Over the next weeks and months, we will witness a bitter, brutal fight among factions of the Democratic Party over how to rebuild after a shattering loss in which Vice President Kamala Harris managed to do worse than Joe Biden did in 2020 in county after county.

Many of those disputes will center on why Harris lost Tuesday’s election. Some will have merit. It’s clear that illegal immigration is very unpopular, and that the positions Harris took veered further to the left than the American public is comfortable with. But remember, as you follow these arguments, that everyone involved is not just engaged in empirical analysis but trying to move the party and its policies in a direction more pleasing to their faction. That will true of both Democrats arguing for this or that set of priorities, and Republicans arguing that this is all about the border, or wokeness. So, always keep in mind the less-exciting, less-ideological factors that played a big role in President-elect Donald Trump’s victory.

For example, the fact that Trump is a celebrity, and celebrity candidates have always played by special rules. Today’s celebrities generally have that mysterious “it” factor that lets them command a screen whenever they’re on it — and by the time they reach celebrity status, they have learned exactly how to work that screen. Low-information voters, who don’t follow their policy positions or the scandal-du-jour, might have formed what social scientists call a “parasocial relationship” with them through their on-screen performances. People felt like they knew Trump because they’d seen him on “The Apprentice.” That celebrity factor seems to have helped him in 2016, and it probably helped him again this year.

It’s not a great way to choose a political leader but, like it or not, that seems to be how voters often choose their political leaders. Just ask former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Another example is inflation. The clearest message of this election is that people really, really, really hate inflation, and they punish incumbents who preside over it. Democrats might justly protest that this is unfair — while Biden did gobs of inflationary deficit spending, so did Trump, and the president certainly didn’t cause the pandemic-induced supply-chain bottlenecks that caused prices to rise worldwide. But that’s the risk you take when running for the office: You will get unearned credit if the economy booms, and unearned blame if it craters. Some of that blame rubbed off on Harris.

This does have policy implications for the party, but not ones that fit neatly into anyone’s ideological project. The main lesson from the Great Inflation is that if Democrats want to spend a lot of money (or for that matter, if Republicans want big tax cuts), they need to find some way to pay for it.

Finally, pay attention to the unsexy details of Harris’s strategy. For too long, the Harris campaign acted like a football team running out the clock with the lead, rather than a scrappy underdog that needed aggressive moves to win. The vice president was managing her downside risk instead of increasing her potential upside.

Until far too late, she shunned interviews and sent aides out to quietly tell reporters she’d changed her mind about radical positions she’d taken in 2019, rather than frankly explaining why her views had shifted. She hesitated to distance herself from Biden and filibustered tough questions with non sequitur homages to her middle-class upbringing, her pragmatism or the promise of America.

That’s not a bad strategy for an incumbent, if people are pretty happy with the economy, and you’re well up in the polls. But Harris started out behind and ended up that way, too. And in between, she didn’t make bold gambles that might have changed that dynamic.

These latter explanations aren’t as much fun to argue about as which policy positions are morally essential and which should be jettisoned as the Democratic Party repositions for 2028. But collectively, they probably matter more when explaining what happened on Tuesday.

In the end, that’s probably good news for America. While some voters were undoubtedly voting on democracy, or immigration, or race, or gender, most of them seem to have been participating in a pretty normal anti-incumbent election in which a telegenic candidate beat a weak opponent who was tied to an unpopular administration and following a suboptimal playbook. Obviously, that’s disappointing if you supported Harris and think Trump’s character is unworthy of the office. But it also means that in four years, you’ve got the normal chance of taking that office back.