How Trump Could Win
Nine months from tomorrow, voters will cast the first ballots in the 2024 presidential election. The conventional wisdom holds that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee—but that he will go on to lose the general election.
Conventional wisdom can be wrong. And while I broadly agree that those outcomes are currently the most likely, they rely on a series of assumptions that could turn out to be mistaken.
Don’t delude yourself: it is a realistic possibility that Donald Trump could become president again, with disastrous consequences for American democracy and the world. I’ll explain how that might happen—and what to watch out for.
Since 2016, pundits have repeatedly been wrong about the Republican Party because they’ve used the wrong framework to analyze the Trumpified GOP. Most of the talking heads on television and the columnists in flagship newspapers have been conditioned to think about every political development through the prism of “Normal Politics.”
Their focus has always been the United States, and unlike those of us who study global democracy and the rise of authoritarianism, they don’t have another lens with which to view the world. They still see America as being part of the Land of Normal Politics—a land in which rational choice models work best. Political parties chase the median voter, creating a “big tent” party that captures as many votes as possible.
Crucially, in the Land of Normal Politics, when a candidate drags down a party, they’re abandoned. Parties learn from their mistakes. It’s as ruthless as the forces of natural selection, which, as Richard Dawkins once put it, is “a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance. Unrelentingly and unceasingly.” You either deliver, or you’re ditched.
But Trump shifted America’s Republican political landscape. His party is now within the Land of Authoritarian Politics. This is the world I’ve studied for more than a decade, from Madagascar to Belarus and Thailand—and now in the United States.
In that world, rational choice models fall apart. They’re comically bad at predicting events, because voters will repeatedly cling to a single charismatic individual even if they lose. Policy becomes secondary to personality. And when the charismatic authoritarian leader of the movement lashes himself to the mast of unpopular policies (such as bans on abortion or trying to undermine the integrity of elections), the broader movement stays lashed together right there with him, ignoring the siren calls of pundits who howl about electability…
