicans didn't put up much resistance.  Why not?  My (tentative) answer it's because being seen as divided is a negative for a party, and it was clear that if Trump lost a battle for the nomination, the party was going to be divided--he wouldn't accept defeat and urge everyone to unite around the nominee.  So their strategy was to hope that once he was out of office, he wouldn't be the center of news news coverage, and that his support would just fade away.  This wasn't unreasonable, since there was no previous experience with a situation like this.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research and Gallup]

*There were two surveys in 2024, one in May and one in October.  Both Democratic and Republican very favorable ratings were higher in October:  29% for Harris vs. 20% for Biden, 31% for Trump in October vs. 25% in May.  My initial version of this post mislabeled May 2024 as 2020.  There was a survey in October 2020, but the report doesn't have a breakdown of the degree of favorability.