By Andrew Benoit
Former President Donald Trump has been elected the 47th president of the United States, decisively defeating Vice President Kamala Harris by carrying most battleground states including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia. Harris, who conceded to Trump on Wednesday, consistently underperformed compared to Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory. Despite the effort by the Harris campaign to target moderate Republicans and suburban white women, which included an endorsement by Liz Cheney and a promise to put a Republican in Harris’s cabinet, registered Republicans voted for Trump at rates similar to his 2020 defeat. Harris lost major ground among minorities, most notably Hispanic men, 54% of whom voted for Trump. Only 36% of Hispanic men supported Trump in 2020. Donald Trump also overperformed among Black men, who have continued to shift away from the Democratic party. These results continue a longstanding trend of eroding minority support for the Democratic party, which has often relied on these groups — especially black voters — to secure their victory. Donald Trump’s coalition of working-class voters, on the other hand, has expanded beyond its primary base of white non-college-educated voters. This expansion helped Trump secure the popular vote, something which he failed to do in 2016 and 2020. A popular mandate could serve to embolden the former president, who instigated a right-wing attack on the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to prevent the election results from being certified.
The GOP also regained control of the Senate, while the House of Representatives remains up for grabs at the time of writing. Complete control of the legislature would represent a major win for the President-elect, potentially enabling him to follow through on some of his more radical promises. Trump has also succeeded in banishing or absorbing any lingering anti-Trump factions in the Republican party while stacking the Supreme Court with loyalist justices. Combined with the departure of many advisers or staffers who were seen as inhibiting the President, it seems likely that Trump’s second term will be more aggressive than his first. Trump has consistently demonized minorities, the press, migrants, and left-wing activists, often with subtle calls for violence. He has promised to close the border while unleashing the largest deportation operation in the nation’s history. The former president also plans to gut federal climate policies, ending subsidies for renewable energy while restarting tax breaks for oil and coal. He aims to dismantle much of the American bureaucracy and has promised to fire thousands of civil servants. Global allies fear that Trump will work to disentangle America from its obligations abroad, including NATO and the war in Ukraine.