Donald Trump not only completed a once-improbable political comeback — he won a resounding victory despite legal jeopardy, the unpopular end of federal abortion rights and rhetoric that turned off broad swaths of the electorate.
Kamala Harris lost stunningly to Trump, just as Hillary Clinton, the first woman to become her party’s presidential nominee, did in 2016. The former president built a more diverse coalition of voters than any Republican candidate in two decades, despite running a racially charged, testosterone-drenched campaign that demonized immigrants.
The votes are still being tabulated, but here are six takeaways from Trump’s victory:
Trump’s 2016 victory felt like a historical accident. Tuesday feels like a reschedule.
For a politician whose first victory came almost exclusively with white voters, Trump has assembled a remarkably diverse coalition in this election, driven by his unique appeal — or perhaps Harris’ unique vulnerabilities — among men.
Nearly one in five Trump voters were people of color on Tuesday, according to the network’s exit polls. In his first election in 2016, about 13 percent of Trump voters were people of color.
Latino voters, once a reliable stronghold of the Democratic base, are continuing their recent shift to the right. The two major voter surveys — the Network Exit Polls and AP Votecast — differed on whether Harris won Latinos by 8 points or 15 points. But regardless, it was a huge shift from Biden’s roughly 30-point victory among Hispanic voters four years ago.
Trump also impressed black voters, reaching double digits after hovering just below 10 percent in the two previous elections. Trump won 12 percent and 15 percent of black voters in the two surveys, respectively.
Republican gains were concentrated among men, whom Trump’s campaign zealously targeted. The two surveys disagree on whether Trump actually won over Latino men — one says he narrowly won, the other says Harris narrowly won them. But Trump also won between 20 and 25 percent of black men.
These achievements have not only led Trump to victory in the battleground states. They could ultimately make him only the second Republican presidential candidate since 1992 to win the popular vote — although it will take a few weeks before the vote count is finally completed in blue California.
The country once again voted against a woman running for president
For the second time in three election cycles, the American public voted against a female Democratic candidate in favor of Donald Trump.
Harris, who broke with Hillary Clinton’s approach in 2016, did not capitalize on the barrier-breaking nature of her potential presidency. While Clinton leaned on white pantsuits and broke a literal glass ceiling at the Javits Center in New York, Harris sidestepped gender issues.
Neither strategy worked.
Overall, women broke for Harris, but white women preferred Trump. Fifty-four percent of women supported Harris, according to TV networks’ exit polls. Only 26 percent of women of color supported Trump, but 52 percent of white women did.
Democrats insisted that the overthrow of Roe v. Wade would motivate women to go to the polls. The party had overperformed in every election since the Supreme Court ruling in 2022 Dobbs ruling striking down federal protections against abortion.
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Harris made reproductive freedom a central pillar of her campaign, highlighting on stage at the Democratic National Convention and in ads the moving stories of women whose health care choices have been limited by new state abortion bans. In the coming weeks, agents will sift through the data for clues about whether they have relied too much on the issue of abortion, whether the country has become desensitized to it or whether its political potency has simply been neutralized or subordinated by Trump economic situation. to assure.
Biden’s legacy is taking a huge hit
He was nowhere to be found in the final days of the campaign as he was a major liability for Harris. Joe Biden’s decision to step aside in July gave Democrats an opportunity, but his initial misinterpretation of Democrats’ 2022 midterm successes as confirmation of his presidency and his bid for a second term put his party at a huge disadvantage . This also applies to his denial of his own mortality. And barring a turnaround, Harris appeared unable to overcome the public’s frustration with his economy and the majority’s sense that the country is on the wrong track.
Yes, she herself struggled to find an answer to the frequently asked question of how she would differ from Biden – a question of great importance for influencing voters. But Biden, whose sputtering debate performance in June effectively ended his decades-long political career in 90 minutes, has long struggled to make a clear, convincing case for a term marked by some major legislative achievements and an economy that surpassed all others. country in the world.
While reporting focused on Trump’s scattered statements at rallies, his campaign and the super PAC’s support blanketed the swing state airwaves with paid media tying Harris to Biden.
In a sense, Harris’ inability to match Biden’s 2020 vote totals confirms his uniquely broad appeal. But her loss also complicates the president’s legacy: He remains the politician who defeated Trump after his first term but has now played a major role in the apparent failure to stop him from returning to power.
The ground game is stuck
In the final month of the campaign, Harris’ campaign knocked on two million doors – in Pennsylvania alone. Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, appeared to be taking a gamble by outsourcing much of its field operations to people like Elon Musk, whose PAC paid off pollsters and struggled to verify much of the incoming data.
It was a clear strategic difference between the two campaigns, and many operatives believed it would give Harris an edge, possibly even a decisive one.
Given the pattern in the map showing the vice president slightly underperforming in key counties in Biden’s 2020 election — and Trump overperforming in rural areas — expect an upcoming conversation among operatives and donors about traditional knocking on the door and how even a concentrated, professional effort to Mobilizing lower-propensity voters can be no match for the organic enthusiasm that propels a specific candidate.
Harris’ bet for Liz Cheney’s Republicans backfired
Harris spent crucial days on the campaign trail wooing Republicans, even meeting with former Rep. Liz Cheney in Ripon, Wisconsin, the sentimental birthplace of the Republican Party. It didn’t work – at least uniformly.
The setting in Ripon, a town with a small population and not in a swinging part of the state, typified a campaign that sometimes focused on broad themes aimed at capturing the national media, often at the expense of time on the ground in key provinces. . In Wisconsin, for example, Harris did not travel to Door County, the only county in the state to vote for the presidential winner in every election since 2000, until October 18.
Some progressives pointed the finger at Harris for spending so much time courting Cheney’s Republicans.
In some Republican strongholds, Harris performed below Biden’s 2020 margins. In Milwaukee’s Republican suburbs, for example, Harris lagged behind Biden’s 2020 margins in Washington and Ozaukee counties, but performed two points better in Waukesha County.
In suburban Hamilton County, Indiana, where Nikki Haley won 33.8 percent of voters in the May primary after dropping out of the presidential primary, Harris trailed Trump by six points — only a marginal improvement in a county that Trump won in 2020. won by seven points.
Another notable example: Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where a zombie Haley campaign won nearly 19 percent of the vote in April. Watching the movement there, the Harris campaign dropped an additional six-figure ad buy in the upscale counties around Philadelphia, including Bucks. But on Tuesday, Trump took Bucks by three points – a county Biden had won by four points.
The unsinkable Trump
In 2016, the election of Donald Trump could have been dismissed as some kind of joke. But after the last eight years, nothing about sending him back to the White House was hypothetical or abstract.
He has now been impeached twice, is a convicted felon and has appointed the Supreme Court justices needed to overturn the case Roe v. Wade and ran without the support of his former vice president or dozens of former senior aides and cabinet members.
And his campaign, once again beset by a familiar infighting that has long characterized his various operations, appeared to be limping toward the finish line: Trump himself was often incoherent on the stump, while his vote winders made headlines for turning a town hall into a town hall made. a weird dance party in which he promises to protect women “whether they like it or not” and his comments glorifying violence towards his political enemies and Arnold Palmer’s genitals at various points. Not to mention the racist and misogynistic rally he held at Madison Square Garden.
That he has once again exceeded expectations is a reaffirmation of his imperviousness to electoral consequences and an uncanny ability, perhaps unique in the entire history of American politics, to defy political gravity. Returning to the White House after all this would prove his own infamous saying, which many wrongly thought would derail his first run: If you’re a star, they’ll let you do it.
