Trump improvements in blue states raises questions about Democrats' path forward
Donald Trump is with a dominant Electoral College win that also saw him gain considerable ground in states of all political makeups, including places that have leaned heavily Democratic for decades.
While votes are still being tabulated in a handful of states, Trump appears to be on pace to win the popular vote, making him the first Republican to do so since George W. Bush.
Trump won at least five of the seven battlegrounds — and could do a full sweep if Nevada and Arizona continue trending toward him as votes are counted — he also won more support in traditionally blue states like New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Illinois. won most Democratic-leaning states comfortably, but saw her margins shrink compared to previous elections.
It comes after Trump held a series of rallies in states that he was widely projected to lose in like Virginia, New Mexico and New York City, where a comedian's off-color remark about Puerto Rico sparked days of controversy that ultimately did not come back to bit him on Election Day.
With 97% of the votes counted, Trump has significantly improved upon his performance in New York compared to four years ago. Harris won the state with 56% of the vote but that was a 12-point decline from Biden's win in the heavily Democratic-leaning state. Trump also saw improvements in New York City, winning a higher share of voters in each of its five boroughs.
In neighboring and also heavily Democratic New Jersey, Trump also saw his support grow compared to 2020 despite Democrats controlling every branch of government and outnumbering Republicans by some 900,000 voters. With 93% of the vote in, Trump only lost the state by 5%, a marked improvement from the past two cycles when he lost the state by double-digits.
At his New Jersey rally, Trump suggested that the state could be in play.
"A little birdie told me that we're leading in New Jersey. What's that all about?" Trump said. "We love New Jersey. I always said about New Jersey, I said, 'It's gonna happen there.'"
Democrats have already started to look at the returns to see where the party may have erred and what led them to lose ground. One of the biggest questions facing them heading toward the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election, when Trump will not be at the top of the ticket for Republicans, is whether they will be able to count on what has been their most devoted base of voters since he came into the national political scene ahead of the 2016 election.
Speaking to reporters in a post-election press conference, Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said the results were a "sobering moment" and that the party needs to reflect internally.
"It's clearly economic, kitchen-table issues. It's immigration. No matter what the facts are, it's probably crime and public safety," Murphy said at a post-election press conference. "And it's time to look in the mirror and make sure (we're) either changing substance, if it needs to be changed, or changing how we communicate what we stand for."
The trend was noticeable across other blue-leaning states like Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Mexico and Minnesota, showing cracks in Democrats' coalition that may need to be mended moving forward.
"This is not somehow the end of the Democratic Party, but just very literally, they have a question as to 'do we have to worry about holding some of these safe Democratic states that that wobbled in this election? Do we have to worry about that in the next one?'" said Chris Devine, an associate professor of political science at the University of Dayton. "Because, if so, that could be awfully hard to do two things at once — trying to hold a coalition that lost so badly while also expanding enough to win 270 electoral votes."
Trump's campaign made a specific point to court working-class voters and men of color, two blocs of voters that were crucial to his success on Election Day. Exit polling found he made big gains with Latino men, winning them by some measures after Biden won them by wide margins in 2020. He also made gains with Black men in some states that helped power his margins in the Electoral College.
It's too soon to determine whether Democrats will have longstanding problems keeping the support in their stronghold states and will need to do a realignment of the party's policy platform and outreach to specific voting groups that Trump and other Republicans won or performed better with than in the past.
It is also unclear if 2024's series of unprecedented events that shook up the race, a late entrance to the top of the ticket for Harris, and sour attitudes about the state of the economy along with under the Biden administration added up to be too much for Democrats to overcome.
"After every election, there's a temptation for everyone to focus on what the campaigns did right or wrong," Devine said. "The clearer explanation for this, from a political science perspective and just given some indicators we have, is that by and large, this was a fundamentals election.
"For the most part, it seems like voters were looking at this as a choice between an incumbent administration they didn't really like, and under whom the economy was performing poorly, in their opinion, versus someone else."
