Early Wednesday morning, the outcome dreaded by Democrats turned into a reality: Donald Trump has been elected the 47th president of the United States. The Associated Press made the call after Trump's win in the state of Wisconsin; Trump has passed 270 electoral votes, with more to follow.
This crushing defeat for Vice President Kamala Harris and her party also includes a Republican majority in the U.S. Senate and possible control of all three branches of government during the first two years of Trump’s upcoming term. While the Democrats' immediate task will be figuring out what went wrong, an early answer would be damn near everything.
As implausible as this may seem, Trump appears to have replicated his surprise victory from 2016, and even leads the national popular vote as well. Trump has carried a long list of solidly red states that he won in his two previous campaigns — faint Democratic hopes of winning states like Florida, Iowa or Ohio are gone with the wind. Harris has won a bunch of expected states in the Northeast and along the Pacific Coast, along with Colorado, Illinois and Virginia, but has failed to win a single important swing state. In what NBC News said "may be the biggest story of the race," Latino voters moved 25 percentage toward Trump since 2020; he also won a plurality of white women for the third election in a row, according to the outlet's exit poll.
Furthermore, Republicans have won a clear majority in the U.S. Senate. They have already gained three seats, in the wake of Jim Justice's expected win in West Virginia, as well as Bernie Moreno's defeat of incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Tim Sheehy's victory over incumbent Sen. Jon Tester of Montana.
As of this writing, Republican challengers lead Democratic incumbents Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and Jacky Rosen in Nevada. We know that Republicans will control the Senate, and amid what looks like an unexpected MAGA wave, it seems unlikely, although not impossible, that they won't also hold a majority in the House. (Republicans currently have a projected 206 seats in the Senate, with crucial races in states like California and Pennsylvania still to be called.)
Even two years ago, it seemed unlikely that either Trump or Harris would be here. After the chaos of Jan. 6, 2021, the inauguration of Joe Biden and a second impeachment — consider how unlikely that phrase is, all by itself — it was widely assumed that Trump's political career was over and he might be heading for prison, house arrest or (far more likely) a luxurious retirement as a social media avatar based in Dubai or Grand Cayman. Harris was broadly perceived by the Beltway class as a low-impact vice president and perhaps a political liability. We will never know how Harris would have fared in an open Democratic primary campaign, but as the whisper campaign around Biden began to expand, party donors cast loving glances toward California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, among others. The single debate between Biden and Trump in June clearly altered the course of American history — but exactly how is not yet clear.
Both candidates have tried to sound confident of victory in the last week or so, which is customary at this stage of the game. But one of them has run a ragged, undisciplined and often listless campaign, increasingly focused on blatantly false claims and hateful invective, and without the slightest pretense of "moderation" or unifying rhetoric. Yet he now seems very close to defeating the candidate who has run a studied, cautious, relentlessly upbeat but obsessively nonspecific campaign designed to offer nearly all things to nearly all people. One candidate has been convicted of multiple felonies and found liable for sexual assault by a civil jury — and those things have largely played as political advantages against a squeaky-clean former prosecutor whose Black-Indian-Jewish blended family appears to have been carefully cast for a car-insurance commercial.
While the historical precedents behind this election are not the real story, they are striking enough. Trump is trying to become the second president in American history to serve non-consecutive terms (joining the illustrious Grover Cleveland). Harris is the first non-incumbent major-party nominee in 56 years to be chosen without running in the primaries. The last such example was Hubert Humphrey in 1968, also a sitting vice president nominated at a Chicago convention after the incumbent was forced from the race. (Democrats hope to avoid any further parallels.)
It's too early for coherent analysis about whether a red tide of resentful, low-propensity voters, alienated from the undemocratic status quo and eager to punish the so-called elites, have delivered a middle-finger salute to democracy. But it does not appear, at least so far, that the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision and the issue of reproductive rights have proven decisive. Liberals and progressives may perhaps seek comfort in the "anti-anti-Trump" galaxy-brain theory that a Trump win is better for Democrats and the left — because it would supposedly guarantee a major pushback in the 2026 midterms, followed by the first Trump-free presidential election in what seems like a lifetime. Count on just one certainty: The long-term effects of this potentially shocking election will not be what anyone expects.
Democrats successfully framed this election as a contest between normal and "weird," to recycle the cringeworthy epithet from the Harris-Walz peak of early September. But did they manage to convince American voters which of those things they want?
