When Donald J. Trump won the presidency eight years ago, it was easy to cast his victory as a narrow one — or even dismiss it as a fluke.
Not this time.
Despite Jan. 6, the end of Roe v. Wade and a felony conviction, Mr. Trump won a clear victory. He is on track to win all seven battleground states. He made gains in every corner of the country and with nearly every demographic group: If you look at The Times’s map of what has changed since 2020, you’ll see a sea of red.
According to our estimates, Mr. Trump is also on track to become the first Republican to win the national popular vote in 20 years.
At the same time, the scope of his victory shouldn’t be overstated. This was no landslide. A one- or two-percentage-point victory in the national popular vote with roughly 312 electoral votes is not unusual. It’s not as large as Barack Obama’s modest win in 2012, and falls far short of “change” elections like Mr. Obama’s in 2008 or Bill Clinton’s in 1992.
But Mr. Trump is not any ordinary candidate. As a consequence, an ordinary victory says a lot more than it usually would. A felon who sought to overturn an election wouldn’t usually be considered viable in a presidential election. But not only was he viable — he won somewhat convincingly.
Despite his victory, most voters found Mr. Trump to be an unappealing candidate. CNN’s exit poll found that just 44 percent of voters had a favorable view of him, compared with 54 percent who had an unfavorable view. A majority of voters, 55 percent, said his views are too extreme. Obviously, there are many aspects of Mr. Trump’s appeal that these simple questions do not easily measure. But Mr. Trump’s victory may say more about the Democrats and the public’s desire for change than it does about the president-elect himself.
After all, on paper, Democrats weren’t in a sound position to win this election. No party has ever retained the White House when the president’s approval rating was as low as it is today and when so many Americans thought the country was on the wrong track.
The signs that voters had soured on Democrats were everywhere. Most obviously, there was President Biden’s failed re-election campaign, which was predicated on the idea that voters found Mr. Trump so distasteful they would look past any misgivings about the incumbent. This assumption publicly collapsed with the first presidential debate, even though voters had been telling pollsters well before then how dissatisfied they were with Mr. Biden.
And the signs of building Republican strength were everywhere. Not only did Mr. Trump lead Mr. Biden in the polls even as the felony indictments piled up, but the polls also showed Republicans overtaking Democrats on party identification for the first time in two decades. Republican registration numbers surged. Mr. Trump was even gaining among young, Black and Hispanic voters — groups historically assumed to be vehemently anti-Trump.
All of this occurred against the backdrop of political upheaval across the industrial world. In the wake of the pandemic and surging prices, voters in country after country in election after election have voted against the party in power. More broadly, the past two decades have featured the rise of right-wing populist parties and a corresponding decline in the strength of the center-left among working-class voters.
Despite all this, Democrats had a real chance anyway. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe, Mr. Trump’s personal unpopularity and his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, gave the Democrats powerful arguments — arguments that seemed as if they might be enough to let them win an election that they entered with a disadvantage.
Kamala Harris herself probably helped give Democrats a chance. She was not a perfect candidate — she brought major liabilities from her time in the Biden administration and her campaign for the 2020 Democratic nomination — but she revitalized her party, won the debate against Mr. Trump in September and avoided major missteps.
Nonetheless, election night ended in a stinging rebuke of Democrats. This was not like 2016, when Mr. Trump made gains among a single demographic group, working-class white voters, who happened to be disproportionately concentrated in the key battleground states. Instead, Mr. Trump gained across the board — including among the voters who seemed most skeptical of him eight years ago, from Hispanic voters in New York City to technology workers in San Francisco.
Perhaps the most striking evidence of the rebuke came from blue America. Mr. Trump made big gains in New York City, where he improved on his 2020 margin by more than 10 points. As of Wednesday morning, Ms. Harris was on track to win New Jersey by only five points.
In California, the early returns showed Ms. Harris up by only 18 points in her home state, compared with a 29-point victory for Mr. Biden four years ago. Mr. Trump appeared to make gains even in liberal bastions like San Francisco and Alameda County, home to Berkeley and Oakland.
The early results in Dearborn, Mich., home to the nation’s largest Arab American population (and a place Mr. Biden won by 39 points), showed Mr. Trump well ahead, with Ms. Harris only narrowly leading the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, for second place.
Mr. Trump appeared to make his largest gains among Hispanic voters, whether in the exit polls or in the results of counties with lots of Hispanic voters. Miami-Dade County in Florida voted for Mr. Trump by 11 points, compared with Mr. Biden’s seven-point victory in 2020 and Hillary Clinton’s 29-point victory in 2016. The once reliably Democratic bastions along the Rio Grande in Texas were all red — an astonishing shift from eight years ago, when Mrs. Clinton won 70 to 80 percent of the vote.
In the end, there just weren’t many parts of the country where Ms. Harris fared better than Mr. Biden did in 2020. There were a handful of outer ring counties around Atlanta and Dallas, where demographic change drove Democratic gains, but otherwise it was mostly a scattering of rural, white counties, often in the Great Plains and the interior West.
None of this is what Democrats would have imagined a decade ago, when many of them assumed that demographic and generational change would bring a new Democratic majority. Instead, many of the voters whom Democrats viewed as the bedrock of their coalition grew so frustrated with the status quo that they decided to back Mr. Trump instead.
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