The Aftermath: Ten Thoughts on Trump's Sweeping Victory
Heading into Tuesday's election, I genuinely didn't know what would happen. My told my radio audience that my head and my gut had landed in different places: My head, based on the data, told me that Donald Trump would win. But my gut felt like Democrats would somehow pull it out, probably because of Republicans' losses and under-performances in every major election since Trump's 2016 upset. Eight years ago, Trump caught them by surprise. Since then, they've fought him aggressively, and they've been on a winning streak. They knew exactly what was coming, and they did literally everything they could -- including nullifying their own nominating election and swapping out their candidate -- to beat him. And he crushed them. Some thoughts:
(1) The evidence was there all along. Trump was polling better than he ever had, and there was indeed -- yet again -- another polling miss in his favor. The pollsters dismissed by many in the elite media as 'low quality' or 'Republican aligned' by and large got it right. Gallup's big picture data about the electorate was a huge warning sign for Democrats. The dismal right track/wrong track numbers, the unpopularity of the Biden-Harris administration, inflated prices across the board, deep dissatisfaction with the status quo: It was all there, staring us in the face. Looking back, it's easy to say, 'of course the party in power couldn't survive this.' But a lot of the 'experts' told us they would. And a lot of the media was actively trying to help them pull it off. They failed. The fundamentals asserted themselves. Trump is more popular than ever before, and the electorate's answer to the question he posed at the start of every speech down the stretch -- 'are you better off today than you were when I was president?' -- was a resounding 'no.'
(2) One of the predictions I was willing to make publicly were that the election would actually be called on election night. I had a feeling that the result would be fairly conclusive, and that the dominoes would fall in one direction or the other. Early in the morning, Fox called Pennsylvania and Wisconsin for Trump, securing him the victory. As of this writing, Trump is expected to sweep all seven battleground states. He'll win a mini-landslide, north of 300 electoral votes. He appears on track to be the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years. Some people, myself included, questioned whether it was worth the time and resources to hold rallies in places like Long Island and California, but he was hoping to run up the score. And he did exactly that. New York, New Jersey, Illinois (and Virginia, and New Hampshire, and Minnesota) were all closer than Florida; sometimes a lot closer. Trump won Texas by roughly the same margin that Harris won Biden's home state of Delaware. This is why, when he spoke of a "mandate" in his victory speech, it's hard to argue with him.
(3) Another prediction I made was that a bad joke by an insult comic at Trump's closing MSG rally, which was the source of a ridiculous freak-out in the media, would not move votes. They turned it into the biggest story in the country for days, just before the election. In that election, Trump flipped a heavily Puerto Rican county in Florida and Hispanic areas moved red in Pennsylvania. Trump did historically well among Hispanics. And, to top it all off, this happened:
(4) As Trump declared victory, he touted the 'realignment' coalition he'd attracted. This should be a source of extraordinary pride for him and his campaign. While being compared to Hitler and called a fascist and racist at every turn, Trump assembled what was perhaps the most diverse coalition ever won by a Republican presidential candidate -- or certainly in a very long time. A sampling:
- Trump narrowly lost Gen Z and Millennial voters, by single digits, winning younger men. Per NBC exit polls, he outright won young voters in Wisconsin and Michigan.
- He won 15 percent of black voters, and more than four-in-ten Hispanics. He won a quarter of black men, and roughly half of Hispanic men (or even a small majority, according to some exits).
- He won white women and married women.
- He narrowly lost independents and the suburbs and still won, drawing on explosive rural turnout, and moving the needle in cities.
- He carried Catholics, a bellwether group, by nine points. She hurt herself with this demographic.
- He performed stunningly well among Arab Americans, even carrying Dearborn, Michigan.- He won 1 in 5 self-identified LGBT voters.
This is really something:
(5) The gender gap helped Trump. He won a higher percentage of men than Harris did women.
(6) Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate. Her non-answers on her endless parade of shameless, explanation-free flip-flops were insulting. Her cringeworthy performances were noted by voters. Her bland piles of nothingness she offered in interviews were uninspiring of confidence, to put it kindly. He was handed a nomination she didn't earn over the summer, avoided nearly all scrutiny for weeks on end, then showcased her unimpressiveness at nearly every turn. She is left-wing zealot whose rushed, inauthentic ideological facelift didn't sell, partially because she was utterly incapable of selling it. She said she could not think of a single thing she would have done differently than Joe Biden. She said the best example of her going with her gut on a big decision was picking Tim Walz, a truly awful national candidate whose home state lost ground to Trump. The former and future president flipped Walz's home county.
Harris overwhelmingly underperformed Biden's 2020 marks. As the election approached, I kept asking, if Trump is making inroads with so many elements of the Democratic coalition, where would Harris make up the difference? The plan, it seems, was to win even more women and suburbanites and disaffected Republicans. It wasn't nearly enough. And for all the talk of her losing because she's a black woman (I don't think imputing racism and sexism to the incredibly diverse Trump coalition is a good ideal, as such demagoguery is part of why he won), the same people who are offering that ugly assertion will also say in the next breath that Joe Biden would have lost even worse.
(7) Trump's campaign was vastly outspent. It didn't matter. Democrats' ground game may have been superior, but Republicans did some things right, too, and the margins were just too significant to make any difference either way.
(8) Freshly re-elected Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres (from New York City, where Trump did historically well) has this right:
Anti-Semitism has been part of the rotting core of the Democratic base. A lot of Jewish voters noticed. Relatedly, this must be awkward for a certain Congresswoman:
(9) As I suggested on Twitter shortly after the race was called, I humbly nominate this man for Press Secretary:
(10) The 'news' media -- with its hysteria, bias, and sneering -- lost just as resoundingly as Kamala Harris did last night. This is another inflection point away from institutional trust in 'prestige' and 'establishment' sources. Speaking of which, remember that poll that caused shockwaves and convinced a lot of journalists and their fellow Democrats that Trump was going down? Yikes:
I'll have many more thoughts in the days to come, but that's a start.
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