Former President Donald Trump, appealing almost exclusively to nativist sentiments, defeated Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday, bringing to a swift close a compressed election contest that exposed and exploited raw divisions over identity.
As of this writing, 71,775,100 Americans cast ballots for Trump and he received 277 electoral votes, according to the Associated Press. By contrast, Harris received 66,894,178 votes and 224 electoral votes.
Trump is the first Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote since former President George W. Bush in 2004.
The stark racial polarization was evident in exit polling.
According to national exit polling from Edison, 54% of Latino men voted for Trump while 61% of Latinas cast ballots for Harris. As they have for seven decades, a majority of White women, 52%, voted for the Republican presidential candidate, Trump, while 59% of White men did so. Despite intensified and increased focus on Black men, they largely, at 78%, cast ballots for Harris and Black women, a stalwart Democratic voting bloc, came through with 92% voting for Harris.
From the onset, Trump’s third bid for the presidency drew on a demonstrably false and xenophobic narrative that the nation has devolved into an economically repressed, lawless state under the Biden-Harris administration, where Democrats and, more broadly, their multicultural voting base — have run amok in American life. Throughout the campaign season, the Republican nominee and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, weaponized stereotypical tropes and baseless lies about such groups as Haitian migrants, immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries, and seemingly innumerable others during a campaign that espoused anger, fear, misogyny and identity-based bigotry at virtually every turn.
Even more than his rhetoric, Trump’s proposed policies and actions promise to exact a devastating impact on communities of color, likely drawing from Project 2025, a conservative manifesto written by the Heritage Foundation and dozens of other similar groups that employ former Trump administration staffers. He has vowed on multiple occasions to nix federal funding for public schools that teach about race, gender, or sexual identity using books and curriculum he and fellow Republicans find objectionable. He also promised to reinstate the travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries and expand it to include Palestinian refugees fleeing war in Gaza.
During the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in March 2023, Trump told the largely White gathering, “I am your retribution.” In December, Fox News host Sean Hannity asked about those comments, pressing, “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Trump responded “Except for Day One” and went on to vow mass deportations and a “drill, baby drill” environmental approach. Nearly two months ago to the day, he promised a “bloody story” in mass deportations.
“On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out,” he reiterated during his Oct. 27 rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. “I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail, then kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible.”
He fantasized about unbridled police violence by saying he would allow cops “one rough hour” to deter crime.
He has also taken aim at the press and Black female journalists in particular, hurling demeaning insults at the moderators during the National Association of Black Journalists convention in late July in Chicago.
Trump tapped into the misogynoir already stacked against Harris — by questioning her Blackness, her intelligence, and her qualifications to lead the nation while his supporters repeatedly took aim at her sexual morality, suggesting she is a prostitute with “pimp handlers.” His flagrant disparagement of women and Black women in particular has earned him wrist slaps, and more crucially broad enthusiasm from his base.
Trump’s third bid for the presidency drew on a demonstrably false and xenophobic narrative that the nation has devolved into an economically repressed, lawless state under the Biden-Harris administration, where Democrats and, more broadly, their multicultural voting base — have run amok in American life.
In a Nov. 3 rally he joked that to get to him, a would-be assassin would need to “shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much.” He said he would use the military against American citizens deemed “the enemy from within” a phrase he often repeated during the final campaign push.
“The crazy lunatics that we have — the fascists, the Marxists, the communists, the people that we have that are actually running the country,” Trump told a gathering at a Wisconsin rally in October. “Those people are more dangerous — the enemy from within — than Russia and China and other people.”
In his victory against Harris, Trump was able to drown out what had become a steady drumbeat of warnings about his fitness for office and threat to democracy. Those alarms were sounded by a cadre of former national security staffers including his former chief of staff, John Kelly, who called his old boss “a fascist.”
“We know who Donald Trump is,” Harris told a throng of more than 75,000 supporters who gathered last week at The Ellipse and spilled out onto the National Mall. “He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election.”
In her concession speech on Wednesday at Howard University, an HBCU and her alma mater, Harris reassured the gathering “While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign,” Harris said. “The fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people.”
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Provided that Trump is not sentenced to a prison term in New York later this month after his May conviction on 34 felony counts, he will return to the White House early next year possessing much broader latitude to act on those types of promises without fear of legal or criminal accountability. This summer’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. United States determined, effectively, that U.S. presidents are immune from prosecution for official acts conducted during their time in office.
Republicans also won control of the U.S. Senate and, as of this writing, appear poised to maintain their hold on the House of Representatives, further hindering efforts to counter Trump’s Orwellian agenda.
Perhaps more than anything, Trump’s victory illuminates truths concerning the nation’s electorate at this point in history.
The Associated Press reported that among those who cast ballots for Harris, roughly two-thirds cited the future of democracy as the motivating factor to vote for her. Just about half of Trump’s voters were motivated by the economy and immigration — in particular, migration on the U.S.-Mexico border. Just one-third of Trump’s voters cited democracy as the most important reason for their votes.
Ultimately, the majority in the American electorate chose this path as Trump told his supporters early Wednesday morning:
“This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country.”
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