The fact that inflation is the main reason why Trump won, and his two main policies: tariffs and deporting undocumented workers are highly inflationary is a great irony. 

Trump will succeed the most by not succeeding in his campaign promises here. 

Why are tariffs inflationary? The point of tariffs are to create a price-floor to make local manufacturing competitive with foreign manufacturing. They are taxes designed to make up for the fact that companies can underpay workers abroad to sell products at a lower price (while netting some margin with the arbitration for themselves.) The whole point of them is to make sure prices go up. 

Why is deportation inflationary? Many industries that almost all Americans consume and were complaining about price-increases in: construction, farming, housekeeping, and child-care have 10-30% of their workforce as undocumented immigrants. If you deport them, that gives the remaining workers more bargaining power and ability to request higher wages. This is good for those workers of course, but the business/owners are going to want to offset a part of that onto their customers. 

If we could teleport back in time and give Democrats a message, they should have focused on how to explain this to as many people as possible, while pushing the fact that they were ready to subsidize child-care, home-purchasing, etc and save Americans money. They should have also found a way to explain that while inflation was high over the course of the pandemic it has finally come down and while they are still not feeling the effects it takes a bit of time for these effects to be felt/noticed, just as it did for the high inflation of 2022 to be felt in 2023 and 2024. Democrats just threw graphs at these people without doing the work to ELI5 for them. 

Edit:   
Democrats love to talk about how they appeal to the educated, without doing the work to appeal to the less formally educated by educating them in a non-condescending manner. That is what needs to change. 

Can you explain how to improve the economy in a non-inflationary manner, and that is better than tariffs? 

On another topic, I am hoping as the final votes come in the Democrats can limit some of their losses. They only have like a 10-15% chance to take the house now, but if they can keep the house difference to 1-5 seats, and the Senate difference to 2 seats it'll be a lot harder for Trump to do the dictatorial stuff and much of Project 2025 until the mid-terms, when there almost certainly will be some sort of backlash and where low-information voters are less likely to vote. 

Hopefully Casey can win PA as the vote filters in and after a recount to keep the Senate 52-48 and some of the California swing house seats remain Democratic or flip toward them on net. 

A 52-48 Senate would be ideal given that Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins only vote with MAGA 70% of the time and are most likely to disagree on fundamental constitutional matters like elections, presidential powers and constitutional rights. Without Manchin and Romney it will be harder for them of course though. 

With a 53-47 Senate, we're looking at conservatives as conservative as Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell as the "swing voters." VoteView

Trump Term 2 is going to be a lot worse than Term 1 regardless. If he can do what he says he wants to do, I wouldn't be surprised if we enter another Great Recession or Depression level event given that we are overdue for a real recession (Covid doesn't count) and many of the safe-guards that ended late-19th century/early-20th century Depressions are on the chopping block. 

Define "improve the economy." Do you want policy that focuses on helping people as consumers or specific sub-sets of workers? 

If the problem is high-inflation, then no tariffs aren't the solution. If the problem is a lack of jobs available in certain regions or industries, then tariffs can be part of the solution (but you probably should be targeted in how you do them. They aren't a blunt tool.) 

Given that people are mainly concerned about inflation and not jobs (we are at a very low unemployment rate currently, which is partly why inflation was high in 2021 and 2022) then tariffs are a very bad idea. 

Yeah I've noticed this too.

I found a youtube comment on a Vtuber vid that stood out to me in regards to this election:

"Since Elon Musk and Joe Rogan are clearly involved with Trump and they're credited with giving Trump the boost for him to win, it's possible we may see the first republican administration that is more libertarian leaning rather than conservative with Musk showing a lot of eagerness to be very involved with the new administration."

"So me as a right winger myself, one of the things I have always detested about my side is the Right's stubborn reluctance to embrace youth culture. Why does the Left often win culture war battles while the Right loses? The answer comes down to how they treat youth culture. Back in my day, the Religious Right and other factions of the Right would foolishly demonize young people and the things they liked which scared them away from even voting for them (calling people degenerates for reading Harry Potter or calling people satanists for playing Dungeons and Dragons and demonizing gamers that played Doom and Mortal Kombat did the Right no favors); meanwhile the Left at the time made the wise choice to embrace youth culture because the Left realized that to stay relevant then they have to appeal to young people so they wouldn't have to worry about the Right that much. It's why the Left usually wins."

"Well things have changed since then. Now and days, progressives attack young people for their hobbies and call them every name in the book though their hubris. I think Trump is making the wise choice to have some notable libertarian minded people join him. Musk is popular with young people, Joe Rogan is popular with young people and many of those big libertarian celebrities are also nerds like you and me. I think Trump realizes that for the Right to stay relevant, the Right needs to embrace youth culture and have more libertarian minded individuals on board to beat the Left because the Left right now is making every mistake the Right used to made back in my day."

Now I don't entirely agree with what they said, but the part about tapping into the current day youth is what stood out to me. It stood out to me, because I have seen that happening slowly over time. The part especially about the right shitting all over games back in the day, citing them as the source for gun violence, Rock being spawned from the devil, etc. All of that was pushing away that generation of youth (heck it's what got me disliking boomers a lot, and still do, because some of them still cling onto that super dated mindset that has proven to being wrong).

I do think if the other side wants to see better results next time and going forward, they are going to have to start connecting more with the younger generations of people, and not belittle them, call them names (like Nazi/Fascist for a start) and degrading them as humans, and actually treat with equality (not equity, people get that mixed up so hard and it annoys me). 

Everything is better than tariffs when it comes to inflation especially so short term.

Tariffs should be used only in a manner to help local manufacturers/suppliers of a product you also import. But, most of the time you don't produce or have long stopped producing what you can import for cheaper, which means tariffs will directly drive costs and it's not event sure tariffs will give enough leeway to make manufacturing locally possible anyway.

So, if you want a way to drive inflation up 20% adding 20% tariffs on everything is sure to be the best way to achieve just this.

The left and maybe Democrats if they ally with us need to focus on building up viable, livable urban, suburban, and exurban areas. This means more YIMBYism and municipalism (to make municipalities more directly democratic.) Municipalities should be nexuses of small "d" democratic power with the focus of making urban areas in the U.S more viable, livable spaces without rigid bureaucracy, but which provide desirable services and public goods to their residents. These municipalities need to federate and coordinate across states and help each-other solve many of the most pressing issues, probably starting with the housing crisis at first. They should also ally with class-conscious worker's unions and tenants unions (with a syndicalist movement as an adjacent "dual" nexus of building worker power.)

That is the only hope for a real left-wing in the United States that can actually effectuate meaningful changes. Over-time as these organizations gain in power, then the state and national politics will change to accommodate them not because they want to but because they have no choice but to. 

The issue we have is that the United States has one party that is two-thirds Nationalist (MAGA) and a third fusionist and another party that is the final home of social liberals, conservative liberals, and social democrats, the last of whom the nationalist-fusionist party deems as "far-left", even though in most countries and historically in the U.S (pre-Reagan) they'd be center-left at best.That is not enough political representation to meet the political-economic needs of the working class. And when the working class isn't represented it typically defaults to electing demagogues and fascists. 

Why are we discussing what Trump is going to do? He was all friendly to Putin in 2016 but his actual presidency was anti-Russian, he wanted to drain the swamp but he hired them all instead. His Russian stance may change as his personal ambitions astronomically grew since 2016, "why can't I have what MBS has?" is probably what he asks himself looking in the mirror.

I am taking most of his campaign rhetoric with a grain salt, including the proposed tariffs, what policies he'll peruse may be a lot worse than what he already proposed or completely unrelated to what he said. We'll just have to wait and see.

Younger Bernie Sanders from a time machine. Dan Osborn if he had won would have been a front contender too. Or Gluesenkamp Perez after she becomes a Senator/Governor of Washington.

To be honest, I don't think any Democrat fits the bill of what might be the success formula (more to the center on social issues + left-wing economic populism) right now.

I have the "benefit" of participating in discussions in both fields, which allows me to have some kind of insight on what both sides think. My ignorant and non scientific view would be:

1) Inflation, Inflation, Inflation. I won't go into specifics as it would require a book instead of a post, but people cannot correlate the increase in GDP and low unemployment with the absurd loss of purchase power the average Joe suffered. A lot of economic growth has come from huge government spending and debt (since Obama 2 but it got much worse under Trump 1 and Biden) which creates inflation. Due to several factors, this does not necessarily reflects on the official government numbers, so Joe Doe looks at "official" inflation rates of 3% but his rent, food, gas, mortgage, everything is WAY more expensive than a few years ago, when Trump was in power. Saying "we have the strongest economy" or "USA GDP is really growing" says nothing to Joe Doe if now he needs to go into credit card debt to pay for everyday stuff.

2) Kamala is just absolutely horrible as a candidate, the worst in a LONG time from the democrat side, I seriously question how they could choose her. Probably identity politics but seriously, she is horrible.

3) Trump's drive, courage and charisma are just magnetic to a lot of voters which makes it almost impossible someone that voted trump in the past to change its vote. Love or hate the guy (I hate him), it is impressive what he's been through and still show such energy. 

4) The left needs to stop saying 50% of the country is fascist (people dont even know what that means), neo-nazi, garbage people, or think they have possession over certain demographics. How can you make someone change their vote when you call them nazi, maybe the worst thing you can say about someone? It will be very difficult to win votes from the other side treating half the population this way. Because, in the end, you DO need to conquer part of the people on the other side.