President-elect Donald Trump entered Election Day in a virtual tie against Vice President Kamala Harris, according to several poll aggregates, yet by early Wednesday morning, he easily defeated his rival.
“This is a movement like nobody’s ever seen before and, frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time,” Trump boasted during his victory speech.
As the results began to roll in that Tuesday evening, Trump won the first battleground state of North Carolina before winning Georgia, then Pennsylvania, and sweeping Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona.
He went on to win 312 Electoral College votes compared to Harris’s 226 votes and the popular vote, becoming the first Republican president since George W. Bush in 2004 to accomplish this feat.
Trump rode a wave of public anger over rising grocery and gas prices that helped reinstate him as president and gave Republicans control over the House and Senate, along with previous majority control of the Supreme Court, in a backlash against President Joe Biden’s administration.
With Biden and subsequently Harris as the de facto incumbent candidate, one political expert claimed the race was there for Democrats to lose.
“While I see the political accomplishment of Trump (or any Republican) winning the popular vote and sweeping all swing states, I nevertheless think that it’s mostly Democrats who lost the election,” said Louis Perron, a political consultant and author of Beat the Incumbent: Proven Strategies and Tactics to Win Elections.
“Did you win? Or did the other side lose? In this case, I think Democrats blew it. And I say Democrats specifically and not Harris,” Perron continued.
Trump was likely on the march to trouncing Biden, whose mental acuity was a key topic of concern among voters and as voters increasingly disapproved of his leadership. Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump on June 27, in which he often appeared confused, accelerated calls among fellow Democrats for him to stand down from reelection.
A little over a month later, Biden announced on X that he was suspending his campaign. Hours later, he endorsed Harris to replace him atop the Democratic ticket.
Harris’s quick consolidation of the Democratic Party, historic fundraising figures, and extensive ground game operation should have given her the advantage heading into the election. But there were key warning signs.
Public heartburn over the economy and the rising immigration crisis at the southern border proved no match for Harris, who struggled to distance herself from Biden’s administration. When Harris told the hosts of The View there was “not a thing” she would do differently than Biden, Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance repeatedly aired the clip at campaign rallies.
Piggybacking off of Trump’s populist approach, Senate Republicans were able to brand the Democrats and Biden as out-of-touch elitists. The effort resulted in the GOP retaking the upper chamber by flipping seats in West Virginia, with Sen. Joe Manchin retiring, Ohio, Montana, and Pennsylvania.
Bernie Moreno took down Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), while Tim Sheehy toppled Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT), the most vulnerable incumbent senator, and Dave McCormick unseated Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA). The GOP now holds a 53-47 majority.
More than a week after the election, House Republicans narrowly held on to their control of the lower chamber after losing seats in New York and California. Their win marks the first year since 2018 that the GOP has had a governing trifecta.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will likely hold on to his leadership role after the success of the election and given Trump’s support.
“The mandate that has been delivered shows that a majority of Americans are eager for secure borders, lower costs, peace through strength, and a return to common sense,” Johnson wrote in a congratulatory letter to the conference. “With unified Republican government, if we meet this historic moment together, the next two years can result in the most consequential Congress of the modern era.”
Grant Reeher, professor of political science at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, claimed that voters in the battleground states were most primed to display their economic anger at Democrats after the last four years of inflation.
“They have been the ones that have really been living the brunt of this,” Reeher said. “And so they were the most, I think, ripe for the picking, if you will, for the Republicans, and the most receptive to the kinds of messages that Trump was offering on the economy.”
The vice president raised a historic $1 billion in roughly three months and repeatedly boasted about having more campaign staff and field offices in the seven battleground states. Yet, according to most preelection polls, Trump remained within striking distance of Harris.
Harris also campaigned heavily on galvanizing women voters around the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and restoring abortion access. However, Trump proved he could run on gender, and he frequently appeared on podcasts geared toward young male voters, culminating in an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Harris won women voters by an 8-point margin, while Trump won male voters by a 13-point margin, according to CNN exit poll results.
Anti-abortion conservatives championed Trump’s win as an example that the public was no longer politically motivated by Roe.
“This election proves that abortion was not the silver bullet Democrats thought it would be. Even after Democrats put half a billion dollars behind abortion TV ads in this election, they still lost the presidency, the Senate, and potentially the House,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement. “The reason? Their extreme abortion agenda is out of step with Americans. And their fearmongering and abortion lies did not work. There was not a historic gender gap that ushered in Kamala Harris’s abortion policies. That’s because most Americans support early, reasonable limits on abortion.”
Another feat Trump accomplished was winning more Hispanic voters at 45%, according to NBC News exit polls, a record high for a GOP presidential candidate, and winning more Asian and black voters than most GOP candidates have done in decades by running on a populist pitch.
Steven Hilding, a Republican strategist in Nevada, pointed to Trump’s efforts to reach niche voting blocs as an example of how his campaign helped win the popular vote.
“You saw Trump do things like going to the sneaker convention and socializing with young minority males,” Hilding said. “You saw him having a Greek and Cyprian American leadership council … he was able to make some inroads in the Muslim communities in Michigan.”
In the final days before the election, Trump visited a Dearborn, Michigan, cafe owned by an Arab American leader. Dearborn’s Arab and Muslim population long signaled their disapproval of the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
Also hobbling Harris was the struggle to define herself to the public once she became the nominee. During her 2020 run for president, she embraced several left-leaning policy issues, such as fracking, that she later denounced in the run-up to the election.
“Harris ran a deliberately, in terms of policy, pretty vague campaign. I don’t blame her for that. You have 107 days. What are you going to do?” Reeher said. “And also, you want to distance yourself from a presidential administration, but you don’t want to throw that administration under the bus. So, how do you finesse that? Well, she tried, but it didn’t really end up working out.”
WHAT MAGA AND THE GOP WILL LOOK LIKE IN A POST-TRUMP ERA
In the end, Democrats are now left scrambling over how to win back disaffected voters who overwhelmingly rejected the Harris campaign as Trump governs over the next four years. Trump, at least, claims that easing financial burdens for the average American will be a top priority.
“We have to put our country first for at least a period of time. We have to fix it. Because together, we can truly make America great again for all Americans,” Trump claimed in his election victory speech.
