Tuesday night signaled a realignment in American politics, as Donald Trump rode his “Grand New Bargain” coalition into the White House. Trump recast Republicans as the party of the safety net, strong borders, technological innovation, and the ordinary person against cultural elites. In one of the greatest feats of political judo in American history, Trump leveraged the ferocity of his opponents against them. A series of unprecedented prosecutions in 2023 helped transform the former president into a symbol of embattled Americans and national alienation, and the excesses of the Biden years (especially on immigration) helped greenlight Trump II.
Trump’s victory in 2016 was an inside-straight shocker, but the once-and-future president comprehensively defeated Kamala Harris on Tuesday. While votes are still being counted, he appears poised to sweep all the battleground states. Most media organizations have called Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin for him. He is also currently leading in Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada. If he does pick up those states, it would be Republicans’ strongest Electoral College showing since 1988. Trump also leads in the popular vote. If that holds, Trump would be the first non-incumbent Republican to win the popular vote since 1988.
Kamala Harris’s campaign made many missteps. She never developed a focused policy message, dismissed economic themes, and adopted a low-salience media strategy that let Trump drive the news cycle. But structural factors created an even deeper challenge for her. For a long time, polls have shown that American voters believed that the nation was on the wrong track, and Joe Biden’s approval rating has been underwater for years. The escalating chaos of Biden’s presidency—the broken border, instability abroad, and crippling inflation—exerted a gravitational pull that was too much for Harris to withstand, and her substance-light campaign hurt her ability to distinguish herself from her unpopular boss.
Harris’s “vibes”-based strategy was premised on building out a “Belmont+” coalition of educated suburbanites. But a campaign based on appealing to progressive activists, NPR listeners, and professional anti-Trump pundits was too narrowly focused to win across the country, even in the credentialed suburbs. An early canary in the coalmine for Harris’s chances was Loudoun County in northern Virginia. Often rated the wealthiest county in America, Loudoun should have been the epicenter of Belmont+. Harris seems to have won it by about 16 points, but that margin is well below Biden’s 25-point victory there in 2020.
Many signs point to this new Republican coalition as being more ethnically diverse and more blue-collar. While Harris did improve on Biden’s margins in a few areas (such as in the Atlanta suburbs), Trump consistently bettered his past performance in rural and exurban counties. Perhaps even more strikingly, he ate into Democratic margins on their home turf. While votes in the New York area are still coming in, Trump seems to have significantly improved on his 2020 performance in much of New York City’s five boroughs. Bordering Mexico, Starr County in Texas had backed Democratic presidential candidates for over a century, but Trump won it by 16 points. Elsewhere in the Lone Star state, Trump picked up supporters in the Dallas and Austin suburbs.
Exit poll data is still being calibrated and should be viewed cautiously. With that said, the exit polls may give a window into an electorate continuing to polarize around education, even as it depolarizes around ethnicity. Early analysis suggests that Trump might have done slightly worse with voters who identify as “white” (particularly those with college degrees) compared with 2020, but he improved among voters who did not identify as white. Trump seems to have substantially improved his performance with voters who identify as “Hispanic.” Current exit-poll data finds that Harris did indeed do better with college-educated voters than Biden, winning them by 13 points instead of Biden’s seven. But the tidal wave of Trump support from non-college voters washed away those gains.
The down-ballot picture is still emerging. Republicans have flipped the Senate. As expected, West Virginia governor Jim Justice easily won the West Virginia seat of the retiring Joe Manchin. In Montana, Tim Sheehy beat three-term senator John Tester, and Trump’s strong performance in Ohio helped Bernie Moreno defeat Sherrod Brown, who also served three terms. That gives Republicans 52 Senate votes and control of the chamber. Republicans could still pick up more seats. Bob Casey, a third member of the Democratic Senate Class of 2006, is down by about a point against Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania. Races in Nevada, Michigan, and Wisconsin are too close to call. The House also remains up in the air. Republicans only narrowly won the chamber in 2022 despite winning the “popular vote” by a significant margin, so House control could come down to tight margins in a small number of seats.
If the topline election results can in part be seen as a repudiation of the excesses of the cultural Left, so, too, could some of the ballot questions. In California, a measure allowing for felony prosecutions for certain property and drug crimes committed by long-time offenders (Proposition 36) passed overwhelmingly. While ballot questions to weaken abortion restrictions passed in some states (such as Maryland and Arizona), voters in Florida and South Dakota turned back pro-abortion initiatives. Florida and North Dakota also rejected marijuana-legalization proposals, and Massachusetts shot down an effort to legalize psychedelics.
Realignments are often the story of a failed past paradigm. Biden thought he was entering office as the next FDR. To appease a Democratic Party racing left, he detonated border controls and enacted a full-spectrum agenda of progressive identity politics. He denounced his opponents as a threat to the “soul of the nation” and called for the removal of guardrails on narrow partisan majorities (by endorsing both the nuclear option on the Senate filibuster and some version of progressive court reform). On Tuesday night, voters rejected his politics of the widening gyre.
The collapse of the Biden presidency and the rout of the Harris campaign present an opportunity, and a warning, for Republicans. A faction trusted with power will be punished by the voters if it fails to deliver, and elites risk grave political dangers if they become insulated in the pseudo-cosmos of their own fantasies. To avoid a similar electoral reckoning, the Republican Party must keep its new bargain with the American public.
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images