After the Votes
On the Shock and Awe of Trump’s Victory, the Fall of Progressivism, a Nation Realigned, and the Next American Era
Many have offered analyses of Donald Trump’s historic victory, and over the coming months, you’ll no doubt read countless perspectives. But after a sleepless night, I felt compelled to provide a straightforward audit of the election and examine where each party might go from here. Firstly, Mr. Trump, now President-elect Donald Trump, is the second man in history to be elected to two nonconsecutive terms besides fellow New Yorker Grover Cleveland (I’m sure many historians are devastated that this unique distinction has grown more common). And, unlike his fluke victory in 2016 or his narrow defeat in 2020, Mr. Trump is on track to win the popular vote, the first time for a Republican since 2004. He is set to win 312 electoral votes, the most for a Republican since 1988; he has achieved the best Republican performance with non-White voters since 1960. This is the story of the most remarkable comeback in American politics, surpassing Richard Nixon in 1968, and there are many takeaways.
The biggest surprise of the night was not Mr. Trump’s performance in the swing states but his inroads with moderates, Hispanic, African-American, Asian, and Jewish voters—who may not have made a difference in the more white, rural swing states of the rust belt, but allowed him to “ride the wave” nationally. Blue states like New York went from voting 23 points Democratic to just 10 points. New Jersey went from voting 16 points for Mr. Biden to being carried by Kamala Harris by a weak margin of 4.9 points. Connecticut shifted 8 points to the right, with Mr. Trump narrowly losing it by 12 points. Mr. Trump only lost Illinois with 45.2 percent to Ms. Harris's 53.4 percent, a margin of 8.2, a decrease from Mr. Biden's 17-point victory four years prior. I wrote that in 2016, with Mr. Trump narrowly winning through pluralities in states and razor-tight margins, his victory was a fluke—but 2024 has proven to be no fluke and a major realignment in American politics. Moderates and a multiracial coalition propelled Mr. Trump’s “MAGA” movement to victory and have given him a resounding mandate, manifesting a plea to enact change—irrespective of voter’s personal opinions on him, his conduct post-2020 election, his indictments, it is abundantly clear that Mr. Trump has been chosen, resoundingly, by the public to govern.
My most controversial claim I will allege is that Mr.Trump has been more consequential for the Republican party than Ronald Reagan ever was and, if anything, bears more similarity to Franklin D. Roosevelt—I have alleged, in the past, that Mr. Trump is not coherent and articulate enough on policy specifics to forge a “permanent revolution” that would result in his populist agenda supplanting traditional conservative orthodoxy, which may indeed prove true, but he, by the sheer force of his political genius and willpower, has transformed the Republican Party into a one-man vessel over a decade-long period and three presidential elections, in the mold of FDR in the 1930s-1940s.
It was FDR who brought African-Americans into the Democratic party in his 1932 victory and was the first Democratic candidate to flip significant cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore—and while Mr. Trump did not flip these, his strong performance with non-White voters, specifically Hispanics, suggests that, like FDR, he has expanded the party’s traditional coalition and forged “MAGA” into something of a modern “New Deal” coalition; I would not be surprised if Hispanics emerge by 2028 as a reliable Republican party constituency. And with such strong allies in Congress, a comfortable Senate majority, and likely retention of the House, I expect Mr. Trump’s first 100 days to look like Roosevelt’s 100 days—Mr. Roosevelt’s influence was so grand that for a significant amount of New Deal legislation, Democrats (who had supermajorities) would look at a bill, inquire whether it was “from the boss,” and pass it unanimously without even reading it.
The electoral destruction of the Democrats that, as I wrote above, incredibly manifested in the bluest of states shows that it was an advantageous macro environment for the Republican party that propelled Mr. Trump to victory. I considered elaborating on the failings of Kamala Harris's candidacy, but I feel that it is best served as a separate editorial and that she was not much of a candidate; she didn’t present herself as different from Mr. Biden. Ms. Harris offered very little to the average voter in terms of policy; what she did offer were left-wing Peronist politics such as price controls to tackle “price gouging,” an inflationary $25,000 credit for first-time homebuyers, and an “unrealized gains tax” on capital gains—left-wing policies when the country was crying for a divergence from the present administration. On that front, Ms. Harris could not list any decision she would have undertaken differently from the unpopular President Joe Biden. Thus, most voters felt they had no alternative but Mr. Trump.
If anything, this should come as a relief for her; the reality is that no Democratic nominee likely could have overcome this storm and that, if anything, the only thing preventing an electoral annihilation in the mold of Reagan's 1980 victory was Mr. Trump’s consistently weak performance with highly educated affluent White voters that prevented him from carrying Virginia, Colorado, and New Hampshire. The failings and off-putting policies of the Biden administration in the retreat from Afghanistan, a failure to deter Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a belligerent Iran that lays siege to Israel through its proxies, unconstitutional executive orders to buy votes with student-loan relief, ten million illegal migrants crossing the border, a stagnant economy where wages have not outpaced the increase in prices of four years, the de-facto legalization of crime in major blue cities as a result of a “woke” approach to criminal justice, unpopular DEI initiatives have relegated identity politics and leftist ideology to the backseat; or potentially the ash-heap of history.
For all of Ms. Harris's talk of upholding freedom, her slogan, “We’re Not Going Back,” was anything but accurate; the progressivism that came to define the Democratic party of the Obama and Biden years and much of the establishment culture and media has been crushed. Her party’s shift to being more “progressive” than liberal—more committed to socially engineering “progress”—has resulted in its electoral annihilation. It’s the culmination of the failings of the Democrats’ shift away from classical liberalism, where guaranteeing personal liberty is the prerogative of the state, in favor of a revisionist history-based left-wing ideology of progressivism, where all racial and economic disparities are the result of systemic racism, and uprooting all institutions, for being discriminatory has to be achieved, and all other considerations secondary.
The Democratic coalition has been shattered; aside from unmarried women and the uber-wealthy, the Democrats have no other base to draw upon, and their electoral prospects will collapse permanently if things continue as is. Their support has collapsed among men, married couples and parents, the middle class (that was the backbone of their party), and non-White voters—the last of which poses an existential threat to the Democratic party, for the non-White population is expected to compose the majority of the United States population by 2050. Time will tell if the Democrats learn the correct lesson from this election, which is a need to tack to the center à la Bill Clinton in 1992, after Michael Dukakis's resounding defeat in 1988, and run a candidate like Governors Josh Shapiro or Wes Moore, or if they will double down on progressivism and opt for candidates like Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom, who would likely lose to future Vice President J.D. Vance.
There isn’t much to be said about Donald Trump that I haven’t already. He brought unprecedented baggage to the race; his conduct after the 2020 election and repeated election denial seemed impossible to overcome. His erratic behavior and frequently questionable policy positions raised legitimate concerns that I and many others had about his suitability for a return to office, and the “lawfare,” as his supporters call it, that Democratic prosecutors saddled him with proved to be an electoral strength. Personal opinions aside, one has to credit the man's resilience against adversity in mounting a comeback that manifested in the largest Republican victory since George H.W. Bush 36 years ago.
While I remained ambivalent in predicting the outcome of the election, I wrote repeatedly over the last year and a half that Mr. Biden (and by extension Ms. Harris) was quite beatable due to lackluster polling numbers and an amidst revival in small-government conservatism, encouraged by the successful governorships of Ron DeSantis, Brian Kemp, Glenn Youngkin, Kim Reynolds, and Greg Abbott—particularly in response to the Biden administration’s COVID policies in 2021. While Mr. Trump deserves a unique amount of credit for his resilience and the raw display of courage in the face of two dastardly assassination attempts, and the strength of an unorthodox campaign that brought out a multi-racial coalition of low propensity groups and relied on alternative media such as podcasts, I do not necessarily believe that the public has fully embraced all aspects of Mr. Trump and Trumpism.
I, as do most Americans, remain a conservative—a classical liberal who believes in upholding the foundations that made America great—free speech, free markets, faith, individualism, and never giving into the tyranny of authoritarianism at home and abroad. And even though Mr. Trump's historic victory seems like a capitulation towards Vox Populi, the truth is that Americans will not tolerate him conducting himself as a loud-mouth and vulgar demagogue, and if that is the route he goes down, he can expect to be punished at the ballot box in 2026. I believe Americans have entrusted him to set forth on the business of governance and bring a sense of normalcy, the one they demanded of Mr. Biden in 2020, that being the pre-COVID Trump administration of 2019 and before, and to get a sluggish economy back on the treadmill.
The conspiratorial nature of many on the right becomes increasingly pathetic and laughable in the context of tonight, as we are somehow to believe Democrats supposedly stole the election from a sitting president with full control of the executive branch. Still, in 2024, with even more motivation and power, the shadowy and sinister deep state decided to let Trump win? Where was George Soros when they needed him? And in the bluest of cities, where allegedly the fraud is so grand, he overperformed his previous margins by double digits? It defies logic to suggest that Democrats would steal one election but not the other, raising questions about the consistency of the fraud narrative. Could it be that it was a lie meant to conceal a bruised ego? Worthy of pondering, indeed.
The biggest takeaway of the election is that Democrats misunderstood that the pitch wasn’t the problem; the product was. Democrats foolishly decided against having a competitive primary season. When Mr. Biden was forced out by his party, they naïvely believed Ms. Harris could laugh and clap her way through the so-called “brat summer” to the White House without diverging from Mr. Biden’s policy in any way. With all the emphasis on the “adults being back in charge” in the aftermath of Mr. Biden’s victory four years prior, it’s incredible how, as incumbents, Democrats still tried to position themselves as change agents, though Ms. Harris couldn’t point to a single action she would have handled differently than the Biden administration. The American people, ultimately, opted for actual change.
I have numerous reservations about Mr. Trump, my opinion, and previous criticisms, and I stand by my editorial criticism of him. I am astutely aware that many readers are split on their feelings about this outcome. Still, I wish President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance the best wishes and encourage us all to pray for their success and the country, for they embark on a mission to unite a country after a bitter campaign that has left us on edge, but not fractured. Thanks to a few strong shots of espresso, I remained awake long enough to watch Mr. Trump’s victory speech—and I was encouraged by what I heard, with Mr. Trump oddly enough humble in victory and preaching the importance of bringing the country together. I will praise his successes and criticize bad policy and conduct wherever I find it, but I believe that all of us, irrespective of who we voted for, have nothing to feel but optimism about our future.
Regarding that, I would point to 2004, wherein conceding the election, Senator John Kerry correctly observed that: “In an American election, there are no losers, because whether or not our candidates are successful, the next morning we all wake up as Americans. And that -- that is the greatest privilege and the most remarkable good fortune that can come to us on earth.” These are important words to remember, now more than ever. Irrespective of who one may have voted for, I am proud to see Americans turning out, in record numbers in many places, to express their voices—the backbone of our Republic is an engaged and informed citizenry. Utilizing their right to vote is the most consequential action the average individual exercises in his or her life. I tip my hat to all of my fellow citizens for understanding the importance of this responsibility and expressing their voices.