Donald Trump is sweeping the nation in the wake of Tuesday’s highly anticipated polls, and the US Republicans are taking control of both the White House and the House of Representatives.
Trump won the four battleground states—Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—and 277 electoral college votes, earning him the presidency. According to US media forecasts and vote counts, his party has also seized control of the Senate.
Due to Donald Trump’s divisive presence, the country is still split nearly evenly in half for the third consecutive election.
The contest between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to return to Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin early on Wednesday morning. These states narrowly decided Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2020. As of midnight yesterday, Trump had a slight but distinct advantage in all of them.
When Trump dislodged the “Blue Wall” of states that Democrats had won in all six presidential contests from 1992 to 2012 by a combined margin of roughly 80,000 votes in 2016, those three Rust Belt battlegrounds became the president; four years later, Joe Biden won them back from Trump by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes.
Now, the three Rust Belt titans seemed poised to decide the winner again, with Trump reclaiming the upper hand across Sun Belt battlegrounds where Biden gained gains in 2020.
As of midnight, the results indicated that the three states were somewhat in Trump’s favor; the return patterns there were more reminiscent of 2016, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton than in 2020, when Biden defeated Trump.
Trump will probably win the presidency again if he seizes any of the three Blue Wall states. He has a strong hand in Arizona and seems very likely to win the battlegrounds of North Carolina and Georgia in the Southeast.
He would become just the second person after Grover Cleveland in the late nineteenth century to win the presidency, lose it, and then win it again on a third attempt.
Not only is Trump’s third race centred on the same industrial-state battlegrounds, but it is still largely split along well-known lines. Trump is gaining significant support in rural, small-town, and suburban areas, where the majority of voters are culturally conservative and whites without college degrees, just like he did in 2016 and 2020.
n the densely populated, highly educated suburbs around the major cities of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Milwaukee, Harris is accumulating sizable—though, in certain cases, diminished—margins.
The one potentially significant change from 2020: According to exit surveys done by Edison Research for a group of media outlets, Trump was gaining support from Black and Latino voters—particularly men—not just in the important former Blue Wall states but elsewhere.
In many ways, the results of midnight yesterday served as a reminder that the same principles apply in politics (as in Casablanca) even when a candidate as distinctive as Donald Trump is running.
After World War II, it was very difficult for parties to hold the White House when an exiting president was unpopular. When Harry Truman left office in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968, and George W. Bush in 2008, the White House reversed partisan control.
While unpopular exiting presidents have typically posed an insurmountable challenge, popular presidents haven’t always been able to ensure victory for their party when they leave office (the White House changed hands when highly popular chief executives resigned in 1960, 2000, and 2016).
