There will be a lot to say about Donald Trump’s incredible victory in the coming days and weeks, but as I sort through the results in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, I thought I would offer a number of initial takeaways.
It’s the greatest comeback in the history of American politics.
This is the most obvious point. Love him or hate him, there is simply nobody who has pulled off anything close to resembling what Trump has just accomplished. Some people may have previously cited Grover Cleveland’s victory in the 1892 election or Richard Nixon’s comeback in 1968, but what Trump accomplished was closer to what would have happened had Nixon won the White House again after having resigned. After his loss in the 2020 election and the January 6 Capitol riot, few believed that Trump could come back four years later and win not only a Republican nomination, but the presidency. Add to that where Trump was in the party after his chosen candidates tanked in the 2022 midterms, throw into the mix the indictments, impeachments, sustained low approval ratings, the entire media being against him, the fact that he essentially had to beat not one but two Democratic opponents in the same year, and it is just astonishing what he was able to accomplish.
Harris couldn’t fool enough of the people.
While Trump brought an unprecedented level of baggage to the race, Vice President Kamala Harris couldn’t ultimately get past the fact that she was trying to pull a fast one on the American people. President Biden refused to face reality and drop out of the race when there could have been a normal primary to replace him. So Democrats tried to plop in one of the most unpopular vice presidents in history in Harris despite the fact that she never won a single primary. She tried to coast on good vibes and joy over the summer, not doing any interviews or explaining how she changed her positions on a litany of issues. She tried to claim she was a change agent while touting her experience in the Biden administration and admitting she couldn’t think of anything she would have done differently than him. Ultimately, voters saw through the phoniness.
Trump’s performance with Hispanics has upended immigration politics.
Trump won 45 percent of Hispanic voters, according to CNN exits, which would be a record performance for a Republican if it holds. For much of the past 30 years (since the backlash against California’s Prop 187 that sought to limit services to illegal immigrants), the prevailing view has been that Republicans would need to soften on immigration policy or risk losing a growing demographic for generations. Yet Trump ran on mass deportation and sealing the border, and earned record numbers of Hispanics — eclipsing George W. Bush and John McCain.
Progressivism, and wokeness, has proven to be political kryptonite for Democrats.
After 2016, Democrats convinced themselves that all the energy was with the socialist movement of Bernie Sanders and so most Democratic candidates in the next presidential election, including Harris, raced to get in their good graces. Biden resisted in the primary, and yet after becoming president, decided to govern from the left — signing trillions in spending that fueled inflation, reversing successful immigration policies, pushing unconstitutional executive orders to reward favored constituencies (e.g., student-loan relief), and so on. When she became the nominee, Harris was saddled not only with Biden’s failed left-wing policies, but a litany of positions she took when courting socialists in 2019 — banning fracking, confiscating guns, scrapping private health insurance, providing prisoners with gender transition treatments, etc. These provided fodder for Trump’s most effective ads.
The Obama coalition is dead.
There’s been a lot of focus on how Trump’s success represents a break from the Reagan era of the Republican Party. But this election offered further proof that the coalition that elected Obama to the White House twice (which paired wealthier and college-degree voters with supersized support from minority groups) is not easily translatable when the candidate isn’t Obama. The Democrats can win unmarried women and wealthier college grads, but they have a real problem with married couples, the middle class, and men. Meanwhile, their ability to generate minority turnout by cranking up the charges of racism has reached diminishing returns.
So much for the damaging MSG rally and late Kamala momentum.
The media coverage at the end of the race centered on the idea that the MSG rally was a massive blunder by the Trump campaign, that a tasteless joke would cost Trump Puerto Rican votes, and that late deciders were breaking toward Harris. But there is no evidence that any of this is true. Trump won voters who decided in the past week by eight points, and he narrowed the Democratic advantage among Puerto Ricans in Florida (where there is a large enough sample size) by about 30 points. And as for the viral Ann Selzer poll showing Harris up three points in Iowa that supposedly pointed toward the salience of the abortion issue and Democratic gains in the Midwest? Trump won the state by 14 points. As long as we’re citing results that contradict media narratives, get this one: Voters who said that democracy is “very threatened” went for Trump 50-48.
Harris blundered by trying to appease pro-Hamas voters.
Exit polls showed that 61 percent of voters thought U.S. policy toward Israel was “about right” or “not strong enough,” and yet Harris spent much of the campaign trying to placate the 32 percent of voters who believe that American support for our ally is “too strong.” Despite all her efforts, it turned out that in Dearborn, Mich., the pro-Hamas contingent went for Jill Stein anyway, helping Trump to a plurality.
Polls got the big picture right, but still can’t pick up shy Trump voters.
The instantly infamous Selzer poll aside, were you to have looked closely at the polls in the closing weeks of the election, you would have come away with the following general impression: The race was close in a number of states, but if they all tipped in the same direction, it could end up in an Electoral College landslide even as the popular result remains close. This is roughly what’s happened, with the close states tipping in Trump’s direction. That said, for the third presidential election in a row, Trump has overperformed the polls, suggesting that despite the best effort of pollsters, they still haven’t figured out a way to pick up the “shy” Trump voters.
Tim Walz was a bust.
