Why did Trump win, and what comes next?

What happened in the 2024 election was a political earthquake. Former President Trump not only won in the Electoral College, but he won so big that he expanded his coalition with historic demographic shifts. For the first time in his three runs for president, he is on track to win the popular vote — and have full control of the levers of power in Washington. So how did it happen? Trump's victory starts with the issues that led to a rightward lurch in this election — and was fueled by men. Here's a deeper look and some other takeaways from this election: 1. The issue landscape favored Republicans from the start. For two years, voters have been in a bitter mood about the economy and upset about high border crossings. Despite economic improvements — unemployment is low, wages are up, inflation is down — Americans have continued to chafe at higher than pre-pandemic prices and the lack of affordable housing. Ironically, the Federal Reserve's inflation fix — raising interest rates — meant more expensive borrowing for things like mortgages and car loans. The Fed has started to cut rates, but it will take time for Americans to feel it — right in time for a Trump presidency. Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues lowered interest rates Thursday in response to easing inflation. Voters placed the blame squarely on the Biden administration — despite the U.S. recovering economically better than other developed countries after a pandemic that Americans felt Trump mishandled. But Vice President Harris struggled to separate herself in the eyes of voters on the economy, and Trump's handling of the pandemic was barely an issue this time around with voters nostalgic for the economy of five years ago. Exit polls showed Biden's approval rating at just 40%; two-thirds rated the economy negatively; only a quarter said their financial situation was better now than four years ago; three-quarters said inflation had caused them a severe or moderate hardship over the last year; and voters said they trusted Trump more on not just the economy, but immigration, crime and, while it was lower on the list of priorities — foreign policy, too.Harris led on handling abortion rights, but more narrowly than pre-election polling showed. 2. White voters went up as a share of the electorate for the first time in decades, helping Trump. White voters have sided with Republicans in every presidential election since at least 1976. And in this election, white voters went up as a share of the electorate from 67% to 71%. That is remarkable, considering that, quite simply, white people are a smaller share of the population in the country than ever before. They have been steadily declining as a share of eligible voters, and that is not changing any time soon because of growth with Latinos and Asian Americans. 3. Trump expanded his coalition, driven by men. Trump won an astounding 46% of Latinos in this election. That's the highest ever for a Republican, even higher than George W. Bush in 2004. But that was driven by men. He won a majority of Latino men by double-digits over Harris, while Harris won 60% of Latinas. President-elect Donald Trump praises his campaign senior advisor Susie Wiles during an election night event at the Palm Beach Convention Center on Nov. 6 in West Palm Beach, Fla. Trump has asked Wiles to serve as his chief of staff when he takes office in January. There was a similar gender divide among younger voters. Harris won 61% of women, 18 to 29 years old, while Trump narrowly won young men. In fact, Trump won men in every age group, and Harris was unable to win a large enough share of women to offset Trump's gains. 4. Women turned out as a higher share, but not enough for Harris to win. Women were 53% of the electorate, up a point from 2020. But while Harris won a majority of women — including winning moms while Trump won dads — she only won 53% of women, down from Biden's 57%. Then-President Donald Trump signs an executive order related to reforming the hiring process for federal jobs on June 26, 2020. That was, in particular, because of the pronounced gender divide by education among white voters. Harris won a higher share of white women with college degrees, but Trump won an even wider margin with women who didn't go to college, and there were more of them who voted. Add to that Trump's massive margins with non-college white men and the fact that even white men with college degrees narrowly went for Trump, and Harris just simply couldn't make up that ground. 5. The gender divide brings up the question of when America would be ready for a woman to be president. Things might have turned out differently for Harris if she wasn't tied to the Biden administration, and Trump — or any other Republican — had been president while voters' views of the economy were this bleak. But, in this campaign, it was clear that men and women view women in power differently. There was evidence of this, for example, in the final NPR/PBS News/Marist poll before Election Day. President-elect Donald Trump arrives to speak during an election night event at the Palm Beach Convention Center on Nov. 6, in West Palm Beach, Fla. Trump has articulated ambitious plans for his first 100 days in office. A majority of women said they thought Harris intended to carry out the more moderate proposals she put forward in this campaign as compared to five years ago when she also ran for president. A majority of men, however, doubted her sincerity and thought she was just making those promises to get votes. This will be dissected more in the coming months and years. 6. Ticket-splitting happened, but not enough for Democrats to prevent a GOP wave. Democratic candidates outran the top of the ticket in lots of House and Senate races. In fact, when looking at the margins, they did so in every Senate race Republicans were looking to flip except West Virginia and Maryland. Senate Democratic candidates did better than Harris by roughly 13 points in Montana, 8 in Arizona, 7 in Ohio, 4 in Nevada, 2 in Wisconsin and Michigan and less than 1 in Pennsylvania with vote still being tallied in some places. It wasn't enough, though, for Democrats in Montana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Incumbent Democrat Jacky Rosen is leading narrowly in Nevada. In the House, Democrats were hopeful they could hold onto or flip several races they either lost or likely won't be able to win — including in Pennsylvania, Arizona and California. When all the votes are counted, Democrats may come up just short of winning the majority, because it's just tough to swim against the tide of the top of the ticket in a presidential year. 7. Democratic voter turnout appears to be way off. Biden got 81 million votes in 2020 to Trump's 74 million. Trump is on pace to get close to that, but Harris may come up some 10 million votes short of Biden's 2020 total. Her declines were acute in blue states she won — for example, she was off roughly 900,000 votes in New York, 500,000 in New Jersey and Maryland, 300,000 in Massachusetts, 180,000 in Virginia. Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth Poll, noted Harris' declines were about 15% in the Northeast, Minnesota and Illinois. (There's still a lot of vote out in California, Washington and Oregon.) She was down 10% in red states and about 4% in swing states. It's perhaps not surprising that this would happen when so much of the attention has been trained on an even-smaller-than-usual set of seven swing states. But Trump did not see those declines. He went up in all three regions. 8. The polls underestimated Trump's support again, but they were also useful. The final FiveThirtyEight national polling average had Harris ahead by slightly more than 1 point. DDHQ, factoring in Robert F. Kennedy's campaign, had Harris ahead by slightly less than a point. Trump is on pace to win the popular vote 50%-48%. That 3-point shift is well within the polls' margins of error, and they got right Harris' overall number. FiveThirtyEight's average had Harris at 48%. DDHQ had her at 47%. But there was a continued underestimation of Trump's support nationally and in the key swing states, as has been the case in each of the past three presidential elections, though it is notable that late deciders broke for Trump. He won the 4% of people who said they decided in the last few days by 6 points. He also won the additional 3% who said they decided in the last week by 12. Things usually tend to break one way in elections, and they did again this time. While the polls appeared to again underestimate Trump's support, they did indicate several key storylines that proved true in this election. Harris, and Biden before her, consistently lagged in surveys with Latinos and young voters, for example. And despite a strong opening to Harris' campaign, the polls closed dramatically, starting about a month ago nationally and in the swing states. In fact, the averages had Trump slightly ahead in an average of the swing states. Factoring polling error from past elections, that pointed to the possibility of exactly what happened — a big Trump Electoral College win. 9. Democrats will have to do some soul-searching on the way forward. It is the case that after every election, the losing party goes through a period of trying to figure out where it went wrong and what to do to try to win in the future. There are no clear answers for the Democratic Party, but Democrats continue to struggle to win over working-class voters, a group that used to be solidly in their camp. Harris narrowly lost the suburbs, and maybe more notably, voters who make between $30,000 and $100,000 a year voted for Trump. Harris won those who make more than $100,000 a year, a group Republicans used to win. In other words, Trump won the working and middle class, while Democrats won over college-educated people who are financially better-off. That's a shift in American politics, and unless the Democratic Party can figure out how to win those voters again and not continue to get blown out in rural areas, they are in danger of becoming a party that is strictly for the elites. And there are not enough of those voters for Democrats to win. At the same time, what really matters is the right candidate in the right environment. Remember, it was only a decade ago when Republicans were wringing their hands about how to win over the growing population of Latinos in this country and issuing dire warnings of being in a permanent minority unless the party embraced a comprehensive immigration overhaul. Well, it went a completely different direction — and won a record share of Latinos in this election. So, sometimes, just because things look like they're going a certain way, doesn't always mean that's the way they will.

So, it will be Trump, after all. The very idea of another Trump presidency is devastating. His entire campaign consisted of unbridled race-baiting, woman-hating and fascist-in-waiting messaging, yet still he prevails. This is what succeeds in this country? The answer, it’s now clear, is a resounding yes. Should I be surprised? There are long and painful histories of racism, misogyny and fascism in this country (the Nazis even studied the US when crafting their regime). But, unlike any other nation’s election, this American tragedy will reverberate around the world. We must do all that we can to prevent a Trump presidency turning into even more of a death sentence not just for American women seeking abortions, but also for Ukrainians, Lebanese people and especially Palestinians. Hindsight is easy, of course, but some of us have been warning the Democrats for months about the limitations of the Harris campaign. The Democrats appeared more interested in courting disaffected Republicans, including war criminals such as Dick Cheney, than even merely dialoguing with their progressive flank. They refused to allow a Palestinian American to take the stage at their convention. Meanwhile, American bombs are dropped daily on Palestinians in what is widely considered a genocide, and Harris has had little to say. The sad truth is that anti-feminist backlash helped propel Trump to victory Malaika Jabali Read more In fact, Harris probably had little to say about a lot of issues, so much so that the news site Axios labeled her the “‘no comment’ candidate”. The Republicans ran their campaign as a party of hate; the Democrats ran as a party that stood for almost nothing. Between hate and nothing, hate won. This must be the most profound wake-up call the Democratic party has ever heard. They must stop trying to be moderate Republicans and instead stand for equal justice, working people and human rights for everyone. Saying that they do just isn’t enough. The Democrats thought all the hate emanating from the Trump campaign was simply an emotion that they could neutralize by their expressions of “joy”. But what if hate isn’t an emotion? What if it’s an ideology? The answer to that question is what we, and the rest of the world, are about to find out. Pray for us. Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist

American democracy has fallen apart. That an authoritarian rightwinger will take power is the symptom rather than the cause. What brought us to this point, is the cataclysmic, decades-long breakdown of working-class institutions and civil society. The only path forward is to rebuild somehow. Trump gained or held steady with every demographic, even left-trending groups like white college-educated voters and women. He gained most with young, less politicized voters and voters of color of all stripes. How has this happened? Working-class organization, civil society and the basic institutions that have held the country together have disintegrated. There are very few places where people talk to anyone outside their co-workers – during work – and a small number of friends. We don’t know our neighbors. We don’t have unions. This is a society where trust erodes to an extreme degree, and politics is practiced at the level of the individual rather than the community. Kamala Harris did not run a terrible campaign. She was brought into a terrible situation. Joe Biden’s hubris cost her deeply. But she failed in two directions. She shed young voters, Arab and Muslim voters, and Latino voters who had previously favored the left by running an aggressively bipartisan, centrist campaign, ignoring the active genocide in Palestine supported by the United States. But this didn’t work either. The median voter, the bipartisan moderate voter, rejected her. Americans don’t have organization. And with that, they don’t have active solidarity or a structured worldview. They believe a man who played a businessman on TV can press a button and stop inflation. The voting patterns we have seen with young voters, voters of color and all sorts of voters left behind by our country are striking. Their grievances are real. And Democrats have been unable to offer a solution. Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refused to internalize their limited mandate. On election day the US punished them, returning Donald Trump, a convicted felon, to the White House. And before the Democrats cast half the country as benighted, they ought to look closely in the mirror. In office, Biden racked up decades-high levels of inflation at the same time as openly musing about being more consequential than Barack Obama – not the metric Americans were looking for. As much as Biden-Harris saw Dobbs and democracy as silver electoral bullets, voters without four-year degrees were unimpressed. But it doesn’t end there. Despite Biden’s growing deterioration, he pursued re-election – until it was too late. Meanwhile, his team openly trashed Harris to anyone who would listen. All heard that bell’s peal. On the campaign trail, Harris exhibited joy but failed to show sure-footedness. She clobbered Trump in debate but bobbed and weaved when confronted by interviewers. Her inability to separate herself from her boss coupled with her selection of Tim Walz as her running-mate probably doomed her bid. Think incredible lightness of being. Culture remained a battleground. In 2020 and 2022, Democrats nearly destroyed themselves over “defund the police”. Fast forward to 2024: Harris declined to say where she stood on a Proposition 36, a California ballot measure supported by small businesses that sought to impose felony charges and stiffer sentences for certain theft and drug crimes. The proposition prevailed overwhelmingly; Harris did not. Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992

Joy will come in the morning, fired-up Democrats enthused at the Democratic national convention back in August. It did not. The unthinkable happened in the middle of the night. Trump is back and he’s back with a vengeance. A Trump revenge tour will bring carnage at home and abroad. Netanyahu was already doing whatever he liked under the Biden administration – but we also know he was angling for a Trump victory. For over a year now Palestinians have been grieving; now it seems likely that the West Bank will be annexed and the misery in Gaza, already unbearable, will intensify. And I don’t need to tell you what will happen with women’s rights at home. Overturning Roe v Wade was just the beginning. The right’s war on women is entering a terrifying new phase. How did we get here? How did the US elect an adjudicated and alleged sexual predator over a woman again? This will be dissected for weeks but the bottom line is this: the US was desperate for change and the Harris campaign squandered their chance to meaningfully represent a new path for the country. Harris did not sufficiently break from Biden and Americans did not want a repeat of the last four years. The Harris campaign tried to find a path to victory by moving to the right, ignoring progressives and courting Republicans by parading around Liz Cheney. It didn’t work. And yet the lesson one imagines the Democratic party will draw from this loss is that they must move even further to the right. Things are bleak. But political change isn’t something that only happens every four years at the ballot box. The amount of organizational energy I’ve seen in the last couple of months has been astounding. We must keep this energy up. The fight isn’t over. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Unlike in 2016, many of us were bracing ourselves for this outcome. But how exactly did Donald Trump manage to win the White House a second time? It certainly wasn’t on the merits of his campaign. Trump was less coherent than in 2016, didn’t deliver the same potent appeals to workers, and embraced unpopular billionaires like Elon Musk. But he seemed to have this election handed to him. To start with, there was Joe Biden. The headline features of “Biden’s economy” were strong as far as GDP growth and jobs went, but Biden was unable to effectively communicate his domestic successes and take advantage of his bully pulpit as president. As a result, 45% of voters, the highest number in decades, said they were financially worse off than they were four years ago. Good policies don’t translate to good politics without an effective voice behind them and the president was unable to head off worries about inflation and immigration. The failures caused by his declining ability manifested itself most dramatically at the first presidential debate and Harris was forced to run from behind when she became the presumptive nominee. Harris herself ran a competent campaign, but was limited by the very nature of today’s Democratic coalition: it’s increasingly the party (in both style and substance) of professional-class people. Even though Harris herself shied away from it, the Democrats as a whole are still associated with identitarian rhetoric and relied on cross-class issues like abortion – which turned out to be less salient than the economy – to drive turnout. The type of majorities that can actually transform American politics won’t be found until Democrats return to their economic populist, New Deal roots. That means naming elites as enemies and avoiding cultural radicalism that appeals to very few and alienates working-class minority communities. This isn’t Harris’s loss; it belongs to her whole party. And the whole country will pay the consequences. Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities

Trump won a personal victory in the 2024 election, sweeping all the swing states, improving his vote share just about everywhere, and—unlike his 2016 victory—garnering an outright majority of the popular vote. In addition, he led the Republican Party to a larger-than-expected Senate majority and, although many House races remain to be called, an expanded House majority may result as well. These gains are more than incremental; indeed, they may signal a new era in American politics. Political scientists and historians will spend years analyzing the causes and significance of this election. My focus is more immediate. Although the data are imperfect and incomplete, I will offer preliminary answers to two questions, which are really two sides of the same coin: Why did Donald Trump win the 2024 presidential election, and why did Kamala Harris lose? Trump’s victory Donald Trump’s theory of the case was broadly correct. He and his campaign managers believed that it was possible to build on Republicans’ growing strength among white working-class voters to create a multi-ethnic working-class coalition. He was right: If the exit polls turn out to be accurate, he made strides among Latinos and African Americans, especially men. He increased his share of the Black male vote from 12% to 20% and carried Hispanic men by nine points, 54% to 45%. The Trump campaign also believed that they could improve their performance among young adults, and they did—from 35% in 2020 to 42% this year. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most of this gain reflected a shift toward Trump among young men. Trump spent lots of time on podcasts, such as Joe Rogan’s, whose principal audiences are this otherwise hard-to-reach group. After the Republican primaries, the victorious Trump forces faced a choice: They could moderate their message to reach out to disappointed backers of Nikki Haley, who ran a traditional Reagan conservative campaign, or they could continue their all-out appeal to the Republican base while enjoying the grudging support of his defeated adversary. They chose the latter course and won the gamble that the party would unite around them. Donald Trump received 94% of the Republican vote and as a bonus, reduced the Democratic edge among Independents from nine points in 2020 to five points this year. The Trump campaign’s tactical choices paid off. Three turned out to be critical. First: Convinced that Trump’s intense personal bond with his supporters would do most of the mobilizing work, the campaign decided not to invest heavily in traditional get-out-the-vote organizing and instead outsourced it to supporting organizations. Although the Harris campaign touted its advantage in the “ground game,” there is little evidence that it made much of a difference. Second: The Trump campaign decided that Harris’ stance on transgender issues was the Willie Horton of 2024 and invested heavily in negative advertising that dominated the airwaves throughout the South.1 Anecdotal evidence suggests that this campaign helped weaken Harris’ effort to portray herself as a common-sense center-left candidate rather than an emissary from San Francisco. Third: Donald Trump chose to modulate his stance on abortion by declaring early on that each state should decide this matter for itself and then doubling down by vowing to veto a national abortion ban. Many longtime foes of abortion were disappointed, and some were outraged. Nevertheless, Trump paid no price, winning 81% of the white evangelical vote—virtually unchanged from four years ago. Harris’ defeat The Harris campaign was always running uphill. She served as vice president to a president whose approval rating plunged in the middle of his first year in office and never recovered. The public’s judgment of his performance on two core issues—inflation and immigration—was harshly negative, and Harris inherited this disapproval when Joe Biden abandoned his quest for a second term. The fact that Biden waited so long to leave the race also worked against Harris. The president’s tardy decision deprived her of the opportunity to sharpen her arguments in a primary fight and shortened the time she had to introduce herself to the voters. She did the best she could in the circumstances by quickly unifying the party and building on Biden’s campaign apparatus rather than starting from scratch, but she never entirely overcame the difficulties stemming from Biden’s timetable. Harris’ theory of the case was flawed. Looking at examples from the 2022 elections, she assumed that putting reproductive rights at the center of her agenda would mobilize an army of angry women and move them to the polls in record numbers. This did not happen. Women’s share of the total vote rose only marginally from its level in 2020, and Harris’ share of the women who voted did not increase from Biden’s 2020 levels. It is hard to judge how much this emphasis on abortion contributed to Harris’ poor showing among men—just 43%, down from Biden’s 48% in 2020—but it did nothing to convince them that a Harris administration would be sensitive to their concerns. Her closing argument—that Donald Trump posed a clear and present danger to democracy—fared little better. This happened in part because many Republicans and Independents saw Harris and the Democrats as the real threats to democracy, and also because the charge offered no new information that would sway voters whose minds weren’t made up. Donald Trump may be the best-known candidate in modern American history, making it difficult to change anyone’s view of him. Harris’ tactical choices made her problems worse. First, she spurned opportunities to create a clearer political profile. Although Biden’s unpopularity burdened her campaign, she refused to separate herself from him in any way that broke through to persuadable voters. Similarly, by refusing to explain why she had abandoned the progressive positions on crime, immigration, health care, and climate change, she blurred the public’s perception of her and opened the door to the Trump campaign’s charge that she was a closet radical. Thinking back to the successful campaign of Bill Clinton in 1992, some Democrats were hoping Harris would have a “Sister Souljah” moment in which she broke with some party orthodoxy in order to show her independence, but this did not happen. Second, Harris’ decision to avoid media interviews during the first half of her campaign created the impression that she was dependent on scripted remarks and afraid to think on her feet. Answering tough questions can enhance a candidate’s reputation for competence and character, a potential upside to which Harris and her campaign seemed oblivious for much too long. Conclusion Democrats knew that the election would be close, but the scope of their defeat will likely trigger recriminations first and then an extended period of soul-searching. As was the case after Michael Dukakis’ defeat in 1988, the party will be forced to engage in a debate about the causes of its defeat, and what is sure to be a long and lively primary campaign will determine the path forward. Meanwhile, President Trump will be challenged to honor the sweeping promises he made during his campaign. It remains to be seen whether he can impose massive tariffs without raising costs for average families and triggering another round of inflation. Also uncertain is whether he can quell conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East as quickly as he claims while reducing America’s global commitments. And it is possible that trying to deport millions of immigrants present in the U.S. could blow up in his face by creating civil strife and a backlash among Latino voters who have rallied to this cause. If he fails to meet the hopes that he has aroused, especially in the new supporters who provided his majority, he and his party may pay a price in 2026 and beyond.

President Obama transformed the Democratic Party into a bastion of elite progressivism that alienated the working class. Throughout the course of the 2016 election, the conventional groupthink was that the renegade Donald Trump had irrevocably torn apart the Republican Party. His base populism supposedly sandbagged more experienced and electable Republican candidates, who were bewildered that a “conservative” would dare to pander to hoi polloi by promising deportations of illegal aliens, renegotiation of trade agreements that “ripped off” working people, and a messy attack on the reigning political correctness. It was also a common complaint that Trump had neither political nor military experience. He trash-talked his way into the nomination, critics said, which led to defections among the outraged Republican elite. By August, a #NeverTrump movement had taken root among many conservatives, including some at National Review, The Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal. Many neoconservatives who formerly supported President George W. Bush flipped parties, openly supporting the Clinton candidacy. Trump’s Republican critics variously disparaged him as, at best, a Huey Long or Ross Perot, whose populist message was antithetical to conservative principles of unrestricted trade, open-border immigration, and proper personal comportment. At worse, a few Republican elites wrote Trump off as a dangerous fascist akin to Mussolini, Stalin, or Hitler. For his part, Trump often sounded bombastic and vulgar. By October, after the Access Hollywood video went viral, many in the party were openly calling for him to step down. Former primary rivals like Jeb Bush and John Kasich reneged on their past oaths to support the eventual Republican nominee and turned on Trump with a vengeance. By the end of the third debate, it seemed as if Trump had carjacked the Republican limousine and driven it off a cliff. His campaign seemed indifferent to the usual stuff of an election run—high-paid handlers, a ground game, polling, oppositional research, fundraising, social media, establishment endorsements, and celebrity guest appearances at campaign rallies. Pundits ridiculed his supposedly “shallow bench” of advisors, a liability that would necessitate him crawling back to the Republican elite for guidance at some point. What was forgotten in all this hysteria was that Trump had brought to the race unique advantages, some of his own making, some from finessing naturally occurring phenomena. His advocacy for fair rather than free trade, his insistence on enforcement of federal immigration law, and promises to bring back jobs to the United States brought back formerly disaffected Reagan Democrats, white working-class union members, and blue-dog Democrats—the “missing Romney voters”—into the party. Because of that, the formidable wall of rich electoral blue states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina crumbled. Beyond that, even Trump’s admitted crudity was seen by many as evidence of a street-fighting spirit sorely lacking in Republican candidates that had lost too magnanimously in 1992, 2008, and 2016 to vicious Democratic hit machines. Whatever Trump was, he would not lose nobly, but perhaps pull down the rotten walls of the Philistines with him. That Hillary Clinton never got beyond her email scandals, the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation wrongdoing, and the Wikileaks and Guccifer hackings reminded the electorate that whatever Trump was or had done, he at least had not brazenly broken federal law as a public servant, or colluded with the media and the Republican National Committee to undermine the integrity of the primaries and sabotage his Republican rivals. Finally, the more Clinton Inc. talked about the Latino vote, the black vote, the gay vote, the woman vote, the more Americans tired of the same old identity politics pandering. What if minority bloc voters who had turned out for Obama might not be as sympathetic to a middle-aged, multimillionaire white woman? And what if the working white classes might flock to the politically incorrect populist Trump in a way that they would not to a leftist elitist like Hillary Clinton? In other words, the more Clinton played the identity politics card, the more she earned fewer returns for herself and more voters for Trump. In the end, the #NeverTrump movement fizzled, and most of the party rightly saw, after putting aside the matter of his character, that Trump’s agenda was conservative in almost every area—immigration, energy, gun rights, taxes and regulation, abortion, health care, and military spending. In areas of doubt—foreign policy and entitlements—voters reasoned that sober and judicious Republican advisors would surround and enlighten Trump. As a result, Republican voters, along with working class Democrats and Independents voted into power a Republican President, Republican Congress, and, in essence, a Republican judiciary. Trump’s cunning and energy, and his unique appeal to the disaffected white working class, did not destroy the Republican down ballot, but more likely saved it. Senators and Representatives followed in Trump’s wake, as did state legislatures and executive officers. Any Republican senatorial candidate who voted for him won election; any who did not, lost. Trump got a greater percentage of Latinos, blacks, and non-minority women than did Romney, and proved to be medicine rather than poison for Republican candidates. With hindsight, it is hard to fathom how any other Republican candidate might have defeated Clinton Inc.—or how, again with hindsight, the Party could be in a stronger, more unified position. In contrast, the Democratic Party is torn and rent. Barack Obama entered office in 2009 with both houses of Congress, two likely Supreme Court picks, and the good will of the nation. By 2010 he had lost the House; by 2012, the Senate. And by 2016, Obama had ensured that his would-be successor could not win by running on his platform. A failed health care law, non-existent economic growth, serial zero interest rates, near record labor non-participation rates, $20 trillion in national debt, a Middle East in ruins, failed reset and redlines, and the Iran deal were albatrosses around Democratic Party’s neck. Obama divided the country with the apology tour, the Cairo Speech, the beer summit, the rhetoric of disparagement (“you didn’t build that,” “punish our enemies,” etc.), the encouragement of the Black Lives Matter movement, and a series of anti-Constitutional executive orders. In other words, even as Obama left the Democrats with ideological and political detritus, he also had established an electoral calculus built on his own transformative identity that neither had coattails nor was transferrable to other candidates. Indeed, his hard-left positions on redistribution, social issues, sanctuary cities, amnesty, foreign policy, and spending would likely doom candidates other than himself who embraced them. The Bernie Sanders candidacy was the natural response, on the left, to Obama’s ideological presidency. But the cranky socialist septuagenarian mesmerized primary voters on platitudes that would have proven disastrous in a general election—before meekly whining about Clinton sabotage and then endorsing the ticket. What then has the Democratic Party become other than a hard left and elite progressive force, which without Obama’s personal appeal to bloc-voting minorities, resonates with only about 40 percent of the country? The Democratic Party is now neither a centrist nor a coalition party. Instead, it finds itself at a dead-end: had Hillary Clinton emulated her husband’s pragmatic politics of the 1990s, she would have never won the nomination—even though she would have had a far better chance of winning the general election. Wikileaks reminded us that the party is run by rich, snobbish, and often ethically bankrupt grandees. In John Podesta’s world, it’s normal and acceptable for Democratic apparatchiks to talk about their stock portfolios and name-drop the Hamptons, while making cruel asides about “needy” Latinos, medieval Catholics, and African-Americans with silly names—who are nonetheless expected to keep them in power. Such paradoxes are not sustainable. Nor is the liberal nexus of colluding journalists, compromised lobbyists, narcissistic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, family dynasties, and Clintonian get-rich ethics. The old blue-collar middle class was bewildered by the leftwing social agenda in which gay marriage, women in combat units, and transgendered restrooms went from possible to mandatory party positions in an eye blink. In a party in which “white privilege” was pro forma disparagement, those who were both white and without it grew furious that the elites with such privilege massaged the allegation to provide cover for their own entitlement. In the aftermath of defeat, where goes the Democratic Party? It is now a municipal party. It has no real power over the federal government or state houses. Its once feared cudgel of race/class/gender invective has become a false wolf call heard one too many times. The Sanders-Warren branch of the party, along with the now discredited Clinton strays, will hover over the party’s carcass. Meanwhile, President Obama will likely ride off into the sunset to a lucrative globe-trotting ex-presidency. His executive orders will systematically be dismantled by Donald Trump, leaving as his legacy a polarizing electoral formula that had a shelf life of just two terms.

Election night 2024 felt like the sequel to Election 2016: Many of the beats were the same, but the particulars were different. The early returns were ominous, and prospects did not improve from there. I was not as surprised, and yet it affected me as deeply if not more so. If you are anything like me, you have been trying to hold many different ideas in your head at once these past few days — and you still have a lot of questions. I won’t pretend to have all the answers, because nobody does. But we have collected your questions from the Vox Instagram page, our Explain It to Me inbox, and the Explain It to Me podcast phone line. Here are four common queries from Vox’s readers and listeners, with my best read on them (with an assist from one of Vox’s most astute young political minds) as we sift through the fog of Election Week. Did Trump overperform or did Harris underperform? We all want to apportion blame or credit. Was Kamala Harris doomed by the political environment? Or did her campaign make missteps? Both can be true. Which one determined the outcome more? The truth is, it’s hard to say what was determinative. Nate Silver can run 80,000 simulations of the election, but the rest of us only get to live through one reality. We can’t know the counterfactual and it will take time for the data that tells the story of this election to come into focus. With that caveat out of the way, I am skeptical that Harris ever had a chance — and I’m more inclined to pin her loss on the conditions under which she was running, rather than the choices she made as she ran. Something stuck out to me throughout election night: Whenever MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki would pull up some bellwether county in a swing state, he would compare the 2024 margins to 2020 and 2016. He would often point out Donald Trump was returning to his 2016 levels, while Harris trailed President Joe Biden’s 2020 performance, closer to (and yet usually above) Clinton in 2016. Look at this map from the Washington Post that charts the shift from 2020 to 2024 in the presidential race by county. It’s red arrows all over. You should read exit polls with caution, but it would appear Trump made gains with voters across the board. That suggests to me there was a structural problem, as much as any strategic one, for Harris. Luckily, we don’t have to look far for structural explanations. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp wrote on the wave of anti-incumbency worldwide that seems to have carried Trump and sunk Harris. It’s damaged conservatives (in the UK) and liberals (in South Korea). The constant is people being fed up with those in power after Covid-19 and the global inflation that followed. The aggregated economic indicators might still be solid, but wage growth has only narrowly outpaced inflation. Consumers aren’t feeling flush with cash and slowing inflation does not mean no inflation. Interest rates have also stayed high, adding to the sense that things are expensive. America might also be a little more conservative than Democrats thought, which is why Trump sought to portray Harris as an out-of-touch liberal. Maybe the Biden-Harris administration could have handled inflation better. But it’s vexed governments everywhere. More than anything, people were simply frustrated: In an October Gallup poll, 72 percent of US adults said they were dissatisfied with how things were going in the country. It’s going to be hard for any incumbent national leader to win in that environment. Let’s remember the state of the 2024 campaign after the Biden-Trump debate and the clear evidence of improvement in Democrats’ chances after Harris took over. She attempted to circumvent Americans’ anger with the status quo by running as the challenger even while she was the sitting vice president. But it didn’t work, and maybe it never could. People were sick of the Biden-Harris administration. They wanted a change. That’s what Trump was selling. What is Trump going to do? Here’s the big takeaway, beyond any specifics that could be subject to change: Trump is less likely to be constrained by other Republicans, by advisers who are more loyal to the office than him personally, and by democratic norms than he was during his first term. Now for the specifics. The day after his victory, Trump’s campaign pledged to start “the largest mass deportation operation” in US history on his first day back in office, a signal that he may be even more aggressive on his signature issue. He could enact those tariffs as he pleases unless Congress stops him in the next two months. His team has telegraphed an immediate expansion of oil and gas exploration. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has brashly said that the Trump administration would advise the removal of fluoride from American water supplies on day one, a preview of the public health agenda likely to follow. We can also expect some kind of shake-up within the federal bureaucracy. It is worth sounding a note of caution, however. Trump signed the so-called “Muslim ban” on January 27, 2017, but it was blocked by the courts, including the Supreme Court. It took him a year and a half to get an altered version okayed by the judiciary. Likewise, Trump’s attempt to approve Medicaid work requirements was later stopped by a federal judge. One of the biggest questions of a second Trump term is: How much will the judiciary restrain him, if his own people won’t? In Congress, Trump and Republicans are already hankering to cut more taxes and slash the social safety net. But actually passing those plans is still going to be hard. Control of the House is still undecided and even if the GOP wins it, their margin will be extremely thin. The failure to repeal Obamacare in 2017 is a very recent example of a newly minted Republican majority’s top priority failing because of public backlash. What does Trump’s election mean for the world? Before the election even occurred, one Vox reader asked us: Why do US elections matter so much for the rest of the world? The US has the most powerful military in the world, it is one of the two most important diplomatic players in global affairs (though China has caught up), and its foreign aid programs are a vital lifeline for humanitarian efforts around the world. On foreign policy in particular, Trump has plenty of discretion to do as he pleases without much or any input from Congress. We know the consequences of this enormous power’s misuse. The US military has obviously been used for terrible ends, US diplomacy can be ineffectual, and US-funded humanitarianism has a mixed track record. That is why the fate of not only 330 million Americans but many millions more around the world was altered by Trump’s election. Israel’s war in Gaza, the effort to contain mpox in Africa, the famine in Sudan, the war in Ukraine, Taiwan’s future as an independent nation — these are some of the high-profile issues over which Donald Trump, rather than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, will have significant leverage and influence. PEPFAR, the AIDS relief program that became the signature success of the bipartisan global health consensus that took shape under George W. Bush, will need to be reauthorized next year, and there are signs of Republican support wavering. Trump will hold the veto pen during that congressional debate. What will actually happen? I don’t know. But I know Trump’s election has defined what will be possible. What do Democrats do now? I want to briefly hand the newsletter over to Vox senior political reporter Christian Paz, who sat down with Explain It To Me podcast host Jonquilyn Hill to analyze this year’s election and has as good of a read on the state of the Democratic Party as anyone: There’s still this assumption that a diversifying America would inevitably lead to progressive or liberal or Democratic dominance, regardless of other factors, which once again, keeps being proven wrong and wrong. In fact, this election will be one where racial polarization decreases, especially among Latino voters. They voted similarly or in the similar direction or similar swing as white voters. The Democrats got the turnout they wanted, but it turns out that the voters that were turning out just didn’t want to vote for a Democrat. The Democrats bet a lot on educated and suburban voters, while expecting to maintain their previous margins with working-class voters of color and snagging enough white working-class voters to push them over the top. That bet didn’t pay off. It will take months for Democrats to figure out how to recalibrate going forward, in the 2026 midterms and beyond. Looking at the 2024 fallout so far, Christian said, “There’s a mixed bag [in terms] of just what it is that the electorate wants.” This story was featured in the Explain It to Me newsletter. Sign up here. For more from Explain It to Me, check out the podcast. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

Washington CNN — From the beginning, everyone underestimated Donald Trump. He pulled off a stunning victory after the most unprecedented of presidential campaigns. Trump channeled the fury of average Americans against Washington. He tapped into their anxiety about the present and the fear of the future. He spoke to the pain they felt about working hard and getting left behind. And in doing so, he eviscerated every convention about politics. The pundits thought Trump’s reality show antics, his vulgar rhetoric, speeches filled with falsehoods and insults thrown at almost every sector of American society – Latinos, African Americans, war heroes, women and Muslims – would disqualify him from the presidency. It didn’t. Instead Trump marshaled a movement – a modern day uprising of forgotten Americans, reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” of the late 1960s. How Clinton lost He argued that Americans were hungering for change and that he alone could “drain the swamp” by sweeping away corruption in Washington. Changing the map Trump said he would change the complexion of the electoral map – putting Democratic states in the decaying industrial Midwest into the Republican column with his anti-trade rhetoric. He did. He said he could humble the most talented Republican field in a generation: He did. He said he could teach Republicans to beat their nemesis – the Clintons. He did. He said the polls were wrong and that he would pull off a surprise that would dwarf the shocking poll-defying Brexit vote in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. And he was right. Trump’s rewriting of the rules of politics could usher in a period of global turmoil and uncertainty, as US allies, foreign markets and the Americans who were revolted by his behavior during the campaign look to the future with deep anxiety. How politicians, pollsters and media missed Trump’s groundswell The question now, is when he becomes the most powerful man in the world in January, whether Trump will try to rewrite the rules and conventions of American government and the international system, just as fundamentally as he rewrote the rules of American presidential elections. Trump pledged unity during a victory speech in the early morning hours Wednesday. “I say it is time for us to come together as one united people,” he said. “I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans.” Still, Trump pulled off one of the most staggering upsets in the history of Western democracy. As recently as a month ago, pundits were still contemplating the possibility of a Hillary Clinton landslide. But the polls began to tighten, returning the race to a more accurate reflection of a deeply polarized country. Then came uncertainty as FBI Director James Comey cast a new cloud of suspicion over Clinton’s campaign, reopening a review of emails tied to her server. Clinton allies said the damage was undeniable – their hope of swaying those final persuadable Republican women and independents – suddenly looked bleaker. As late as this weekend, the polls suggested Trump would have to run a near perfect race and chart a very narrow path to the White House, essentially pulling an inside straight. Relying on the RNC Somehow the candidate – who relied almost entirely on the Republican National Committee for his ground game – outmanned the Clinton campaign. The results Tuesday night stunned strategists from both parties. Many of the supporters who had gathered for Clinton’s celebration in New York were shocked, some of them crying as they watched the states roll in for Trump. Early on Tuesday, Obama’s former chief strategist, David Plouffe, tweeted a picture of vodka and Orange Crush, with the optimistic message: “Ready to watch her victory speech.” Eight hours later, Plouffe tweeted that he had never “been as wrong on anything” in his life. “Still a beating heart in WI, and the two (congressional districts in Nebraska and Maine). But sobriety about what happened tonight is essential.” The world reacts to U.S. election results While Trump fueled an enormous amount of enthusiasm among working class voters and brought many new voters to the polls, many Republicans were also quick to credit the RNC, which essentially ran Trump’s entire ground game. One Republican strategist noted that unlike in past campaigns, the GOP had permanent staff on the ground since the summer of 2013 in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada. Working off the model of what the Obama campaign had done in 2008 and 2012, they spent the early days recruiting organizers and volunteers, testing their GOTV prowess in 2014. Over the past three years, they plowed money into voter registration and field staff – flipping ten counties in Florida, for example, from a Democratic advantage to a Republican advantage. GOP aides said they cut the voter registration disadvantage that Mitt Romney had in 2012 by half. Around the time of the Republican National Convention, the Trump campaign and the RNC forged an awkward alliance. Instead of building their own ground game, the Trump campaign looked at the infrastructure that the RNC had built to support the Republican nominee and agreed to work within that framework. Many of the voters drawn to Trump’s campaign were new to the political process. So throughout the year, the RNC conducted countless trainings for phonebanking and door-knocking.

CNN — President-elect Donald Trump won across the map — improving on Republican margins nearly everywhere and delivering on his promises to win over more non-White voters on his way to defeating Vice President Kamala Harris. Now that the dust has settled on the 2024 presidential election, a dive into CNN’s exit polls and county-by-county results compared with previous races offers an even more detailed glimpse at how Trump won. And perhaps more important for Democrats, the results paint a daunting picture of a party whose national coalition has fractured — with suburbs where they’ve won squeezed as tight as they can be, Latinos rapidly realigning with the GOP, and Trump posting the sorts of marginal gains among both urban and rural voters that are difficult to overcome. Here are five takeaways on the voters Trump won and what it means moving forward: The Latino realignment A trend with the potential to remake the American political landscape is the huge shift in Latino voters toward Trump. His gains were visible nationwide, but were particularly glaring in Florida. Trump cruised to a nearly 12-point win in Miami-Dade County, home to a massive population of Cuban Americans and a large and growing number of Venezuelan immigrants. He was the first Republican presidential nominee to win the county in 36 years. Perhaps more ominous for Democrats outside of the Sunshine State, though, was Trump’s strong performance in the Orlando area, where the Latino population is largely Puerto Rican — and therefore the results more reflective of what’s happening outside Florida as well. Harris’ campaign had hoped the pro-Trump comedian referring to the island as “garbage” at a Madison Square Garden rally would pay off with those voters. But the results showed they had moved hard in Trump’s favor. Trump’s 1.5-point win in Osceola County flipped a location that President Joe Biden won by 14 points four years earlier. Trump’s performance similarly improved in Orange County, home of Orlando, where Biden won by 23 points in 2020 but Harris won by just 5.6 points this year. CNN’s exit poll showed the dramatic swing in Latino voters over just a four-year period. In 2020, Biden won Latino voters nationally, 65% to Trump’s 32%. For Harris, the advantage was just 52% to Trump’s 46% — a huge slippage among a demographic that makes up 12% of the overall electorate. With Latino men, the numbers were even more stark. Trump won Latino men by 12 points — a 35-point swing from 2020. If the dramatic shift continues in future elections, it could remake the American political map, with consequences ranging from presidential races to state legislative battles and more. GOP’s big border gains Latino voters’ shift was also on display on the border — particularly in the Rio Grande Valley in southeast Texas. Starr County, which is 97% Hispanic, hadn’t backed a Republican presidential nominee since 1892 — and it hadn’t really been close: Hillary Clinton won there by 60 points in 2016. But Trump broke that streak this year, winning Starr County by 16 points. It was a vivid example of the valley’s rapid political evolution. The tough-on-border-security message Trump hammered nationally hit home in the Texas borderland, where residents — many of whom have been in the United States for generations — feel the effects of border crossings acutely. Republicans’ cultural appeals and organizing efforts have also paid dividends. There is reason for Democrats to believe they can stop, or at least slow, this shift. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz made gains but did not rack up the same huge border wins that Trump did. A Democratic incumbent, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, narrowly held on to his Rio Grande Valley seat — though it was a much closer race than he’d faced against the same opponent in 2022. So did Rep. Henry Cuellar, the most conservative Democrat in the House. The good news for Republicans: It wasn’t just Texas. In the swing state of Arizona, Yuma County — a border county in the state’s southwestern corner — went to Trump by 6 points in 2020. He won the county by 29 points this year. Trump’s urban improvement Trump criticized Detroit while he was in Detroit. He accused Harris of ruining San Francisco, where she’d been district attorney. He held a rally in deep-blue New York City, despite the state not being in play. While the effectiveness of his campaign tactics is debatable, what’s undeniable is that the former president tapped into a simmering discontent in urban areas, where local governments are led almost exclusively by Democrats. Trump’s percentage of the vote in Wayne County, home of Detroit, ticked upward by 3.4 percentage points compared with 2020. Harris’ percentage dropped by 5.7 points. And the Democratic ticket won the state’s most populous county — one where racking up huge margins is critical to the party’s hopes statewide — by 85,000 fewer votes than it had in 2020. Trump’s gains are explained in part by his appeals to Black men, and his efforts to reach out to Arab American voters. The urban swings toward Trump were evident across the political map. He gained significant ground in New York City and the surrounding counties. But even small gains, like the 2 to 3 points he appears to have improved in Philadelphia compared to 2020, is significant: It chopped the Democratic raw vote edge there down by about 55,000 votes. Trump’s improvement was fueled in part by Black men. CNN’s exit polls showed just a 2-point shift among Black men toward Trump nationally. But the shift was much bigger in some key states, like Pennsylvania, where Biden’s 89% to 10% edge turned into a 72% to 26% win for Harris, and North Carolina, where Biden’s 91% to 8% advantage was just 78% to 21% for Harris. Harris’ suburban flatline Headed into Election Day, two potentially outcome-deciding questions loomed: Would Trump’s yearslong efforts to appeal to men, particularly young and non-White men, show up at the polls? And would Harris be able to outpace him by further building on recent Democratic wins in the suburbs? The answers: Yes. And no. The only group with whom Harris improved on Biden’s margins was college-educated women. Her campaign had hoped for big gains with those voters — people who helped drive Democratic midterm wins in 2018 and 2022, and who might have backed former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. It’s why she campaigned alongside former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, who lost her House seat in a 2022 primary after vehemently opposing Trump, in the race’s closing days. But they were nowhere near enough to stop her overall slide. One window into Harris’ failure is the counties surrounding Detroit. Oakland County, sprawling suburban territory that both campaigns had visited in the race’s closing days. Harris won by 10 points and 85,000 votes — short of the 14-point, 114,000-vote win Biden had notched there in 2020. Macomb County, where Trump had won by 8 points and 40,000 votes four years ago, went to the former president by 14 points and 70,000 votes. Those marginal gains for Trump add up very quickly in a state where he defeated Harris by 78,000 votes. Trump also showed improvement in the Western battlegrounds, including Nevada — where different mail-in ballot counting rules means the vote is being tallied more slowly, but early indications are that Trump made significant gains, particularly among newly registered independent voters in and around Las Vegas. Independents made up a bigger share of Nevada’s overall electorate than they did in 2020, and they swung 8 points in Trump’s favor. Where Democratic presidential nominees can’t win The deep challenge the national Democratic Party faces with rural voters was on vivid display in two states the party hasn’t won on the presidential level in a generation: Missouri and Kentucky. In Missouri, policies broadly backed by Democrats won popular support. Voters this year approved statewide ballot measures guaranteeing abortion rights, raising the minimum wage and mandating paid sick leave. Harris, though? Blown out by 15 points. In Kentucky — the same state that reelected a Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, last year in a campaign that focused largely on cultural battles like abortion rights and transgender rights — voters resoundingly rejected a proposed school voucher program. They also rejected Harris, handing Trump a 30-point victory. Virtually across the board, Trump picked up even more votes in the largely White, working-class, rural regions where Republicans have long dominated. Those marginal gains made the challenge for Harris of putting together a winning coalition even more daunting — and, ultimately, impossible. What Democrats will have to grapple with as the party enters a period of soul-searching is why the national party’s brand is so toxic with voters who have sided with the party on policy, and at times handed the party local victories.

Editor’s note, November 6, 6:07 am ET: Donald Trump has won the 2024 presidential election. For more of our 2024 campaign coverage, click here. To learn more about the implications of Trump’s win, you can also watch this video. Though votes are still being counted and several battleground states remain to be called, we can see a handful of trends developing in the 2024 election. Former President Donald Trump is once again showing that he can turn already ruby-red parts of the country even more Republican. And in the suburbs, where Democrats have made gains throughout the Trump era, those gains seem inconsistent at best this time around. Meanwhile, though it’s still too early to say for sure, it appears that Trump has made large-scale inroads with voters of color, particularly in Latino communities. Exit polls, the main way commentators and journalists try to make sense of the electoral trends happening nationally, are notoriously unreliable, and it will be weeks, or months, before they paint a full picture. But here are some trends that appear clear so far. Trump has been able to maximize his support in rural areas Everyone expected Trump to dominate in rural areas. What wasn’t clear, however, was whether he could improve on the already large margins by which he won in 2020. Still, it seems that he has. Early in the night, Trump built big cushions of support in Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia, and North Carolina. That trend continued throughout the night. In rural counties across Pennsylvania, for example, the general trend as votes were counted was that Trump was able to both increase turnout and increase his margin of support in the GOP heartland. One obvious example of this rural surge: Lackawanna County, home to President Joe Biden’s hometown of Scranton, swung 5.6 points to the right from 2020 — even though Vice President Kamala Harris still looked on track to win the county by the smallest of margins. The suburban shift toward Democrats stalled To offset those expected GOP margins of support in rural places, Democrats have had to rely not just on winning urban centers, but getting a boost in surrounding suburbs. Those suburbs have been trending toward Democrats since 2016 — but it’s not clear today that this leftward lurch has continued. The first clear sign of trouble in the suburbs came from northern Virginia’s Loudoun County, a Washington, DC, suburb with a large concentration of college-educated voters. Biden won it by about 25 points in 2020; this year, Harris appears to have won it by just about 17 points. In Indiana’s Hamilton County, seen as perhaps an early indicator of other trends because of its Indianapolis suburbs, Harris was trailing Trump by about 6 points — running nearly even with Biden’s performance in 2020 (Trump +7). Still, other suburbs around the country did continue that Democratic drift. In the suburban counties surrounding Atlanta, for example, Harris was on track to do a bit better than Biden in 2020, increasing the Democratic margin in Cobb and Gwinnett counties by about a point each. Democratic support among voters of color, especially Latinos, is continuing to erode Pre-election polling indicated that Trump was on track to post historic gains in support from nonwhite voters. Though we don’t have great national data yet (early exit polls can be unreliable), we did see some dramatic shifts from places with large Latino populations. The most obvious example is Florida. The state moved in a decidedly Republican direction, and its Latino electorate did as well. Miami-Dade County, which used to be a reliably Democratic county with a huge Cuban American population, swung for Trump by double digits. Osceola, a county with a large Puerto Rican community, also flipped for Trump, after Biden won it by 14 points. And more specifically, cities with large Puerto Rican and Cuban populations, like Kissimmee and Hialeah, saw a dramatic drop-off in Democratic support, according to Democratic firm Equis Research’s analysis. One caveat: Florida’s Latino population is unlike those in other parts of the country — it’s much more diverse in terms of national origin and had already been shifting toward Republicans after 2020. Still, similar swings happened in South Texas, where Trump expanded his margins in the county he won in 2020, Zapata; flipped two more counties (Starr and Cameron); and ran nearly even with Harris in Hidalgo and Webb counties. Beyond those two states, which drifted further red, national exit polls, as unreliable as they may be, seem to be painting a broader picture of eroding Democratic support with Latinos: Early results suggest Democrats just barely won the majority of these voters, after exit polls in 2020 signaled Biden won about two-thirds.