All the sound and fury of the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign—at least two assassination attempts, two Democratic candidates, the cats and the dogs and the brats—ended up signifying, well, not much, really. Despite expectations of an extended nail-biter between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, he won handily. There was little violence on or after Election Day. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy kept ticking along.
Academics will be unpacking the events of Nov. 5 for years, but journalists write the first draft of history, and Foreign Policy’s Michael Hirsh charted an opening chapter examining the reasons why Harris lost. U.S. foreign policy played an outsized role in the Harris-Trump matchup. Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon and outgoing President Joe Biden’s unstinting support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have driven many would-be Democratic voters away, as Abdelhalim Abdelrahman writes in a postcard from Michigan.
All the sound and fury of the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign—at least two assassination attempts, two Democratic candidates, the cats and the dogs and the brats—ended up signifying, well, not much, really. Despite expectations of an extended nail-biter between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, he won handily. There was little violence on or after Election Day. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy kept ticking along.
Academics will be unpacking the events of Nov. 5 for years, but journalists write the first draft of history, and Foreign Policy’s Michael Hirsh charted an opening chapter examining the reasons why Harris lost. U.S. foreign policy played an outsized role in the Harris-Trump matchup. Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon and outgoing President Joe Biden’s unstinting support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have driven many would-be Democratic voters away, as Abdelhalim Abdelrahman writes in a postcard from Michigan.
Immigration was never far from voters’ minds, and Julian Zelizer argues that the issue enabled Trump to form a diverse coalition of supporters. FP columnist Stephen M. Walt writes that the impact of this election on Russia’s war in Ukraine will be profound. And FP’s Claire Schnatterbeck and Anusha Rathi use six infographics to delve into how U.S. electoral rituals compare to the rest of the world. Remember, the midterm elections are just some 700 days away.
These are five of our best reads on how foreign policy played a role in the U.S. election.
1. Why She Lost
By Michael Hirsh, Nov. 6
Harris had a remarkable start to her campaign, Hirsh writes, but in the end, she was not able to distance herself enough from her historically unpopular boss. Amid a political environment muddled by false narratives and skewed by foreign disinformation campaigns, Trump found the perfect conditions for a comeback.
“Indeed, the 2024 presidential campaign—far more than the elections of 2016 or 2020—marked a moment of maximum polarization in U.S. political dialogue, in which the public struggled to find an authoritative source of truth or fact,” Hirsh writes.
2. 6 Charts That Explain the 2024 Election
By Claire Schnatterbeck and Anusha Rathi, Nov. 8
Consider this: all the questions that you were afraid to ask about U.S. presidential politics answered—in graphics. Find out how many days Trump ran for his second term and how few days Mexico endured in its own official campaign period by contrast; how voter turnout in the United States compared other countries that held elections this year; and precisely how long the lame-duck period lasts.
3. The 10 Foreign-Policy Implications of the 2024 U.S. Election
By Stephen M. Walt, Nov. 8
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Nov. 5.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
FP’s resident truth-teller breaks down the ways in which Trump’s victory changes just about everything on the world stage—from why liberal hegemony is dead to what China really thinks, and whether to consider Trump’s convincing win as a show of national unity.
“A deeply divided United States is precisely what its adversaries want to see, and there’s no reason to think that Trump will do anything but exacerbate it,” Walt writes. “Given the United States’ outsized global role, Americans and the rest of the world are about to participate in a vast social experiment, one conducted entirely free of human subject controls.”
4. Why Michigan’s Arab Americans Voted for Trump
By Abdelhalim Abdelrahman, Nov. 13
One of the clearest trends to emerge from the election is that Trump made gains with many demographic groups. In Dearborn, Michigan, Muslim and Arab American voters shifted away from the Democratic Party and toward Trump, seemingly in response to the Biden administration’s unwavering military support for Israel.
Abdelrahman asks voters in Dearborn why they made their choice, even after one of Trump’s early moves in office the first time around was a so-called Muslim ban that prevented people from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. “Differing perspectives on how to express dissent against the Democratic Party … split members of Michigan’s Arab American community,” Abdelrahman writes.
5. Immigration Is the Glue Holding the MAGA Coalition Together
By Julian E. Zelizer, Nov. 15
Anti-communism was an issue that every faction of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s coalition could support, just as Trump has rallied his supporters around immigration. The only slim hope for those who don’t agree with Trump’s agenda is to remember how Reagan’s presidency ended, Zelizer writes: with one of the most famed anti-communists signing a historic treaty with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to dismantle a class of nuclear weapons.
“If there was a voice within the Democratic Party who could recreate this role within the partisan fault lines of Capitol Hill, then maybe that person could create the opportunity for some kind of breakthrough on an immigration deal,” he argues. “The possibility of the Reagan-Gorbachev exchange was just as fanciful in his first term.”
