Just after 5:30am on Wednesday, the Associated Press called Wisconsin for former and now future president Donald J. Trump, raising his total of electoral votes to the majority of 270 needed to win the electoral college. The popular vote count was on track to deliver a national mandate. Republicans also retook the Senate with a larger majority than anyone had predicted and appear poised to expand their slim House majority.
Trump's Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, sheepishly snuck out of her own election night party in Washington, leaving subordinates to tell her assembled crowd of supporters simply to go home. Trump moved from celebrations at his Mar-a-Lago residence and private club to West Palm Beach's convention center to deliver a victory speech to a larger gathering that included a wide media audience.
Trump's victory has the makings of a blowout, with all swing states either solidly in his column or leaning in his direction by several points at the time the race was called. These results flew in the face of most pre-election day polls, which predicted statistical ties or slight leads for Harris. Trump's comeback—arguably the greatest in American history—defied nearly a decade of unremitting mass media hostility, a once-in-a-century pandemic, open defiance from the federal bureaucracy, multiple criminal prosecutions, damaging civil legal actions, two impeachments, electoral defeat in 2020, dogged opposition within the Republican Party, myriad slights and slanders, and two assassination attempts.
Harris, whose campaign raised a billion dollars, outspent Trump at least three to one and commanded the loyalty not only of the Democratic Party but of virtually the entire Washington establishment and most of American institutional life.
How was it possible? Like Ronald Reagan before him, Trump cut through his opponents' poisonous invective and toxic spin to ask a fundamental question of the American people: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?
For more than half the population, the answer was a resounding "no." Nearly 80 percent of Americans told pollsters that the country was on the wrong track. Exit polling conducted on election day found that 72 percent of voters felt either "disappointed" or "angry" about the state of the country. Annoyed by Democratic insistence that their feelings were wrong, they voted accordingly, wearing down the urban and suburban vote share that Joe Biden had won by larger margins in 2020 and boosting Trump in rural areas where despair and deprivation have been acute features of the Biden-Harris administration.
Harris' empty rhetoric about "turning the page" and "charting a new course" to embrace the "joy" she supposedly offered a country that had never voted for her to be selected as a presidential nominee failed to resonate. Voters were smart enough to realize that she has been the foundering incumbent administration's vice president for nearly four years, during which it grossly underserved the country and most of its people. Trump intelligently capitalized on these deficiencies, campaigning heavily on inflation, the southern border, foreign trade, controversial cultural issues, and other topics on which most Americans believe the Democratic incumbents have failed them.
Trump also reached to minorities, who turned up at the polls for him in far larger numbers than any Republican presidential candidate had ever won before. In Michigan, exit polling showed 62 percent of Latinos voting for Trump, and a Fox News exit poll showed that in Georgia he won the support of one in four black male voters—a 14-point increase from 2020.
As the Biden-Obama coalition fractured under the immense weight of its own contradictions and failures, the Trump coalition built new strengths. Additional polling showed Trump winning large shares of Arabs, Muslims, Catholics, and other culturally conservative demographics that reject the radical social ideologies now sacrosanct in the Democratic Party. Trump's promises of economic recovery, national strength, a strong border, and cultural empowerment appealed to key segments of those voters and to rising numbers of young men across the demographic board. With the Biden-Harris administration fumbling badly in the Middle East, Jews turned out for Trump as well. Exit polls in New York showed some 43 percent of New York's Jewish voters casting their ballots for the former and future president.
Trump has promised to make the country great again—to fix what Harris broke, in the words of his late-phase campaign slogan—and to deliver quality assistance to communities plunged into desperation during her tenure as vice president. In large numbers, those communities believed him strongly enough to redirect their votes and restore him to the White House.
Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
English (US) ·