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Trump Storms to a Second Term

Reuters
By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey
Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Trump Storms to a Second Term as President

Donald Trump’s election to a second term in the White House cements an astonishing and historic political comeback, delivering supporters of his MAGA movement a profound sense of vindication while dashing Democratic hopes that the country might turn the page on nine years of his combative, divisive and chaotic brand of politics.

Trump and the nation now face serious questions about how he will govern in pursuit of his campaign promises after he and his party claimed a powerful mandate from voters, also capturing a majority in `the Senate while potentially holding on to a narrow edge in the House, where dozens of races have yet to be decided.

“We're going to help our country heal,” Trump said in a victory speech shortly before 3 a.m. ET on Wednesday morning. “We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly. We're going fix our borders. We're going to fix everything about our country, and we made history for a reason tonight and the reason is going to be just that we overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible.”

Eight years after catapulting from reality television star to the White House as a neophyte politician — and four years after stoking a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol as he tried to deny his re-election loss — Trump waged a divisive and often offensive campaign centered on an anti-immigrant message and economic discontent to grab a stunning and decisive victory over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, who called Trump Wednesday to concede and promised a peaceful transfer of power in an afternoon concession speech.

Trump has already won 295 Electoral College votes to Harris’s 224, and he’s projected to win 35 more, for a total of 312, when the races in Arizona and Nevada are called. He also appears to have won the popular vote by a sizable margin after losing it in both 2016 and 2020, outperforming polling projections for a third time.

He becomes the first president since Grover Cleveland in 1892 to win nonconsecutive terms in the White House — a feat made all the more remarkable because of Trump’s record through four tumultuous years in office as the 45th president. Ranked by historians earlier this year as the worst president in U.S. history, Trump was impeached twice, was convicted by a New York jury of 34 felony counts earlier this year, and came before the electorate still facing other criminal cases, including federal charges that he illegally sought to subvert the results of the 2020 election.

The roughly 72 million voters who supported him, based on vote totals so far, set aside warnings from former members of Trump’s administration that he is a fascist, dangerous, dishonest and unfit for office, and they seemingly disregarded criticisms by Harris that he is unhinged, unstable and in pursuit of unchecked power.

The blue wall crumbled…again: Trump is likely to sweep all seven key battleground states, and he has already been declared the winner in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the so-called “blue wall” states that represented the easiest path to victory for Harris.

But this wasn’t only about swing states: Trump outperformed his 2020 totals in counties across the country, including in Democratic strongholds and key urban areas, as he made substantial inroads among Black and Latino voters. “Trump garnered the support of a remarkable 1 in 3 voters of color, most likely the best performance of any Republican presidential candidate since George W. Bush in his 2004 re-election effort,” NBC News reports, based on its exit polling. “That included a striking shift of Latino voters into the GOP column compared with 2020 — they backed Trump by 13 points more.”

Dems in dismay: Trump’s resounding victory is sure to prompt significant soul-searching among Democrats and debates over how much blame to lay at Harris’s feet or those of President Joe Biden — though the margins Trump put up across the country suggest that Democrats’ problems went far beyond any tactical decisions by the Harris camp. Democrats do need to figure out how they can once again connect to working-class men and women.

It’s still the economy, by and large: “Voters were disappointed about the economy and their finances, all of which fueled a desire for change. And Trump cleaned up with ‘change’ voters,” NBC News says, citing its exit poll results.

Despite a low unemployment rate and healthy GDP growth, voters were pessimistic about the direction of the country, with 43% saying they were dissatisfied with how things are going and another 29% who said they were angry about it. While 35% of voters pointed to the state of democracy as their top issue, including 81% if Democrats, 31% cited the economy — and two-thirds of voters called the economy “not so good” or “poor.” Almost half of voters, 45%, described themselves as worse off financially than they were four years ago.

But this also fits with a larger pattern: “Globally, this outcome is what we’ve seen for every head of state who has stood for re-election since the pandemic,” Kate Bedingfield, the former communications director in the Biden White House, said on CNN. “There has been, across the board, an anti-incumbent sentiment that I think does transcend some of the margins that Trump was able to expand on with different racial groups in this country.”

What lies ahead in a second Trump term: Republicans have wrested control of the Senate away from Democrats, giving Trump the ability to more freely install federal judges and potentially place new Supreme Court justices. Trump has also promised to enact steep tariffs that economists warn would be inflationary and costly for consumers. And he has pledged to restrict immigration, carry out mass deportations and pursue some anti-“woke” and anti-transgender culture war policies, including the elimination of the Education Department as it currently exists, among a host of other notable campaign agenda items.

But whether he can enact any legislative priorities or fiscal policy may depend on whether Democrats can somehow still eke out a majority in the House. If Republicans control both chambers of Congress, Trump would appear likely to be able to secure his promised tax cuts — potentially including not just a $5 trillion extension of his 2017 tax cuts but also a steeper corporate tax cut and an end to the taxation of tip income, Social Security benefits and overtime pay.

“If the House breaks for the Democrats then Trump’s ability to push through additional fiscal stimulus would be sorely constrained,” analysts at Capital Economics wrote in a note to clients. “Even if Republicans do hold the House, it will be hard to govern with what could be a majority in the low single digits. Moreover, as the market reaction makes clear, the bond vigilantes are stirring and the risk of an even bigger adverse reaction could intimidate the Republicans into forsaking another big package of deficit-financed tax cuts. In that scenario, we would expect them to restrict themselves to extending the original Trump tax cuts, due to expire at end-2025.”

Disappointment for deficit hawks? Unified Republican control of all levers of power may lead to disappointment for budget watchers calling for fiscal restraint. While Trump has said he will let Elon Musk oversee a cost-cutting commission on “government efficiency” — and the billionaire Tesla founder has said he can slash $2 trillion a year in federal spending, or nearly a third of annual outlays — the reality is that such drastic cuts are nearly impossible, or at least nearly impossible without inflicting massive pain of the sort that could be ruinous for traditional politicians.

“The most fiscally irresponsible outcomes have occurred when Republicans or Democrats win control of both Congress and the White House,” conservative budget expert Brian Riedl wrote recently at The Dispatch. “Ultimately, despite deficit-hawk rhetoric, unrestrained Republican governments have prioritized: 1) aggressively cutting taxes; 2) significantly expanding defense spending—including buying Senate Democratic support to avert filibusters with equal domestic discretionary spending hikes; and 3) buying off more constituencies and lobbyists with social spending, infrastructure, and pork.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has estimated that Trump’s plans would increase the national debt by as much as $15.55 trillion over a decade, with a central cost estimate of $7.75 trillion. “We estimate President Trump’s plan would push debt to 143 percent of GDP in 2035 – an 18 percent of GDP increase,” the CRFB analysts wrote. They added that the next president will quickly be confronted with fiscal deadlines and choices beyond the sunsetting of some 2017 tax cuts, including the need to raise the debt limit and the expiration of spending caps enacted last year.

Map of the Day: A Lot of Red Arrows

Voters moved notably to the right in the 2024 election. This map from The Washington Post’s Kevin Schaul and Kati Perry compares yesterday’s results to the vote four years ago, with red arrows indicating a shift toward Republicans and blue arrows indicating a shift toward Democrats.

“Most of the nation’s 3,000-plus counties swung rightward compared with 2020,” Schaul and Perry write. “The Republican shift appeared across rural border communities in Texas, the wealthy suburbs of Washington, D.C., and even reliably Democratic counties in New York City.”

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