In the days leading up to the 2024 presidential election, Democrats were worried that Donald Trump would declare victory prematurely based on early returns.
“We are sadly ready if he does, and if we know that he is actually manipulating the press and attempting to manipulate the consensus of the American people … we are prepared to respond,” Vice President Kamala Harris told ABC News.
“Of course. This is a person, Donald Trump, who tried to undo … a free and fair election, who still denies the will of the people,” Harris told NBC. “The American people at this point, two weeks out, are being presented with a very, very serious decision about what will be the future of our country.”
“As soon as [Trump] falsely declares victory, we’re ready to get up on TV and provide the truth and tap a broad network of people who can use their influence to push back,” a top Democratic National Committee official told Reuters.
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“Worries grow over Trump prematurely claiming 2024 victory,” read a Bloomberg headline. The Guardian reported Trump’s advisers were urging him to do so.
When Trump took the stage in the early hours of Wednesday morning after Election Day, some networks had yet to call the race. Harris campaign Chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon had already sent out a memo essentially sending the staff to bed. “This is what we’ve been built for, so let’s finish up what we have in front of us tonight, get some sleep, and get ready to close out strong tomorrow,” she wrote.
“I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president,” Trump told the assembled crowd. But there was nothing premature about it. By the time the Harris campaign staffers awoke ready to close out strong, the Associated Press and the networks had confirmed Trump the winner. Even in 2020, that process took four days. This time Trump had not only won but had completed the greatest political comeback in U.S. history, surpassing even Richard Nixon’s triumph in 1968.
The relatively early call was a testament to the breadth of Trump’s victory. He swept the seven battleground states. This included collapsing the blue wall, just as he did against Hillary Clinton in 2016. He held North Carolina and every other state he won in 2020. He flipped back both the Sun Belt states he lost four years ago, Georgia and Arizona. He won Nevada for the first time in three campaigns, defeating the remnants of the old Harry Reid political machine.
Trump improved his vote share in every state, including his native New York, where he broke 40%. At this writing, he is winning 40% in the deep-blue state of California. Trump won Ohio by 11 points, Florida by more than 13, and Texas by almost 14. Remember that shock Des Moines Register poll showing Harris ahead in Iowa the weekend before the election? Trump carried the state by double digits, his biggest margin in three tries.
As Election Day approached, Trump was starting to campaign in unusual places. Virginia, New Hampshire, and New Mexico did not appear to be swing states according to the public polling, though they were believed to be at risk for the Democrats when President Joe Biden was at the top of the ticket. Political analysts wondered if this was hubris.
Trump didn’t end up carrying any of those reach states. But Loudoun County, a heavily college-educated suburban part of northern Virginia, swung 9 points to the right. He held Harris to 51.7% of the vote in New Mexico, 51.7% in Virginia, and 50.8% in New Hampshire (he took 48%). Harris received just 51.5% of the vote in New Jersey.
All this added up to Trump’s first popular vote edge in three presidential bids. He is currently taking 50.9% nationally to Harris’s 47.6% for a lead of more than 4 million votes. That’s bigger than Hillary Clinton’s margin in 2016. If these numbers hold, Trump will be only the second Republican presidential nominee to win the popular vote since 1988 and the first non-Bush to do so since Ronald Reagan’s 49-state landslide in 1984. “A great feeling of love,” Trump said of his popular vote totals during his victory speech.
“Realignment” is the word pundits kept using to describe Trump’s win. He had delivered white working-class voters to the GOP in big-enough numbers to swing the Rust Belt, and the Electoral College majority, in 2016. He largely held these voters even in defeat in 2020. But this time around, he won Hispanic men while making inroads with younger voters and black men. His 46% of Latinos overall would top George W. Bush’s previous record for a Republican. While the two men share a political party, Trump and Bush have quite different immigration policies. Trump’s handling of immigration was supposed to alienate Hispanics, but many of these voters were also unhappy about the border crisis.
Starr County in Texas is 97% Hispanic, the highest percentage in the country. Trump won it by 16 points, becoming the first Republican to do so since 1892. Clinton carried it with 79% of the vote just eight years ago.
Journalists covering the election sounded as if they could not believe it. Politico’s election night story described Trump as “building a more diverse coalition of voters than any Republican nominee in 20 years — despite running a racially charged, testosterone-soaked campaign that demonized immigrants.” Trump managed this feat even after Democrats replaced the old white man currently in the Oval Office with a nominee who was the first black, Asian, and female vice president.
Nor was Trump a downballot drag. He ran ahead of the Republican Senate candidate in every competitive race except for Larry Hogan in Maryland. He was an asset to the GOP’s efforts to take control of the chamber, after complaints about his influence on Senate races in 2022 and the loss of two Georgia Senate runoff elections in the aftermath of the 2020 contest. Republicans are on the cusp of enjoying unified control of the federal government.
All this came after Trump endured a lengthy Russia investigation, two impeachments, a failed reelection campaign, adverse legal judgments in two civil trials, and indictments in four cases across multiple jurisdictions. The lawfare campaigns against Trump and the Democrats’ rabid pursuit by most accounts helped him politically. Trump also survived two assassination attempts, displaying courage under literal fire when he was shot during a Pennsylvania rally just before the Republican National Convention.
But Trump also suffered self-inflicted wounds due to his steadfast refusal to concede the 2020 presidential election, leading to the catastrophe of Jan. 6. Yet he overcame all of this, first in the primaries, where he swept all but two contests despite facing high-caliber challengers such as Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, and then in November.
To be sure, some of this had to do with the unpopularity of the Biden-Harris administration. Consumer prices had not come down from when inflation ran at a 41-year high, leading to widespread public discontent with the economy. There was record illegal immigration for much of the incumbents’ term as they eased Trump-era border policies and told the world they wanted to enact amnesty for millions.
Biden’s job approval rating stood at 41.1% on Election Day, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. In the same average, 62.9% said the country was on the wrong track compared to only 27% who believed it was moving in the right direction. A November Ipsos poll had only 17% approving of the national direction, a score of negative 47 points. All this occurred against the backdrop of a global wave of anti-incumbency at the ballot box.
Democrats resolved to fix this problem, along with the issue of Biden’s advanced age, by making a late candidate switch. Harris replaced Biden in late July, receiving much media adulation. Her convention in Chicago was judged a success, averting a 1968-like disaster as Gaza protests were held to a minimum. Harris was a more skilled communicator than an octogenarian Biden, with far better message discipline, and easily cleared the low bar her boss set in her only debate with Trump. She was selective in her media interviews, save for one contentious sitdown with Bret Baier on Fox News, and appeared content to ride out a truncated general election campaign on the backs of high-profile Democratic surrogates, A-list celebrity endorsements, and an adoring media fan base.
But cracks in Harris’s armor began to show. She refused to be nailed down on many of her policy positions, giving evasive answers when confronted directly and often allowing staffers to disavow her most left-wing stances from her ill-fated 2019 presidential campaign to media outlets under the cloak of anonymity. Even the press became annoyed with her lack of access after a certain point. At town hall forums when voters would try to get a sense of who she was, Harris fell back on canned lines.
Harris never came up with a good answer to how she would differ in any substantive way from Biden, though she eventually settled on pointing out they are different people with different experiences. A much-derided Harris catchphrase, “What can be, unburdened by what has been,” seemed to be the guiding philosophy of her campaign. But her attempts to wriggle free of Biden and her incumbency failed.
What Harris tried to do instead was to make the election a referendum on Trump, rather than Biden and herself. She closed with a message about Trump’s instability and alleged fascism. She campaigned with former Rep. Liz Cheney and other disgruntled ex-Republicans in an attempt to build a broad anti-Trump coalition. But such a coalition, stretching from the socialist Left to the Cheneys, was unwieldy. It required her to deepen her commitment to vagueness and a lack of specificity outside of abortion for fear of making any commitments that might alienate any part of this incoherent group.
But without the pandemic and Trump currently serving in office, some of this fell flat. It was also the case that progressives were in a more irritable mood than in 2020, especially with Israel’s war in Gaza splitting the Democratic base. Harris and Biden tried to triangulate on the issue but often wound up just alienating both sides. Harris’s repeated attempts to distance herself from her liberal record dampened enthusiasm, while Trump still beat her 10-1 among conservatives in the NBC exit poll. She is presently on track to receive some 13 million fewer votes than Biden.
This has all given Trump a nearly unprecedented second chance. The only other president to win back the White House after losing a reelection bid and go on to serve nonconsecutive terms was Grover Cleveland in the 1892 presidential election. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump declared.
What will Trump do with it? “We’re going to help our country heal. We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly,” he said in his victory speech. “We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country. We made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that.”
The border is going to be a top Trump priority, just as it was in his first term when he sharply curtailed illegal immigration. Democrats are more skeptical he will heal the country. Harris tried to warn voters that Trump will seek revenge against his domestic political enemies. There will be no “guardrails” set by establishment Republicans and others like former White House chief of staff John Kelly, whose recollections formed the basis of the Democrats’ last-minute fascism attacks.
It is likely true that Trump will rely less on strangers who look good on television. TV readiness and looking like a Cabinet secretary straight out of central casting will still be important Trump considerations, of course. But the former and now future president understands how the government works better than he did in his first term. He also has a greater appreciation for the maxim that personnel is policy, which probably rules out a John Bolton return.
Many first-term Trump administration officials who clashed with him are also much less likely to put their names forward this time around. Mitt Romney interviewed for the secretary of state job eight years ago. That would be unthinkable today.
Trump may have a friendlier Republican congressional leadership team than in 2017. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is stepping down from his longtime leadership role, and former House Speaker Paul Ryan is no longer in Congress at all. Trump has a better relationship with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), should the GOP majority in that chamber hold, than he did Ryan. Some new senators will owe their seats to Trump. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance is coming from the Senate.
On the Democratic side, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is no longer in leadership, though Biden can attest to her still having considerable influence. Trump has a longer-standing relationship with soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) who, now that he is returning to the minority, has regained his enthusiasm for bipartisanship.
“I think [Trump] will try to find common ground. He understands this is a legacy term for him now,” longtime Trump adviser Paul Manafort told the journalist Mark Halperin before the election. “The first term was a first term that was hopefully going to lead to a second. But this is his last term. … And he cares about his standing in history.”
The renewal of Trump’s tax cuts will loom large as a priority. He campaigned on restoring SALT deductions undone by the original version of the law, to salvage Republican congressional seats in high-tax blue states such as New York. He also proposed ending taxes on tips, something that could prove popular with working-class voters but will have little Laffer curve effect and thus lose revenue.
It is possible with Vance and other new faces in the administration Trump will dig deeper into economic populism. He is already set to push ahead with higher tariffs to combat China and attempt to reshore U.S. jobs. Don’t rule out legislation that might pair mandatory e-Verify to crack down on illegal immigration with an increase in the federal minimum wage.
Most Republicans in Washington believe Trump will be far better prepared out of the gate than he was in 2017. He will need to be. Democrats will be eager to take back Congress in 2026, and he is constitutionally ineligible to seek reelection in 2028. “He’ll be a lame duck after six months,” a GOP strategist said.
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Time, therefore, is of the essence. Trump appears to have a sense of urgency.
“I said that many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” Trump said after winning, referring to the failed assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, “and that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness, and now we are going to fulfill that mission together. We’re going to fulfill that mission.”
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
