This is an edited excerpt from MSNBC’s special coverage Wednesday.
Across the country, people are still coming to terms with what happened on Tuesday. To be fair, many Americans, including myself, believe this was a bad outcome for the country. But I think it’s really important to be as clear as possible, not just about what happened, but about what happened. Why it happened.
Donald Trump won a majority of votes in the Electoral College and for the first time in his three presidential runs, he appears poised to win the national popular vote. But if you look at why he won, I think it was clear that it was a rejection of the status quo at a time when many voters feel alienated from their leaders and pressured by high prices.
This is how they feel throughout the Western world, where the incumbent parties left, right and center have suffered the same electoral fate after Covid-19. These were elections marked by the rejection of a status quo that large majorities did not like.
Trump and the Republicans have a vested interest in interpreting this outcome as a mandate for their worst government impulses — all the Stephen Miller-esque Project 2025 dark fantasies about destroying the “administrative state.”
But those ideas were never popular. Trump tried to distance himself from them when they had a terrible election. So that was not the source of this victory.
You can see it all over America in Tuesday’s results. You can see it in what happened during the vote. In North Carolina, voters chose Trump by a small margin. At the same time, they elected Democrats as governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and school superintendent. And they may have flipped enough legislative seats to take away the Republican supermajority and the veto.
You can see it in referendums across the country. In seven states, including the Trump states of Arizona, Missouri and Montana, voters approved measures enshrining abortion rights. Voters in deep-red Missouri and Alaska also approved minimum wage increases and joined Nebraska in mandating paid sick leave for workers.
To underscore all that, New Jersey has elected its first Asian American U.S. senator. Maryland elected its first black female U.S. senator. That also applied to Delaware, meaning two black female senators will serve together for the first time in American history. Delaware also gave Congress its first openly transgender member.
This is not a nation that has fully bought into the far-right agenda of Trump and his Republican Party. But we know they are going to interpret this election as a mandate for full-on MAGAism.
And we know they have a plan, a destructive plan for the American Constitution, American democracy and, most importantly, for so many of our fellow Americans, immigrant families, transgender people, women and working-class voters who will be targeted to take. chin of tariffs and stripping of labor legislation.
We also know that Trump is an aspiring authoritarian. He doesn’t have a democratic bone in his body. He attempted to overthrow the constitutional order by force. He has celebrated it and has repeatedly spoken about the use of political violence in his campaign.
Because of all this, we know that they will try to do things to undermine and change the constitutional order. But the most important thing for those of us working to stop them is to remember that their success is in no way predestined.
Yes, they will try and there will be many people trying to stop them, but the outcome is not yet certain.
I don’t say this out of a light-hearted hope. I’ve been covering Trump since 2015. I covered his first term. He tried to do a lot of bad things but failed because he is completely distracted and inconsistent, because he is a vortex of chaos, and because he cannot be stopped from doing stupid, self-destructive things.
None of that changed because he won an election. Are Republicans better prepared this time? Are they more loyal? Is the judiciary more in their favor? Yes.
But again, that doesn’t mean the outcome is preordained. The reason I say that is because the opinion of the masses is not something fixed. It is a real force and it changes and flows and responds to events.
Even Trump has backed off when he found himself on the wrong side. He has tried to distance himself from his most extreme anti-abortion position because he understands it is unpopular and that there was mobilization against it.
One of the most monstrous things he did during his first term, as documented in my colleague Jacob Soboroff’s incredible documentary and book “Separated,” was separating migrant children from their families. When the press reported this and the courts reviewed it, it became clear that it was cruel and illegal.
Although it was a federal judge who first blocked this, ending child separation was merely a complete rejection by the democratic polity. Thanks to the organization, the mobilization and the protests, Americans rightly came to see that it was monstrous and loudly rejected it.
Ultimately, Trump signed an executive order ending the practice and even tried to take credit for getting rid of the horrific policies he had implemented. They had to give it up because it was so unpopular.
That’s just one example and in his second term there will likely be things he won’t give up. But in light of that, it’s very important not to admit up front that these things don’t matter. They do.
Public opinion still matters. Politics didn’t disappear in America because 3 in 100 people switched their presidential votes. Politics depends on the work of organizing, mobilizing, and persuading our fellow Americans.
None of these tools have gone anywhere. In fact, they are all even more important this time. We must pick them up and we cannot allow anyone to pry them from our hands.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
