By Alexis Simendinger & Kristina Karisch
Former President Trump is projected to capture Pennsylvania and other battleground states, the prizes he needed to return to the White House by blocking Vice President Harris’s path to 270 electoral votes, according to The Hill/Decision Desk HQ.
Despite defeat in 2020, the Jan. 6, 2021 riot attack the Capitol, two impeachments, 34 criminal convictions and pending federal indictments, at least two assassination attempts and assertions from critics that he’s unfit to be president, Trump, 78, built a sweeping coalition through the Rust Belt, the South, the Midwest and the West to reclaim power.
The 2024 presidential race was supposed to be a nail-biter. It wasn’t.
Smart Take
Pollsters were once again wrong about Trump, who will be the first candidate since Grover Cleveland to reclaim the White House after losing his reelection bid.
Trump will have a Republican-controlled Senate and possibly a GOP-led House. His agenda will be aggressive and he very well may have the chance to appoint another justice to the Supreme Court.
For Democrats, Election Day 2024 was a nightmare. Where do they go from here? They have called Trump every name in the book and expressed confidence Harris would be the first woman president. Harris adviser David Plouffe said this week the vice president could win all seven battlegrounds. That prediction didn’t age well. Trump courted voting blocs that have traditionally leaned left, including union members, African Americans and Latinos. Democrats scoffed, but the strategy worked. Trump has upended the Republican Party forever while the Democratic playbook is outdated. After the second guessing and finger pointing subsides, Democratic leaders need to do a lot of soul searching. Otherwise, they’re going to lose again in 2028.
The 2024 presidential race was supposed to be a nail-biter. It wasn’t.
Pollsters were once again wrong about Trump, who will be the first candidate since Grover Cleveland to reclaim the White House after losing his reelection bid.
Trump will have a Republican-controlled Senate and possibly a GOP-led House. His agenda will be aggressive and he very well may have the chance to appoint another justice to the Supreme Court.
Georgia became the first swing state to flip from the 2020 results Tuesday. Trump lost the Peach State four years ago to President Biden by 11,779 votes — a number that became memorable after he pleaded with Georgia election officials to help him find one more vote to overtake Biden’s victory.
Ballots are still being counted this morning in swing states Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada, but Republicans, remade in Trump’s image, are confidently jubilant. The former president and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), 40, trounced the Democratic administration and, as a bonus, helped flip the Senate to Republican control. The outcome in the House remains up in the air and may not be clear for days and official for weeks.
The Hill: An improbable comeback.
Trump appeared early this morning at the Palm Beach Convention Center in Florida, the site of his campaign’s election watch party, and ventured that the House will remain under GOP control.
He celebrated “the greatest political movement of all time,” adding, “now it’s going to reach a new level of importance because we’re going to help our nation heal.”
“We’re going to fix our borders. We’re going to fix everything about our country,” he said.
If the White House, Senate and House are all under Republican control beginning next year, the direction of U.S. governance will shift dramatically at home and abroad. Trump, wielding executive authority and with partners in Congress, vows to be pro-business while cutting taxes, and has pledged to shrink government, institute mass deportations, raise tariffs, end U.S. assistance to Ukraine and reverse Biden’s clean energy policies. The former president also offered effusive praise during his victory remarks before 3 a.m. to Elon Musk, who wants to lead a government “efficiency commission.”
Voters in surveys and exit polls have described the country as on the wrong track and joined Trump in criticizing Biden and the vice president for what many Americans describe as their economic upheaval and fears about migrants and insecure borders.
Harris’s supporters wore expressions of disbelief while watching Election Night returns. The vice president, whose backers had gathered to cheer her on Tuesday night at Howard University, her alma mater, in Washington, never arrived. No Democrat stepped forward to challenge Trump’s victory speech or the outcome of ballot returns.
Democrats face a reckoning over the results. In fact, it’s underway. Biden, who will be 82 in two weeks, insisted — until being nudged aside as his party’s nominee — that he could defeat Trump again. He will be asked by reporters whether he should have bowed out earlier, whether America is really ready for a female president and whether what he views as the achievements of his term are teetering toward extinction.
The Hill’s Niall Stanage has five takeaways on Trump’s victory.
Harris’ campaign co-chair, Cedric Richmond, told supporters after midnight that they would hear from Harris today, “We still have votes to count. We still have states that have not been called yet. We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted, that every voice has spoken,” he said.
To win so decisively, Trump made inroads with Black and Latino men, early exit polls showed (Politico). Harris counted on women voters. But her margin was no better than Biden’s showing in 2020. Early exit polls found women favored the Democratic nominee by 10 points, compared with Biden’s 14-point advantage four years ago. The vice president’s focus on reproductive rights did not play out as decisively as Democrats hoped (The Washington Post). Trump’s standing with women voters improved from 2016 to 2020 and again this year, according to exit polls. That was despite worries inside the GOP that the Republican nominee alienated female voters with his crude campaign style, anti-abortion stance and past reputation with beauty queens, a porn star and models.
