Why stop there? Why did voters vote the way they did?
It's also not just happening to US elections, perhaps not even primarily to US elections. Brexit, AfD, Orban, etc. were all boosted with a strategic goal in mind.
Obviously there's a lot more nuance and detail to it (the blame Nixon deserves being of specific note IMO) but the argument is there.
So I'd argue that both the means are bad and the end
Yes, "both sides" do this, but Trump's party has refined it to a science with help from people like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg, while the Democrats still rely on shoe leather.
The election was a rejection of stability.
At least, that's how people in the middle, who decide election results, saw things.
We rolled the dice and lost. But things still aren't working very well in society, so we'll roll the dice again.
A lot of voters in the middle aren’t taking the time to understand why things seem to keep not changing (somewhat understandably so, but also unfortunately given the need for an engaged electorate in a healthy democracy). Both parties are being sticks in the mud, but one in particular is doing a lot more to keep change from happening than the other.
In the usa we have an overemphasis on the president, but we’ve slow walked ourselves into a dysfunctional congress that just can’t do anything. The point of democracy is to let the best ideas win, and part of that is being able to try those ideas out, and respond when they don’t work. Having a senate with two votes per state regardless of population, that are only replaced a third at a time, with an archaic but also recent rule that effectively requires 60/100 vote to pass almost anything meaningful, is just a recipe for failure.
End the filibuster as it is today. If you want a filibuster, force people to talk for it the way it worked for the first ~150 years of our country at least.
Having some slimy Mitt Romney types doing math about various state industries and interests when wording bills and trading votes would be a huge improvement over the equally slimy jerks we have now scheming up ways to serve their donors (who's interests correlate with the voters even less than the state's despite that bar being low to begin with) while leveraging abortion this guns that wedge issues to get re-elected despite screwing their voters.
The distribution of senators to states would also matter less if they weren't direct elected and therefore as beholden to party platforms and funding systems and whatnot.
Why? And why is indirect selection of senators better for that? Won't it just hand power to backroom operators at the state level, instead of to the people of the state?
Isn't that cause and effect? In essence, what the US is showing is that the executive has so much power now that congress is largely obsolete.
If there was a better balance of power and less executive power, the only way the executive branch can get something done is to work with congress.
Obviously that doesn't work in all cases, conflict in particular. But in my experience that's where most democracies have drawn the line on executive power, basically for emergencies.
You can see the same thing playing out in Brazil
Because many people in this country just go by vibes and don't really care what is happening.
We rolled dice well known to be unfair and lost. At some point, victim-blaming is the answer.
I think Trump mostly happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Notice how many countries had the then opposition party win (or come much closer than usual) around 2023-2025. It didn't matter which side they were on, Poland went right -> center-left for example, so did the UK.
People in 2024-ish were very unhappy about their economic situation (which was mostly caused by pandemic disruptions, with the war in Ukraine not helping things), but was usually attributed to whoever was in power at the time. In the US, that happened to be the democrats, so that's whom people blamed.
This gave the GOP a trump card (no pun intended) which they played reasonably well. I think the Democrats could perhaps have made some hay there (by focusing on "evil capitalists" causing "fakeflation"), but the Republicans automatically started from a position of strength by not being in power at the time that particular disaster happened. Even so, the DEM focused mostly on race and not economics, which was a bad play at the time.
The Ukraine war also had a lot less impact on the us than it did in Europe. Europe was much more reliant on energy from Russia, and that was where the pain was in 2022/23/24.
And some simply found Trumpian corruption and abuse to be manly and cool.
Even if you work by the logic of respecting the median voter's position as legitimate and worthy of equal consideration by mere virtue of it being democratically held (a viewpoint I don't necessarily subscribe to), it seems as if the median voter got an own goal this cycle.
I'm trans. I'm also smart, wealthy, and live in America - an intersection of categories that essentially mean you can do almost anything you want to do with your life. I've barely felt any of the consequences of the election because I can afford to move to somewhere where the legislative climate is more friendly, can afford to have a social life among people who are not hostile, can afford to pay out of pocket for every new medication of mine that gets banned off insurance, and largely shrug off fuel and food inflation. I'm not feeling the consequences of the current regime half as bad as the people who voted enthusiastically for it. If the goal was to obstruct or ruin my life for being a member of a given suspect class, then the goal failed.
Culture war is nonsense and nothing can ever supersede material conditions.
There is no solution to this problem other than electing a candidate who will raise taxes, fund infrastructure, and stabilise prices. I don't care what party they come from. I don't have optimism we'll get anyone like this on the national stage within the next decade - NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is the closest I've seen yet to a candidate who espouses the positions I'd like to see in someone who is qualified to run for president.