“Trump retakes power,” boomed a CNN headline after the far-left cable news network grudgingly acknowledged that former and future U.S. president Donald J. Trump had won a sufficient margin in both the decisive electoral college and nominally important popular vote to be declared the victor in America’s 2024 election. The announcement came hours after multiple conservative-leaning media outlets reached the obvious conclusion as the results came in. Trump’s victory confounded almost all legacy analysis and virtually every poll, which up to the very end of the race inaccurately maintained that Trump and his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris were in a statistical dead heat, with Harris enjoying slight leads both nationally and in critical ‘swing states,’ whose electoral votes were virtually certain to determine the final result.
Trump’s victory is historic. It is only the second presidential victory since 1988 in which the Republican candidate won a majority of the popular vote, the last being George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004. It is only the second time in American history for a president to serve two non-consecutive terms, the first being Grover Cleveland, who served from 1885 to 1889 and again from 1893 to 1897. Trump won the highest percentage of racial minority voters of any Republican candidate since at least the 1950s, making huge inroads into black, Hispanic, Arab, Asian, and other populations that had long been part of the Democratic Party’s coalition. The Jewish vote also turned more toward Trump, delivering its highest percentage of Republican votes in a generation. The former and future president also made deep inroads into the youth vote, which went for Joe Biden by 25% in 2020 but for Harris by only 8%this year.
Trump’s victory refuted not only the Democrats, but the Washington establishment, virtually all legacy media, most institutions of American civic life, a sizeable portion of the country’s economic and financial elite, and the traditional leadership of the Republican Party, most of whom came out actively against him. His bid to return to power survived a massive media assault, two impeachments, two assassination attempts, four criminal prosecutions that were widely believed to be politically motivated, civil legal actions that appeared to be designed to bankrupt him, and personal slander as a “fascist” and “Nazi.” To top it all off, the hostile legacy media lavished nearly universal positive attention on his opponent, whose campaign funds exceeded USD 1 billion, several times the amount Trump raised.
But despite it all, Trump prevailed, not merely winning in the electoral college, as he did in 2016, but with an absolute majority of the popular vote, which in American politics implies a mandate exceeding in authority the technical victory of a plurality of votes. Along the way, Trump’s popularity carried down the Republican ticket, helping to win back control of the Senate for his party by a decisive majority, while also likely expanding its existing majority in the House of Representatives. Importantly, the Republican congressional majorities that will take their seats in January are much more closely aligned with Trump than the Republican majorities were in his first term, when they were still establishment-led and contained a significant number of members—especially among the leadership—who were or became anti-Trump, sabotaged his legislative agenda, and even joined with the Democrats to impeach him. They are now almost completely gone and replaced by loyalists.
It is true that Trump was blessed by inept opponents in Biden, who abandoned his reelection bid in July amid unavoidable concerns about his mental fitness for office, and in Harris, who was chosen to be next in line for no reason other than her race and gender. She proceeded to run a campaign that was almost insultingly thin on policy details but heavy on feelings, which did little to answer the real concerns of most American voters.
Trump, by contrast, elaborated detailed solutions to concerns about the economy, which was the most important issue at stake in the election, as well as to illegal immigration, a horrifically mismanaged national problem that also happened to be Harris’ only significant responsibility as Biden’s vice president. Trump had dealt with it effectively in his first term. Trump also scored points on social and cultural issues, including crime, wokeism, radical gender ideology, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which are favored and often overbearingly imposed by the American administrative-managerial caste but angrily rejected by about two-thirds of the public at large. Few Americans vote on foreign policy, but here, too, Trump found fertile ground. Biden’s diplomatic legacy is largely lamentable and scarred by multiple failures to deter aggression by anti-American powers. In addition to Trump’s promises to resolve those conflicts quickly, all of the hostile powers were far more circumspect when he was president and more inclined than Biden to use the threat of force or economic consequences as a deterrent.
As the results pooled on election night, it rapidly became clear that Harris simply had not run a campaign convincing enough to preserve the electoral coalition that had carried Biden over the finish line in 2020—although nearly one-third of Americans believe the results of that year’s election, which was decided by a miniscule 43,000 votes across three states, were themselves fraudulent. This year, the Democratic candidate lost by nearly five million votes, with all swing states falling to Trump. If a fix was in, and there were anecdotal cases of irregularities noted in the days leading up to the 2024 election, Trump’s margins were simply too big to overcome.
Fortunately, there are no questions about the validity of the results. Harris left her supporters without addressing them late on election night and waited until the following afternoon to concede in a telephone call with Trump and, later, in a platitudinous speech in which she promised to “fight” for principles that American progressives care about but do not translate into mass support sufficient to win elections. In the hours that followed, Democrats began to criticize Harris for her lackluster performance. While she has pledged to fulfill her constitutional role as vice president to certify the election in January, she will likely disappear thereafter. Trump and his agenda, by contrast, will define American politics for the rest of the decade.
