Donald Trump is on track to win the 2024 election

Even after the 2020 election victory, the Democrats faced accusations. Tonight they pointed the finger at a likely loss before the votes were counted.

Progressives said Harris made a mistake when she campaigned alongside Liz Cheney and cast herself as the protector of the D.C. establishment against angry outsiders.

Gaza protesters pointed to Arab American Institute polls that showed Harris would benefit if she broke with the Biden administration and imposed an arms embargo on Israel – which she never did.

Center-left pundits wanted her to put Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro on the ballot, ignoring progressive activists who weren't pushing Harris' message at the end of the campaign anyway.

They all lost. So does the theory of a new Democratic coalition that was born with Barack Obama's victory in 2008, almost collapsed with Trump's surprise in 2016 and was buried on Tuesday evening. As long as Donald Trump leads the Republicans — abandoning his old commitment to benefit cuts, supporting tariffs and renegotiated trade deals, and saying things that anger the traditional media — Republicans have greater appeal among non-college-educated voters who used to be Democrats .

Would this have happened without inflation? Possibly. These trends were set four years ago, when Trump didn't even list inflation as the crisis that would unfold if Joe Biden won. (Trump predicted a new Great Depression, which he predicted again this year if he lost.)

Could Biden have done more to prevent it? I still think about a moment from Trump's successful effort to get the International Association of Fire Fighters to remain neutral this year after it endorsed Biden in 2020. Key union leaders ruled out supporting Harris, not because of anything she had done against workers, but because they blamed Biden's border policies for allowing fentanyl into the country and endangering their members.

But the Democratic coalition that won in 2020 committed to those border policies, pushed for gentler treatment of asylum seekers this year and attributed Trump's strong performance among Latinos to other issues, such as stimulus spending related to the Corona crisis. She was committed to transgender rights — the “civil rights issue of our time,” according to Biden — and believed that Republicans sounded mean and half-crazy when they fought against transgender people.

What they were hoping for was a backlash against the way Trump talked and behaved, that his calls for “mass deportations” would be so terrible that voters would reject them, and that his attempt to overturn the 2020 election would anger moderate voters.

It has actually alienated some of them, and in the next two years another Democratic conversation could revolve around the remnants of the mainstream media, which is becoming less influential every four years. On Harris-friendly cable news, former Republicans expressed horror at who Trump was and what he had done; On the new social media and podcasts favored by Republicans, it was all whining that had nothing to do with what voters really cared about.

Twelve years ago, the last time they did not run for Trump, Republicans watched as Mitt Romney failed to break 20 years of Democratic rule over the Midwest. His weakness with Latino voters briefly convinced many Republicans that they needed to pass immigration reform. Trump abandoned Romney's austerity policies, rolled back his own very similar tax policies, and pushed to close the border to new arrivals in order to protect the country for those already here. And it broke the Democratic coalition.