In the end, it wasn’t close. Despite polls and algorithmic models that said the 2024 election was a jump ball that could go either way, Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris smoothly and comprehensively. For the third straight election, pollsters underestimated Trump’s support, throwing into question the methods and legitimacy of an industry that exerts massive influence over the media and political establishment. Trump’s triumph sets American politics—and the American right—on a nationalist and populist course.

Trump’s win was remarkable. He won every swing state, racking up a total of 312 Electoral College votes for the best showing by a Republican since 1988. He is the first person elected to nonconsecutive presidential terms in more than 120 years. At this writing, one week after November 5, he leads Harris by about 2 points, 50 percent to 48 percent, making him the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years. He is the first Republican to win Nevada since George W. Bush. And he is the first Republican since Ronald Reagan to surmount the “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in two elections.

The exit polls, always to be taken with a grain of salt, show that between 2020 and 2024 Trump held ground or improved his standing with just about every group of voters except college-educated white women. Yet the ballyhooed “gender gap” did not doom Trump. On the contrary, because Trump won men by a much larger margin than Harris won women, the “gap” worked in his favor.

Trump’s coalition has transformed. His 2016 victory was based on overwhelming support among white voters without college degrees. His 2024 coalition includes working-class Americans of every race and ethnicity. Most significantly, Trump made major inroads with Hispanic voters, carrying Hispanic men by 10 points and improving his 2020 vote among Hispanics of both sexes by 14 points.

The Hispanic shift toward the GOP benefited Trump not just in swing states such as Nevada and Pennsylvania; it also cut into Democratic margins in blue strongholds such as Virginia and New Jersey where Harris won, respectively, by a closer than anticipated five and six points. This is not demographic drift. It is a restructuring of American politics, happening in real time.

Though voter participation declined since 2020—possibly due to a reduction in voting by mail—turnout in 2024 was nevertheless the second-highest in this century. The Fox News Voter Analysis showed that more voters identified as Republicans (49 percent) than as Democrats (45 percent). Party registration has not tilted Republican in a presidential year since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Which is why Trump beat Harris so emphatically despite losing independent voters, according to Fox News, by seven points.

The Trump sweep had down-ballot consequences, as well. Republicans picked up four Senate seats, giving them control of the upper legislative chamber for the first time since 2020. And they are on track to maintain control of the House of Representatives. If that happens, then Republican performance in the 2024 election will be more impressive in one way than the 1980 election to which it often has been compared. The shift to the political right is evident in both cases, of course. But Ronald Reagan never had a GOP Congress.

Nor is the Republican Party of 2024 the same as it was during Trump’s inauguration in 2017. The representatives and senators in charge of the elected branches, and the cabinet secretaries and agency directors atop the executive branch, will be Trump’s Republicans. They will have little or no connection to the GOP of John McCain, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Liz and Dick Cheney, and other officials who have opposed, disagreed with, or undermined the once and future president.

How did Donald Trump achieve this comeback? How did he overcome his loss in 2020, his role in Republican underperformance in the 2021 Georgia special elections and the 2022 midterms, his federal, state, and local indictments, his civil judgments and criminal conviction, his enemies in the Democratic Party, bureaucracy, mainstream media, and civil society?

It wasn’t sexism that won Trump the election. Voters split tickets between Trump and female Democratic Senate candidates in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada. Nor was it racism—the electorate is less racially polarized than before. “Misinformation” was not responsible. Quite the opposite: Americans pulled the lever for Trump with open eyes. His favorability rating in the exit poll was 46 percent. A majority said that his views are “too extreme.” Asked whether they would be excited or concerned if Trump were elected, voters split down the middle.

The basis for Trump’s majority is not Trump the man. It is the change that he represents. According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, 63 percent of voters say that the nation is headed in the wrong direction. In the 2024 exit poll, 73 percent of voters said that they felt dissatisfied or angry about the way things are going in the country today. Twenty-eight percent of voters, moreover, said that they based their decision on a candidate’s ability to bring needed change. Trump won them by a 50-point margin.

What voters want is no secret. They seek to restore the conditions that prevailed when Trump was president at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020: economic growth with rising incomes and stable prices, a secure southern border, and a world without wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Seventy percent of the voters rated the condition of the economy as not so good or poor. Forty-six percent said that their family’s financial situation is worse today than four years ago. Fifty-two percent trusted Trump more than Harris to handle the economy. Thirty-two percent of voters said that the economy mattered most in deciding how to vote. Among this group, Trump trounced Harris, winning 80 percent to 19 percent.

The economy was one of five issues that exit pollsters offered to voters to explain their choices. The others were, in descending order of importance to voters, the “state of democracy,” abortion, immigration, and foreign policy. Trump lost on democracy and abortion while winning by 81 points on immigration and by 20 points on foreign policy. Majorities trusted Trump more than Harris on immigration, crime and safety, and crisis management. The election data confirm other surveys that showed the public supporting mass deportation of illegal immigrants, completion of the southern border wall, and reductions in immigration both legal and illegal.

Behind voter sentiment on topics such as the economy, immigration, and foreign policy is a broader sense of disgust at the ideas, attitudes, and behavior of liberal elites. This intense antipathy begins with President Biden but does not end with him. Biden’s approval rating in the exit poll was 40 percent. His approval ratings have been underwater since 2021. His physical and mental decline has been apparent for some time and was embarrassingly broadcast to the world during his June 27 debate with Trump. But it remains taboo inside the mainstream media and Democratic machine.

Furthermore, while Biden’s mismanagement of the economy, the border, and the world has been obvious to voters for years, his incompetence has been downplayed or denied by the men and women who rely on the Democratic Party for access, favors, jobs, and funding. And when Biden withdrew from the presidential race to make way for Kamala Harris, no one within the Biden or Harris camps seems to have recognized that the vice president ought to have separated herself from his legacy; explain, justify, or repudiate the radical positions on which she ran for president in 2019; define her personal vision for the country; or provide answers with more detail than “I grew up in a middle-class family.”

The feeling that the Biden-Harris Democrats are aloof, dissembling, bumbling, and egregiously liberal was captured perfectly by the Trump campaign’s ad on taxpayer-funded surgeries for criminal illegal immigrants who identify as trans. Showing Harris come out in favor of such operations, while displaying images of nonbinary and transwoman extremists who work or have worked in the Biden-Harris administration, the ad closed with a simple but memorable line: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

The spot highlighted the gulf between elite opinion and popular opinion on social and cultural matters. It also raised doubts about Harris’s supposed moderation, honesty, and trustworthiness. According to Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, the top reason swing voters chose Trump was that “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”

Yet swing voters had plenty of reasons to be disappointed. Inflation, open borders, social disorder, political correctness, gender ideology, lawfare conducted against the political opposition, anti-Semitism on campuses and in the streets, and ongoing wars in Europe and the Middle East—this is the record that Biden and Harris asked America to extend for another four years.

And America refused.

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The message of 2024 was not wholly negative, however. The results were also a positive endorsement of the program that Trump enacted during his first term and that he pledged to reinstate more effectively in his second. Trump has said that America’s problems are soluble with the right leader and the correct policies. In this combination of outrage and optimism, he is like Ronald Reagan.

Writing in Commentary in the months after the 1980 election, for example, Norman Podhoretz observed that the premise of Reagan’s winning campaign was that “the decline of America, far from being inevitable or the fault of the people themselves, is a consequence of bad policies pursued by the government and can therefore be reversed by shifting to other policies.”

For Reagan, Norman Podhoretz continued, American decline could be reversed by adopting a growth-oriented economic agenda, a military buildup aimed at deterring the Soviet Union, and “a legal structure that will encourage the revitalization of the values of ‘family, work, and neighborhood.’”

A lot has changed in the intervening 44 years, including the composition of the American electorate and of the Republican and Democratic Parties. Consequently, Trump’s methods to reverse American decline will be different from Reagan’s, and understandably so. Trump’s agenda will be shaped by the priorities, needs, and wants of his unique coalition—the MAGA majority of working-class Americans whose luminaries include former Democrats such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Elon Musk.

Trump’s economic nationalism is aimed at improving wages at the bottom of the pay scale by creating tight labor markets. Like Reagan, Trump will seek to increase productivity and innovation through corporate and individual tax cuts, no tax on tips, deregulation, slashing green-energy subsidies, and ramping up domestic energy production. But he will also protect domestic industry by imposing tariffs to punish companies that offshore jobs; and he will raise revenue and shift supply chains away from the People’s Republic of China.

Trump’s noncollege, middle-class voting base demands a more active government than Reagan’s upwardly mobile Yuppies, especially when it comes to illegal immigration. The public backs Trump’s plan to stop migrants at the border and remove them from the cities and towns where they have strained social welfare, education, and housing systems and, in some cases, contributed to social disorder. Yet public opinion does not guarantee success. While it is far too soon to determine the extent of Trump administration’s deportation efforts and its competence in carrying them out, we can say with certainty that they will be opposed in court, in liberal statehouses and city councils, and in the streets.

Like Reagan, too, Trump has pledged to restore American deterrence. His “20 core promises” released as part of the 2024 GOP platform include vows to “strengthen and modernize our military, making it, without question, the strongest and most powerful in the world” and to “prevent World War Three, restore peace in Europe and in the Middle East, and build a great Iron Dome missile defense shield over our entire country—all made in America.” Details to follow.

What is known, however, is that in his second term Trump will double down on the idea of “America First.” He will try to avoid foreign intervention as much as possible. His staff will be filled with opponents of the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine wars. Within days of the election, for example, Trump posted on social media that hawks such as Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley would not be involved in his administration. And the hawkish Tom Cotton, whom Trump likes, opt-ed to remain in the Senate.

Because events and adversaries shape a president’s foreign policy more than theories and strategy documents do, and because Trump is a mercurial personality who is likely to lash out if he feels embarrassed or disrespected, “realists” positioned in the National Security Council, State Department, and Defense Department may wind up using American power more often than they expect. Until then, however, they will likely continue the American retrenchment that began with Barack Obama.

Finally, Trump’s social agenda empowers law enforcement to fight crime and drug trafficking. He will push back against liberal extremism in cities, schools, and universities. He will leverage the resources of the Department of Education against states and school boards that infuse curricula with critical race theory and gender ideology. And he will ensure that institutions of higher education are places where Jews can study without fear of bigotry or harassment.

Though Trump is a defender of religious freedom who earned more than 80 percent of the white Evangelical Christian vote in 2024, he has been supportive of gay rights and opposes additional federal limitations on abortion. His traditionalism is ecumenical, bringing together believers of all faiths, while emphasizing cultural issues that resonate beyond the Religious right, such as patriotism, free speech, and biological men in women’s sports. The buttoned-up churchgoer who once was the caricature of social conservatism has been replaced by the red-pilled frat bro who listens to Joe Rogan, retains traditional attitudes toward God, country, guns, and girls, thinks liberals are crazed, and has no patience for RINOs critical of Trump.

Above all, Trump’s reelection was a rebuke to the establishment of both parties, to the Beltway elite, to the media mavens and NGO chiefs, to the credentialed classes and degreed professionals who read the Economist every week and listen to The Daily and pay attention to what Ta-Nehisi Coates has to say. With confidence in institutions at such lows, with so many reputations in tatters, with the world upside down, and with the Biden-Harris administration exposed as a gigantic failure, Donald Trump’s new majority has an opportunity to prove the doubters wrong and create a freer, safer, more prosperous America.

Beware of anyone who tells you that they know how this will go. The situation may appear quite different if Trump misreads his mandate and interprets the voters’ call to fix the economy, seal the border, and end the wars as a demand for MAGA-mania. And if Trump fails to produce results before the 2026 midterms, the situation will be different, indeed. After all, the public has voted to change partisan control of the presidency or House or Senate in 11 of the past 13 elections. It will do so again if the percentage of Americans who say the country is on the wrong track remains in the stratosphere.

History suggests both caution and promise. Contemplating the similarities between 1980 and 2024, I was struck by another passage in Norman Podhoretz’s 1981 essay on “The New American Majority.” Despite the passage of time, his words still echo. Things may have changed less than it seems. “The groups who voted for Reagan are diverse rather than monolithic, and they are by no means unified in their support for particular programs,” he wrote. “What they are unified in is a yearning to make the country productive and powerful once more—to make it great again.”

Photo: Tetra Images

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