Few could have predicted the size and scale of his success last night.
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A red wave
It was around 8.30pm NZT when Donald Trump came out to address his election watch party. He’d not yet been declared the winner, but with 267 electoral votes under his belt – and leading in the yet-to-be-called swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin – his victory was all but assured. Claiming a “magnificent victory”, he promised the cheering crowd “a golden age for America”, while his running mate, JD Vance, said that “we have just witnessed the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America”. Trump also spoke about his popular-vote victory. He’s the first Republican candidate to win a popular majority since 2004, a fact that pretty much sums up Trump’s incredible night. He didn’t just squeak out a narrow victory; he crushed the opposition. “Trump did better, with everyone, everywhere,” tweeted British journalist Lewis Goodall. “It’s a red wave.”
So what happened?
The post-mortems are only just beginning, but already it seems clear that Trump’s victory hinged on two key issues: the economy and immigration. For all voters’ stated concerns about threats to democracy and the right to abortion, the Trump message won out. Despite the backlash following the Puerto Rico “garbage” insult, Trump won Republicans their biggest Latino turnout since 1976. And despite Harris’s favourability ratings consistently beating Joe Biden’s, she vastly underperformed his 2020 election results. As Harris’s loss looked increasingly certain, MSNBC columnist Michael A Cohen tweeted that he expected her to face recriminations, “but it’s hard to point to any glaring mistakes that she made. She ran an excellent campaign.” On the flip side, “Trump ran an awful campaign. He gave a terrible RNC speech, his VP was deeply unpopular, he lost the debate, he had no ground game to speak of, he offended key demographic groups … and none of it mattered.”
How the day unfolded
The earliest polls closed at 1pm NZT, with a spate of safely Democratic or Republican states called by the Associated Press almost immediately after. The first notable result came in Florida – not because Trump’s win was a surprise, but because he improved his already healthy 2020 margins in nearly every county. The biggest shift was in Miami-Dade, previously a rare Democratic stronghold which saw a staggering 18 percentage point movement to the right. At 3pm, New York state was called for Harris. She was never going to lose there, but the size of her margins – down across the board, including in liberal bastion Manhattan – were yet more ominous signs of Democrats’ impending rout.
At 4.40pm the AP called the solidly Republican state of Iowa for Trump. Again, not a surprise – unless you’d been pinning your hopes on revered pollster Ann Selzer, who on Sunday released a shock poll showing Harris leading in the state by three points. Around half an hour later, the AP called North Carolina for Trump. The state had been seen as a potential pick-up for the Democrats, who focused a lot of their campaign spending and canvassing there. They also tried to tie Trump to scandal-plagued Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, ultimately to no avail (Robinson, however, lost his own race).
The following hour, Georgia moved into Trump’s column, returning the state to the party which – other than in 2020 – had won every presidential election there since 1996. At 7.20pm, Fox News called Pennsylvania for Trump, his West Palm Beach watch party erupting in jubilation at the news. With 267 electoral votes, Trump was in an unassailable position. The presidency was his. Confirmation came at 11.34pm, when the AP called Wisconsin, pushing him across the 270-vote finish line.
What Trump’s victory means for the world
A second Trump presidency promises to dramatically reshape international politics. He has made it clear that he plans to make massive changes to US foreign policy, including withdrawing from major treaties and embracing a highly protectionist trade policy that would spark a global trade war, according to Vox. Trump has promised to pull the US out of the Paris climate accords again, after the US reentered the agreement under Biden. The United States’ cooperation with the UN is also under threat, particularly regarding the World Health Organisation, a UN agency that Trump’s administration has criticised in the past. A devastating withdrawal of WHO funding by the US is even more likely if Trump gives vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr a key role in his next administration, as Trump says he will do.
A sliver of good news is that the US will find it extremely difficult to fully abandon NATO, thanks to a law recently introduced by Congress that requires congressional approval for withdrawal from the defence treaty. However Trump could achieve much the same ends by withdrawing forces, closing bases or refusing to invest in joint military infrastructure.
Ukraine on a knife-edge
As for Ukraine, Trump has repeatedly said he could settle the war between Russia and Ukraine in one day if he was elected president again, without giving any indication of how he plans to do it. While many observers expect a new Trump administration to immediately cancel all Ukraine defence funding – all but guaranteeing a Russian victory – Sky News’ security editor Deborah Haynes wasn’t so sure. “While US support for Ukraine would undoubtedly change under a Trump administration, that is not the same as facilitating a complete surrender,” she wrote, arguing that Trump “will not want to be held responsible for the total absorption of Ukraine into Mr Putin’s orbit”.
The Guardian’s Russia expert Luke Harding was a lot more pessimistic. “The Kremlin will be celebrating Trump’s victory, as another era of chaos and US weakness,” he tweeted. “Putin’s goals in Ukraine are as maximalist as ever: to seize as much territory as possible. And to wipe out the country’s statehood, identity, culture. A fascist project, with US connivance.”
More reading:
Donald Trump’s revenge: The former President will return to the White House older, less inhibited, and far more dangerous than ever before. (Susan Glasser, The New Yorker)
Men got exactly what they wanted: How gender became the driving factor of the 2024 election. (Jill Filipovic, Slate)
America hires a strongman: This was a conquering of the nation not by force but with a permission slip. Now, America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history. (Lisa Lerer, New York Times)