Trump Did It. It’s Real. Now There’s One Question Left.
Donald Trump has won the 2024 presidential election in a broad shift to the right across the country. He's on track to win more comfortably than he did in 2016, and could end up winning the popular vote. The incumbent party had never won in an instance where so many Americans felt things were on the wrong track, and didn't this time, either. As a result, we are, officially, doing this again.
Shocking doesn't begin to describe Trump's turnaround.
Four years ago, Trump lost, and on his way out, he nearly took the state down with him. His effort to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in an assault on the U.S. Capitol, brought him to new lows—not that the highs had ever been particularly good. For a hot second, there was a realistic chance that the Senate might convict him on impeachment s. The second expired.
Trump still retained just strong enough of a GOP stranglehold over the next couple of years to almost single-handedly blow the 2022 midterms for Republicans. Shortly after that debacle, two years ago this month, Trump announced his candidacy for president. Even inside the Republican Party, Trump's effort to turn the page seemed doomed and pathetic; polls in late 2022 began to show him getting swamped in the GOP primary by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Trump was able to reassert dominance among Republicans, though—partly because the Republicans sent to obstruct him, namely DeSantis, didn't translate well to the national stage. But once he was indicted for various crimes in New York, Atlanta, South Florida, and Washington, the personality cult was reformed. It was time to stop entertaining that he might simply be a loser; he was now something of a martyred folk hero. His GOP competitors stood no chance.
In his rematch with President Joe Biden, a few trends thrust him back into competitiveness. Biden had become abysmally unpopular, and his advanced age and deteriorating condition struck majorities of voters as a major concern about his ability to serve another four years. As time went on and the memories of the chaotic Trump administration, COVID, and Jan. 6 receded, voters began to look back on the humming 2019 economy over which Trump presided more fondly. And after a bullet came within an inch or two of taking his life at a July rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, his favorability ratings jumped to a level higher than they ever were during the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Biden and Trump, coincidentally, made the same biggest mistake of their respective campaigns: agreeing to debate in June. Biden's performance was so bad that his party forced him out of the race. Trump's participation in the early debate had lost him an opponent he was on track to steamroll.
Trump had to work for his victory against Kamala Harris, a fact that took him a good deal of public spiraling over the second half of the summer to accept. He fell behind in polls against her at first, though never too far. Once his campaign began spending money in earnest to define Harris as too far left for the country, or in joint ownership of the worst elements of the Biden administration's record, Trump caught up.
Trump's winning coalition showed a new Republican Party (at least when he's on the ballot). Going by exit polls —a very imperfect measurement, but the best we have right now—the backbone of Trump's coalition was men, of whom he won 54 percent. He improved sharply among voters 18 to 29. One of the most eye-catching statistics shows that he won 45 percent of Latino voters—and an outright majority of Latino men. If that number holds, it would be the GOP's best presidential performance among Latino voters in modern times, besting George W. Bush's high-water mark of 40 percent in 2004. He did not appear to materially increase his numbers among Black voters, but maintained the same marginal improvements he made in 2020. Despite Trump's many questionable comments about race over the years, the past two Trump presidential bids have been marked by racial depolarization—and have been replaced with sharp separation in voting patterns along the lines of gender and college education.
There was so much to throw at Donald Trump—more than any one political organization, namely the Democratic Party, could throw at him. It threw what it could. Democrats could not, however, convince voters that they were better off than they were four years ago. This was not an election decided by small things—a joke in Madison Square Garden, a line in a convention speech, a vice presidential selection, a campaign position on this or that issue. It was voters rejecting the administration's record and the results it had produced.
It's worth distilling Trump's comeback to one element: whether Trump, who was previously in power during an attempt to overturn an election, was viewed as a threat. Democrats tried, for the past day, month, year, four years, and eight years, to argue that he's the greatest threat the country has faced in memory. The case was made. And the voters who decided this election either didn't buy it or concluded that it was worth the risk. Now we all get to find out together.
