The answer to the above question depends on how you view the 2024 election. The obvious answer is that the guys in the red hats and the flags on their pickups elected Trump. While that is sort of true, it doesn’t reflect the complete answer. As with most questions (problems) there are simple answers and more nuanced takes. The simple answers are almost never fully satisfactory. No matter how you approach this situation, he is in there. We are stuck with him. Let’s take a look at some aspects of how it happened that a man that encouraged the overthrow of our election process just 4 years earlier could be elected President of the greatest republic in the history of the world.

Before we go further, I would like to take a paragraph or 2 to dismantle this absurd idea that Trump won with an “overwhelming mandate” to pursue his brand of destruction of this country. Trump barely won. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won 48.2% of the popular vote compared to Trump’s 46.1%, a difference of 2.1% or 2.9 million votes. In 2024, Trump won 1.6% more of the popular vote that did Kamala Harris and only 2.2 million more actual votes. And Hillary lost!

There is no “Trump Mandate”. There is no large majority of Americans that wants what we are currently witnessing. That lie was begun by Trump in a press conference the day after the election and continues right up to last week when Pam Bondi crowed about “President Trump’s overwhelming victory” before the Senate oversight committee. The Democrats, to my knowledge, have never effectively refuted this lie. What a surprise! They just sit there and let this, and so many other lies, go right on by.

To no one’s surprise, Trump won 55% of the white vote in 2024, the same as in 2016 and 2020. He carried white males at 20% higher than Harris and white females at 4% greater. Trump increased his take of the black vote in 2024. 15% of black voters went for Trump then, compared to 8% in 2020, and 6% in 2016. In the latest election, about 1 in 5 black male voters favored Trump compared to 10% of black women. In depth analysis of the black vote showed that, for the most part, individual black voters didn’t change their vote to Trump, but less black voters who voted for Biden turned out for Harris. In every racial and educational breakdown, Trump did better with males than females and, overall, he won 55% of the male vote in 2024 compared to 50% in 2020.

The Hispanic voting pattern was interesting. Trump won 48% of the Hispanic vote in 2024, a significant improvement from the 36% that he won in 2020. Interestingly, 9% of Hispanic voters who voted in 2020 did not vote in 2024 and those voters had favored Biden by 69% to 31%.

Voters with a 4 year degree (40% of all voters) favored Harris by 16% while those without a college degree favored Trump by 14%. Voters with a graduate degree voted for Harris by about a 2 to 1 margin. Of course, Trump won the rural vote and by an ever-increasing margin: 59% in 2016, 65% in 2020, and 69% in 2024.

Amazingly, almost half of naturalized citizens (47%) voted for Trump, including 51% of Hispanic naturalized citizens. So, half of Hispanic citizens who were born in other countries voted for the man who repeatedly decried them during his speeches, claimed that they should not be in this country, and made no secret of his racism towards their specific cultural group. How can you make sense of that? I hope they remember their vote every time they are stopped by masked ICE agents and forced to show “their papers”.

Those are a lot of numbers, so who actually put Trump in the White House? Obviously, he ran quite strongly among white males without college degrees. So, yes the MAGA-hat wearing man played an outsized role in our present situation. But those percentages were not the difference between Biden’s election in 2020 and Harris’s loss in 2024, resulting in nauseating gold embellishments throughout “America’s House”. The Democrats lost 6 million votes between 2020 and 2024 (81 million to 75 million). In 7 swing states, 605,000 Democrats who voted in 2020 did not show up at the polls in 2024, enough to swing all of those states to the Democratic column. Remember, Trump only won the popular vote by 2 million and his increase over his 2020 total was less than 3 million. Harris’s voter turnout was 6 million less than Biden 4 years earlier.

Close analysis of the election shows pretty clearly that we got Trump because of 2 different groups of people: those who came to the polls and pulled the lever for a misogynist, racist narcissist and those who did not come to the polls at all. A misinformed, uneducated public will eventually kill a democracy, but so will apathy.