The Reason Trump Will Lose in November

The disruptive choice of 2016 is the tired candidate of 2024

Politics is branding, and voters are consumers. The same rules of positioning that determine the fate of a product on a grocery store shelf determine the outcome of elections. Strategists often make the mistake of focusing on policy details, when people instead vote for the candidate whom they think is the most flattering reflection of themselves.

Trump won in 2016 because he told a better story than Clinton, and in doing so created a persona that powerfully appealed to American voters in the handful of states that made the difference. Outsider, disruptor, rule breaker, Trump positioned himself as the anti-politician who would tear down a DC bureaucracy that had failed millions of the disenfranchised.

His colloquial, incendiary, controversial messaging was simple, repetitive, provocative, and memorable. Challenge: rapists and drug dealers are overrunning the country — solution: “Build the Wall!” Challenge: China is stealing our jobs — solution: “Tariffs!” Challenge: Islamists are terrorists — solution: “Muslim Ban!”. Fast jabs and piercing hooks to a Hillary KO.

Clinton’s persona and messaging in contrast couldn’t get beyond “I’m With Her” and “Trump Guy, Bad”. Failing to present a consistent, cohesive, and compelling story, that vacuum was filled by years of pent-up white middle class Midwestern frustration, zealously channeled into a vote for the most norm-breaking and uncouth President since unelected Lyndon Johnson.

Yet the whiplash created by his chaos doomed Trump to a single term. Biden won the primaries thanks to his status as the most traditional and centrist of Democrats — and the most elderly. If Trump was the anti-politician, then Biden was the anti-anti-politician, his pitch as simple and compelling as Make Politics Boring Again. The electorate had had enough.

Set for a dull post-pandemic four years, the Biden term has proved everything but — rocket fuel for the GOP to ride the ever-swinging swing state pendulum back to the other polar American political extreme, and win back the Oval Office. Any Republican strategist will tell you in private that anyone from Nikki Hailey to Marco Rubio could have it in the bag.

Anyone — but Trump. Not only did he (actually) lose the Presidency, but the House was lost prior in 2018, and the subsequent midterms were a rightwing bloodbath across the board in 2022. Worst hit were the Trump-endorsed candidates, retelling the story that everyone heard in 2020: The American “undecided” voters had become anti-anti-anti-anti-politician.

But the GOP was stuck with Trump like the Democrats were stuck with Biden — they both had legacy and groundswell, albeit for very different reasons. Whereas Biden road the Obama Train and won the candidacy largely thanks to Clyburn and South Carolina African-American voters, Trump’s fanatical MAGA base made any other candidate unimaginable.

Rolling into the 2024 campaign season, a majority of American voters disliked the 2020 Presidential Redux. Biden was even older, Trump even more litigated and obnoxious. What could have been an easy win for the GOP was at least better than neck-and-neck with Tump, who, thanks to Sleepy Joe’s performance at the debate, rapidly became the big favorite.

Biden’s senior moment proved lucky for the Democrats, the Republican equivalent, perhaps, of a federal indictment into a guilty verdict that never played out for Trump. Finally able to age-out Biden, Harris stepped in with Midwest Dad VP, revitalized presence and campaign, hundreds of millions in new donations, and the Trump team sent into a tailspin. What a contest!

One month from Election Day, polls are back to a super tight, within-the-margin-of-error race. The polls notoriously wrong in 2016 and sketchy in 2020, no serious pundits are prognosticating a definitive outcome. That said, barring an extreme situation such as a major war or another assassination attempt, I predict Trump will lose for one basic reason:

His brand identity is tired, and the “undecided” swing state electorate will be drawn, ever so slightly but enough to tip the scales, to a new and different candidate. Despite the hundreds of variables that can go into analyzing the binary choice of Trump v. Harris, the one percolating to the top and making the critical difference is New v. Old, Same v. Different.

Given her failed run in the 2020 primaries, and VP for the past four years, Harris is certainly not new nor, when considered part of the incumbent administration, different. Yet perception is reality in politics, and Harris as the candidate against Trump is an entirely new brand, with an entirely different identity from any Presidential candidate ever before.

As a swing state consumer/voter stands in the supermarket/voting booth, they choose a brand/candidate in a fraction of a second. Biochemically, their ventromedial prefrontal cortex favors one choice, their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex better connects that one to who they are, and their bilateral hippocampus concludes it creates better emotional memories.

The singular deciding factor when choosing a brand in a store or a candidate in the voting booth? New and different brands/candidates stimulate the prefrontal cortex more than old and same ones. That’s it. That will decide this election. That’s why I think Harris/Walz will win — they are more new and more different, and therefore more emotionally enticing.

Given this foundational law of marketing playing itself out, the best strategic advice to give either candidate is to act as new and different as possible. Many complain Harris isn’t talking policies enough — maybe, but she needs to highlight the new and the different more than anything else. And Trump? He’s doubling-down on same-old same-old, so will lose.