In his book on the 1968 election, Nixon Agonistes (1970), Garry Wills wrote:

Each election year is a revelation—in the way the electorate is consulted, wooed, or baffled; in the way issues are chosen, presented, or evaded; in the demands and promises made, compromises struck, strains felt tacitly or voiced.

What did the 2024 election reveal? Many accounts have been published in the months since Election Day. As a rule, those written by journalists focus on what was hidden during 2024 but can now be made public, mostly because knowledgeable insiders who refused to speak during the electoral contest, on or off the record, were willing to tell their stories and vindicate their decisions and opinions after it was over. Conversely, books written by scholars tend to describe the sociopolitical realities that were latent during 2024 but become evident through using statistical analysis to zoom in on the election results, or by widening the field of view in order to place the outcome in a historical or global context.

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Not surprisingly, journalists and scholars each proceed as though the truths uncovered by their profession are the key to making sense of political events. 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America was written by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf, three reporters who worked for The Washington Post during the 2024 campaign. (Dawsey and Pager subsequently moved to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, respectively.) They begin by acknowledging the opinion of “some political insiders” that 2024’s outcome was determined prior to, and apart from, the campaign’s dramatic events. “The overwhelming majority of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track,” as 2024 summarizes this view. “They were fed up with inflation, immigration, and overseas conflicts, and they blamed the sitting president (and his vice president) for their feelings of economic and global insecurity.” Against this thesis, Dawsey, Pager, and Arnsdorf insist that “the outcome was not so predetermined.” Their interviews with political insiders in both parties support their book’s thesis that “the election hinged on accidents and individual decisions that had enormous consequences and might just as easily have gone another way.”

The view that 2024 largely rejects is one that The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics, by political scientists Andrew E. Busch of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and John J. Pitney, Jr. of Claremont McKenna College, largely embraces. “Regardless,” they write, “of candidates, campaigns, and unpredictable events—what one might call the contingencies—every presidential election is bounded by what one might call the fundamentals.” In 2024 these fundamentals included the state of the economy (Busch and Pitney point out that the Consumer Price Index was nearly 21% higher in November 2024 than it had been in January 2021), President Biden’s unpopularity, and the growing majority of Americans who believed, according to opinion surveys, that the country was on the wrong track. Overall, then, the fundamentals “pointed in the direction of a win by a Republican candidate in 2024,” according to The Comeback.

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It would be easy to test the predictive power of contingencies against those of fundamentals in an election year in which one explanation pointed to a Republican victory and the other to a Democratic one, but the evidence presented both by 2024 and The Comeback argues that 2024 was not such a year. Democrats held the weaker hand and played their cards less skillfully. Most of the blunders were committed by Joe Biden. Both books support the idea that the 46th president was exceedingly needy and aggrieved. Even after achieving in 2020 the pinnacle of a 50-year political career, he felt disrespected, a resentment that shaped his staff’s outlook. “Biden and his team” shared a “bunker mentality,” according to 2024, “because they had long felt counted out and underestimated. For decades they were treated like the B team, a stepping stone to a more prestigious job with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.”

The long, deteriorating relationship between Biden and Obama is especially fascinating, as it closely parallels the tensions between Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy. In each case a young, coolly charismatic Democratic leader with a Harvard degree chooses an older Senate veteran, a Washington insider, as his running mate. In each case the vice president, already defensive about lacking the Ivy League credential Democrats had come to valorize, envies his putative superior’s connection with the public, but also regards him as more of a show horse than a workhorse. In each case, the vice president carries out his duties faithfully while aware that the president’s aides deride him, and do not always conceal their disdain. In each case, a wild card outside the normal workings of politics—an assassination in 1963, a pandemic in 2020—rescues the vice president from a stalled political career and the prospect of imminent, enduring obscurity, elevating him instead to the Oval Office.

And, in each case, the fluke that allowed the former vice president to achieve his lifelong goal only exacerbated his feelings of insecurity. In response, Johnson and Biden both set out to demonstrate that they were not just accidental presidents but leaders fully worthy of the highest office. As a result, each felt it imperative to be a great president, one who did great things. The Great Society and Build Back Better were the grandiose, heedless results—sprawling initiatives whose unintended (though not unforeseeable) economic and social consequences created the political environment that made the incumbent president’s party vulnerable. In this sense, the contingencies of a politician’s particular psychology, skills, and limitations are not separate from but determine the fundamentals, the terrain on which his party must fight to retain power. Johnson and Biden both craved the validation that re-election would confer, but the daunting fundamentals forced each man to abandon his quest for a second term.

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One important difference, emphasized by Busch and Pitney, is that Johnson was challenged by other Democrats for the 1968 nomination due to bitter policy disputes, chiefly about the war in Vietnam, while Biden faced only a token challenge from a brave but obscure Minnesota congressman, Dean Phillips. Because there were no important policy differences among Democrats, the sole basis for Phillips’s campaign was his contention that Biden was too old to run for a second term, during which he would have turned 86 years old. It remains astonishing that the Democratic Party closed ranks in order to tie its fate to the repudiation of this entirely sensible proposition, one supported by large majorities in public opinion surveys and validated by many of President Biden’s public appearances—and the fact that those appearances were less frequent and more controlled than those of any other modern president.

Given that few Democrats by 2024 had unqualified affection for Joe Biden, the only way to make sense of the party’s all-in commitment to his re-election campaign—to the idea that he could run, and win, and govern—is that Democrats thought the alternative, Vice President Kamala Harris, was an even more doubtful standard bearer. The Comeback and 2024 present some evidence to the contrary, demonstrating that she possessed formidable indoor political skills. Busch and Pitney show that, from the start of her career in California politics, she lined up support with bold confidence, refusing to wait her turn. (Among the people Harris antagonized early on was Nancy Pelosi.)

2024 makes clear that the nascent Harris campaign organization sized up, shrewdly and immediately, the unprecedented situation created by Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race. Harris and her advisors thought that, with four weeks before the start of the Democratic convention, for the party to slap together a speed-dating primary of townhalls and debates—a notion favored by Pelosi and Barack Obama—was “ludicrous.” Instead, “Harris’s team approached the process like a congressional leadership race: There was a defined universe of delegates, and Harris would seek to win the majority of them. Go out and whip the votes.” She did, driving prospective competitors from the contest before they entered and locking up the nomination within 24 hours of Biden’s withdrawal.

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That smart politicians like Pelosi and Obama would hold out hope for a far-fetched gimmick like the insta-primary, however, shows the depth of Democrats’ concerns about Harris’s outdoor skills, her ability to explain and recommend herself to ordinary voters. Despite having run for president in 2019, she never delivered a clear justification for her second candidacy, a tight elevator pitch for how her ambitions connected to improving voters’ lives. In 2024, as in 2019, she sometimes seemed to have no better than a cursory understanding of her own policy proposals. And her inability to think on her feet was legendary. Asked by a friendly television interviewer four weeks before Election Day whether she would have done anything different from what President Biden had done in office—an inevitable question a sitting vice president running for even higher office should expect—Harris replied, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” At that moment, according to The Comeback, “Harris’s battle to establish an independent persona, so critical to any vice president of a president widely seen as unsuccessful, was over, and she had lost.”

The inability to put forward a clear positive case for her candidacy forced Harris to fall back on the negative argument that had been central to Joe Biden’s 2020 and 2024 campaigns: Donald Trump was so awful that his victory would jeopardize the future of American democracy. Even this attack, which Democrats had been rehashing since 2015, was one the Harris campaign struggled for weeks to distill, finally embracing the redundant slogan “Unhinged. Unchecked. Unstable,” according to 2024. The Biden and then Harris campaigns always believed that Trump was their own strongest argument, that a Democrat’s best chance to prevail was to present a “binary choice,” in Dawsey, Pager, and Arnsdorf’s term. But by September 2024, they write, it was clear that “Trump’s popularity was increasing, not decreasing.” The binary choice was working, but in the opposite direction from what Democrats had counted on. And, of course, the more stridently Democrats denounced Trump, the more lacerating was their implicit self-criticism: Trump is an odious buffoon…and over the course of a decade, roughly half the electorate has regarded our party and its nominees as an even less attractive option.

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Journalists and scholars are both running out of fresh ways to say that America has never seen a politician like Donald Trump. On the one hand, he has a “low ceiling” for public approval: Busch and Pitney point out that by the end of the Republican convention—after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance and the ensuing Democratic turmoil, and after the assassination attempt that found Trump responding with remarkable courage and self-possession to a crisis for which there could be no rehearsal—Trump’s lead over Biden in the RealClearPolitics average of polls was only 47.8% to 44.8%. On the other hand, as a candidate Trump also had a “high floor,” a base that prevented any of his Republican challengers in 2016 and again in 2024 from becoming a credible threat. It was, more importantly, a hard floor, comprising voters who could not be talked out of their commitment to Trump. 2024 reports:

In focus groups, when Trump supporters were confronted with anything negative about Trump, they’d say they either didn’t care or didn’t believe it. You could show them violent criminals released under his sentencing reform bill. You could show them how little wall he’d actually built on the Mexican border. They’d insist he’d done a good job, or blame the Democrats for fighting him at every turn.

Election years reveal not only the character of our political actors but of their political audience, the American people. The Comeback identifies two revelations that are especially concerning. First, the country is closely divided but also deeply divided, a development that raises troubling questions about the nation’s “civic health,” in Busch and Pitney’s phrase. “More and more voters dwelt in partisan ideological silos, holding consistently liberal Democratic or conservative Republican views across various issues,” they write. “The two sides increasingly saw political events through their own lenses, relying on different news sources.” One consequence is that split-ticket voting, once common, is now rare and of diminishing importance. In 1988, 148 congressional districts—34% of the total—voted in favor of one party’s presidential nominee and the other party’s House candidate. In 2020, only 16 districts (3.7% of the total) did so. The increasingly deep and bitter partisan divide is self-reinforcing: the parties respond to the polarized environment by mobilizing their bases rather than trying to persuade the ever-smaller number of swing voters—in other words, by running campaigns that intensify polarization.

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It is not difficult to imagine that this downward spiral will spiral out of control. Republics cannot survive if their citizenry divides into two subgroups, increasingly unwilling and unable to share a nation with the other. Polling data during and after the 2024 election year showed, according to The Comeback, that “[g]rowing shares of Republicans and Democrats saw people in the other camp as more closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, and unintelligent than other Americans.” Most Republicans thought the Democratic Party was run by socialists and most Democrats thought the GOP was dominated by racists. In short, “the two sides disliked each other.” But the experiment in self-government cannot be sustained if the expression “fellow Americans” is uttered only with bitter irony.

The second problem Busch and Pitney identify is that the only thing worse than a polarized republic unable to agree is a polarized republic that is able to agree, because there’s a good chance that what citizens who dislike and distrust one another manage to agree on will be harmful. Federal debt stood at 123% of GDP in 2024, having surpassed 100% of GDP every year after 2011. (It came in below, usually far below, 100% of GDP continuously from 1948 to 2011.) Though the federal deficit and debt figures are, according to The Comeback, “mind-boggling” and “a serious threat to national well-being,” neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump devoted any attention to the nation’s precarious fiscal position. Nothing they said acknowledged the problem and many of their proposals, for additional outlays or targeted tax relief, would have made it worse. In short, “both candidates were…sunk in a pander-fest.”

A house divided against itself cannot stand, but it can spend. There is no way to avert what Busch and Pitney call “the fiscal catastrophe bearing down on the United States” except through hard choices about increasing revenue and decreasing spending. But hard choices are the ones a polarized, distrustful citizenry is least likely to make. The easy choices are the only politically attainable options, and they all rest on the lowest common denominator of spending and borrowing now while scorning responsibility or deferred gratification. Adam Smith once reassured an apprehensive member of Parliament that there is “a great deal of ruin in a nation.” But “a great deal” is not the same as “an infinite amount.” The revelation from some future election or economic crisis is likely to be the coordinates of America’s point of no return, beyond which economic and political decline is irreversible.