| It will take some time for the history books to write the story of this presidential election, but Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Brad Stone offers an assessment today of what propelled Donald Trump to a decisive victory. Plus: If you haven't listened yet, the Citizen Elon podcast dissects the Tesla CEO's new role in politics. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. Most US presidential elections submit a simple and straightforward narrative to history. In 2016 working-class voters, enraged by the economic dislocations of globalism, propelled Donald Trump to a narrow victory over Hillary Clinton. In 2008, Americans, exhausted by the Great Recession and desiring a major change, were overwhelmingly decisive for Barack Obama and his resonate message of hope. The farther back you go, the cleaner those stories become in their ritual retellings. In 1980, Ronald Reagan's cinematic swagger eclipsed Jimmy Carter's perceived impotence in the face of soaring inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis. In 1960 the first televised debates were a fertile forum for John Kennedy, whose youthful charisma outshone Richard Nixon's oily equivocations. And so on. Which brings us to Trump's decisive 2024 win against Kamala Harris. Right now it looks less like the polished narrative gemstone it will inevitably become and more like an unwieldy clump of muddy economic explanations and gross political blind spots. Here's what we know for sure. A wide racial and geographic coalition of voters, dissatisfied with the uneven economic recovery of the past four years, crafted the unlikeliest of political comebacks. American voters expressed historically low approval of the Biden administration—41%, according to Gallup. That's deep underwater from the average presidential approval rating of 52% over the past 86 years. No sitting president has ever recovered from a deficit like that, and in hindsight, it's clear that Harris couldn't—as the sitting vice president—meaningfully distance herself from an unpopular legacy. Unhappiness with inflation anchored this widespread discontentment. Price increases in supermarkets and at gas pumps, which have characterized the post-pandemic years, were a global phenomenon. Another was that incumbent parties have incurred harsh political consequences for those rising costs, either by losing large swaths of support in countries such as Botswana, India, South Africa and the UK, or by losing their elections outright. Harris was especially weighed down by economic conditions in the swing states. The misery index, a metric that combines unemployment with inflation, was unusually high in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and other battlegrounds. Voters in those states polled by Bloomberg and Morning Consult listed the economy as their top priority. The Harris campaign banked on Trump's manifest unlikability and on the issue of abortion. But these apparently mattered little in the final calculus. Women, animated by the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, turned out 54% to 44% for Harris, according to Washington Post exit polls, on par with Biden's margin in 2020. But that wasn't nearly enough to counter Trump's dominating margin with men and his gains among Black, Latino and young voters. White women supported Trump 52% to 47%, with white women who didn't graduate from college favoring him 62% to 37%, according to NBC News. The recent spate of TV ads urging wives to vote for Harris, and to keep it secret from their husbands, now seems like a prescient last-minute Hail Mary pass from a campaign that knew it was behind in the score. Voters also weren't moved by Harris' remarkably disciplined 100-day campaign or her more robust get-out-the-vote operation. Nor were they swayed by the onslaught of endorsements for Harris from major news publications—but not the Washington Post!—the consistent ridicule of Trump on Saturday Night Live and most late-night talk show hosts, or five books from Bob Woodward (and countless more from other esteemed journalists) that chronicled the chaos of Trump's first term.  Fear, Rage and Peril didn't scare off voters. Photographer: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo All of it amounted to essentially nothing. A majority of the electorate either tuned the campaign out or was comfortably ensconced in an alternative sphere of news, podcasts and social media that characterized the race differently. That's another legacy of the 2024 election and a symptom of our badly fractured polity. The easy fables we tell ourselves about past elections obscure the more complex realities. But there's value in the watered-down abstract, too, and for Tuesday's monumental election, the summation may simply be this: Trump was the more popular candidate. Democrats will have to wrestle with that reality as they gird for the battles ahead. Follow all of the day-after developments with Bloomberg News' live blog. | 
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