Photo by Gage Skidmore on Flickr

Former and future President Donald Trump's decisive 2024 win with 312 electors (to Harris’ 226) and 50.1% of the votes nationwide (to Harris' 48.3%) was a resounding victory. 

The GOP ticket’s victories in swing states like WI, MI, PA, OH, and AZ revealed that political moderates have warmed to Mr. Trump since his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden.

Unlike the more tenuous 2016 election result, this election was a mandate from the U.S. democracy. Here are five key factors in Trump-Vance’s big coup this cycle:

1. Independent Voters Leaning Rightward

Anyone else feel like the entire world is moving too fast lately? I don't feel safe!

The pace of progress nowadays, right?

What’s the difference between a liberal and a conservative?

It’s no joke:

Political science researchers have found that they can get more liberal or more conservative answers on survey questions by priming the environment in which study participants take the survey with stimuli that evoke fear or fearlessness.

Scientists have found that negativity bias affects our political leanings.

Sensitivity to fear, disgust, and anxiety tends to make people more conservative, while a sense of fearlessness, security, and safety tends to make people more liberal. 

A 2011 study suggests conservatism may be driven in part by fear of contamination and a disposition toward cleanliness and orderliness.

Experimenters found they could get study participants to be more conservative by having them answer survey questions with hand sanitizer or antiseptic wipes nearby.

Researchers have also found a correlation between the rise of authoritarian governments across the globe and the prevalence of disease-causing parasites in a region.

Meanwhile, experimenters at NYU found in a 2017 study that asking participants to imagine they are invulnerable to harm and have a magic genie that grants them superpowers would make them more liberal in their answers to a political opinion survey.

A 2017 study showed conservatives and liberals collages of images on a screen and tracked their eye movements. Researchers found liberals were more interested in cute pictures like a happy child or bunny rabbit. Conservatives were more interested in threatening and disturbing images such as "car wrecks, spiders on faces, and open wounds crawling with maggots."

With the world changing faster than ever and holding a greater number of known and unknown threats to human happiness and security, Americans are more anxious than ever.

That might have helped the conservative ticket to win this election cycle.

One 2024 survey by the American Psychiatric Association found 43% of adults reporting they felt more anxious than the previous year, up from 37% in the same 2023 survey.

Against a backdrop of unprecedented technological, social, biological, and military upheaval in the world. Republicans picked up a staggering 6% of registered voters from 2016 to 2024.

A Gallup survey reveals that for the first time as far back as 1992, Republicans/Republican leaners outnumber Democrats/Democratic leaners in the U.S. 48% to 45%. Trump also outpaced Harris among voters in the perception of each candidate as a strong and decisive leader. 

2. Younger Voters Are in Love with Donald Trump

GenZ men rocked the vote to the right in 2024.

That 2024 Gallup study also suggested voters cared less about Donald Trump’s rough-and-tumble, clowning, Tony Clifton-like character than in the previous two cycles.

He won the ballot count handily despite Kamala Harris holding a strong advantage over the former president in likeability.

But younger voters in Generation Z find Trump inspiring and more worthy of their vote. 

Donald Trump is inspiring to younger voters regardless of race.

He amassed a notable shift in 2024 with black, Hispanic, and Asian men. 16% more men between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Trump than women in this age group.

Every young person with the exuberance of their youth and the rest of their lives ahead of them thinks they're going to be a billionaire or president someday.

Trump exemplifies and validates their ambitions.

3. Economics: Trump’s Campaign Was on the Money

Unlike Alphabet Inc. and Bloomberg LP, two of Harris’ top contributors in 2024, who represent Silicon Valley and Wall Street (big financial winners of the 2020 pandemic)—

Most Americans say they are financially worse off than they were four years ago. They feel like they are still playing catch up to get back to where they were before the pandemic.

A Gallup poll conducted a month before the election from Sept. 16-28 found 52% of respondents saying they were not better off today than they were four years ago.

That was the highest percentage to respond to this question that way since 1984, when only 26% said they were not better off than they were four years prior.

According to Pew Research Center, lower income Americans found their household income drop by an average of 3% from 2019 to 2020, as a result of pandemic "lockdown" policies heavily supported by Democrats and opposed by Donald Trump and Republicans.

Brick and mortar businesses were disproportionately damaged by the lockdowns. In a news story that was widely reported in 2020, a staggering 100,000 businesses that temporarily closed their doors due to the lockdowns shuttered permanently by the end of the year.

This was reported by the Washington Post, CNN, Fortune, Fortune, The Hill, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington, DC.

A December 2023 study by financial news source PYMNTS reported that 62% of American consumers were living paycheck to paycheck in November 2023. Astoundingly, 40% of consumers living paycheck to paycheck had Tier 1 credit scores of 720 or higher.

That same month a Fox News poll found that only 14% of voters believed that Biden economic policies had benefited their household. Meanwhile, 78% of respondents said the economy was in bad shape.

A large majority— 62% of respondents to the survey— said flat out that they disapproved of the way the Biden White House had handled the economy since taking the reins from Trump in January 2021.

4. Biased Journalism: Left-Aligned Writers Dropped the Ball

A significant quarter of political journalism from mainstream news outlets went way off the deep end to favor the left in a way that insults the intelligence of independent and undecided voters.

Without calling out any specific editor, author, or news outlet in this piece—

A very large consortium of heavy hitters in the traditional news media and political social media influencers twisted their articles into incredible contortions in 2024 to make assertions with the same or worse brash arrogance they find so inimical in Trump, but with a glaring dearth of coherent argumentation or fact-based evidence. That’s called fake news, and it stinks.

There’s an old quotation often attributed to Winston Churchill and Mark Twain that goes: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” While it’s good for a laugh, the average voter in America has never been more intelligent or more well-informed in history than now. They have the world at their thumb tips.

Attention spans are not shrinking, as well-attested by the unprecedented popularity of binge-watching complex, long-form presentations like HBO’s Game of Thrones and Netflix’s House of Cards. The latest generational cohorts to vote in America— the Millennials and Generation Z— hold authenticity in high esteem and can detect bull malarky flying at them from miles away.

According to Sapiens, a popular science journal of anthropology, the leading factor in Trump's ascendancy this year was the impact of a passionate yet illogical dislike of Trump separate from the relevant facts and public policy discourse. Many of his supporters like to call this "Trump Derangement Syndrome."

5. Immigration and Foreign Policy Favored Trump Again

Border and trade policy were Trump's signature issues in 2016. Along with his admirably brash confidence in the face of such a daunting opponent as Hillary, this won him the election before.

Four years of Biden left the border in visibly incoherent tatters, overwhelmed the municipal resources of northern sanctuary cities and southern border states, and made life hard for domestic industries that compete with foreign businesses from nations like China that enjoy vast government subsidies to make their prices too competitive for American companies.

The crisis at the border reached its zenith in January, when the number of daily illegal border crossings at the southern border reached a historical record for several days. The extent of the problem was readily apparent as several Democratic mayors of major U.S. metros in blue counties were openly exasperated with Biden for his failure to move on the border.

The federal government was not merely neglectful, but openly antagonized border states and sanctuary cities. Earlier this year, Biden ordered the U.S. Border Patrol to dismantle razor wire barriers set up by the Texas National Guard at the order of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX).

The Supreme Court gave a greenlight to Biden’s order after Texas challenged it in court, but Abbott said Texas reservists would actively resist any attempt to do so by the Border Patrol, and in this showdown the federal government blinked.