Analysis: It wasn’t close this time — how Trump won the election, again
When Donald Trump won the presidency eight years ago, it was easy to dismiss his victory as a close call — or even to dismiss it as a fluke.
Not this time.
Despite January 6, the end of Roe v. Wade and a criminal conviction, Trump won a clear victory. He is on track to win all seven swing states. He’s made inroads in every corner of the country and with almost every demographic: if you look at the map of what’s changed since 2020, you’ll see a sea of red.
According to our estimates, Trump is also on track to become the first Republican to win the national popular vote in 20 years.
At the same time, the scope of his victory should not be exaggerated. It was not a landslide victory. A 1 or 2 percentage point victory in the national popular vote with about 312 electoral votes is not unusual. It’s not as big as Barack Obama’s modest victory in 2012 and falls far short of “change” elections like Obama’s in 2008 or Bill Clinton’s in 1992.
But Trump is not just any candidate. As a consequence, a common victory says much more than it normally would. A criminal who attempted to overturn an election would generally not be considered viable in a presidential election. But not only was he viable — he won convincingly.
Despite his victory, the majority of voters considered Trump an unattractive candidate. CNN’s exit poll found that just 44% of voters had a favorable view of him, compared to 54% who had an unfavorable view. A 55% majority of voters said their views were too extreme. Obviously, there are many aspects of Trump’s appeal that these simple questions don’t easily measure. But Trump’s victory may say more about Democrats and the public’s desire for change than about the president-elect himself.
After all, on paper, Democrats were not in a strong position to win this election. No party has ever held the White House when the president’s approval rating was as low as it is today and when so many Americans believed the country was headed in the wrong direction.
The signs that voters were unhappy with the Democrats were everywhere. Most obviously, there was President Joe Biden’s failed re-election campaign, which was based on the idea that voters found Trump so distasteful that they would ignore any reservations about the incumbent. That assumption fell apart publicly with the first presidential debate, even though voters had been telling pollsters long before then how dissatisfied they were with Biden.
And the signs of Republican strengthening were evident. Not only did Trump lead Biden in polls even as criminal charges piled up, but polls also showed Republicans surpassing Democrats in party identification for the first time in two decades. Republican registration numbers soared. Trump was even winning among young people, blacks and Hispanics — groups historically considered vehemently anti-Trump.
Vice President Kamala Harris likely helped give Democrats a chance. She was not a perfect candidate — she brought great responsibilities from her time in the Biden administration and her campaign for the 2020 democratic nomination — but she revitalized her party, won the debate against Trump in September and avoided major mistakes.
However, election night ended in a harsh rebuff for the Democrats. It wasn’t like 2016, when Trump made inroads among a single demographic group, white working-class voters, who were disproportionately concentrated in swing states. Instead, Trump won on all fronts — including among voters who seemed most skeptical of him eight years ago, from Hispanic voters in New York City to tech workers in San Francisco.
Perhaps the most striking evidence of rejection came from blue America. Trump made big gains in New York City, where he improved his 2020 margin by more than 10 points. As of Wednesday morning, Harris was on pace to beat New Jersey by just 5 points.
In California, early results showed Harris ahead by just 18 points in her home state, compared with a 29-point victory for Biden four years ago. Trump appeared to have made gains even in liberal strongholds like San Francisco and Alameda County, home to Berkeley and Oakland.
Early results in Dearborn, Michigan, home to the country’s largest Arab-American population (and a place Biden won by 39 points), showed Trump well ahead, with Harris only narrowly leading Green Party candidate Jill Stein, for second place.
Trump appears to have made his biggest gains among Hispanic voters, whether in exit polls or in results from counties with many Hispanic voters. Miami-Dade County, Florida, voted for Trump by 11 points more, compared to Biden’s 7-point win in 2020 and Hillary Clinton’s 29-point win in 2016. Former Democratic strongholds along the Rio Grande in Texas were all red — a stunning change from eight years ago, when Clinton won with 70% to 80% of the vote.
In the end, there weren’t many parts of the country where Harris did better than Biden in 2020. There were a few counties on the outskirts of Atlanta and Dallas where demographic shifts drove Democratic gains, but otherwise it was mostly a scattering of counties rural and white, often in the Great Plains and inland West.
None of this is what Democrats would have imagined a decade ago, when many of them assumed that demographic and generational shifts would bring a new Democratic majority. Instead, many of the voters Democrats saw as the basis of their coalition became so frustrated with the status quo that they decided to support Trump.
