By Eric Bradner, Gregory Krieg and Daniel Strauss, CNN
(CNN) — Donald Trump has completed a paradigm-shattering political comeback, winning the White House in an election shaped more by Americans’ dissatisfaction with the direction of the country than by Democrats’ dire warnings of the threat the 45th and soon-to-be 47th president poses to its founding principles.
In a repeat of his 2016 victory, Trump once again broke through the “blue wall.” He defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania and was leading in two more Great Lakes swing states, Michigan and Wisconsin. He also romped in the Sun Belt battlegrounds, winning Georgia and North Carolina and leading in Arizona and Nevada.
Trump made gains with nearly every demographic group compared with his 2020 loss, CNN’s exit polls showed. And his apparent near-mirroring of the 2016 map would indicate that he paid no political price for his lies about fraud in that election, his efforts to overturn it, or the criminal charges he has faced since then.
He is now poised to return to office with a Republican Senate majority, easing his path to confirming his choices for key government posts. It’s not yet clear which party will control the House.
Democrats, meanwhile, will be forced to confront difficult questions about the direction of the party — on the issues, and on its appeal to critical segments of the electorate, particularly the Latinos whose realignment could reshape American politics.
Here are eight takeaways from the 2024 election:
Trump undoes the Biden map
Though several states are still tallying their results, Trump’s road to victory in 2024 appears to have been nearly identical to his 2016 win.
Both campaigns had long been focused on seven swing states: the “blue wall” of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada.
There were no surprises — no states that unexpectedly slipped into Trump’s column, despite his musings about winning blue states like New Mexico and Virginia.
However, Trump has already claimed Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and he leads in all seven battlegrounds. In 2020, Joe Biden had won six of those seven — losing only North Carolina to Trump.
The final count could take weeks, but Trump also holds the popular vote lead. If that edge holds, he’d be the first Republican since George W. Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote.
The ‘glass ceiling’ remains intact
Harris’ loss will once again leave disappointed the millions of women who hoped to see the history-making moment when what Hillary Clinton famously called the “glass ceiling” was shattered.
There was a significant gender split, with the majority of women backing Harris, but men supporting Trump, CNN’s exit polls showed.
The only segment of the electorate with which Harris made notable gains over Biden’s 2020 performance was with college-educated women — the voters who had propelled the party’s strong suburban performance in the 2022 midterms.
Abortion rights, the issue that fueled Democratic wins in 2022, on ballot initiatives and in special elections, proved less potent this year.
Harris performed much worse than Biden among voters who said they thought abortion should be legal in most cases — even though the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in between the two elections.
Four years ago, 26% of the electorate held that opinion, and Biden won them by 38 points. This year, 33% held that opinion, and Harris won them by just 3 points.
It’s a result that suggests the issue wasn’t the deciding factor for many of those voters — even though Democrats had succeeded in the 2022 midterms, special elections and more by highlighting the GOP’s role in ending Roe v. Wade’s national abortion rights protections.
Republicans win the Senate
Republicans won back the Senate majority that they held during Trump’s first term but lost when he was defeated in 2020.
The GOP win would have significant ramifications for a new president —easing Trump’s path to having nominees for the Cabinet and other key posts confirmed.
Democrats entered the 2024 election cycle with only one or two seats to spare (depending on which party was in the White House, and therefore held the vice president’s tie-breaking vote) — and an all-but-impossible map to defend, with three seats in deep-red states on the ballot.
Republicans won all three of those races. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s retirement effectively guaranteed Republican Jim Justice’s win there. Montana Sen. Jon Tester lost to 38-year-old former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown fell short against businessman Bernie Moreno.
Democrats hoped a long shot would materialize — crossing their fingers that Rep. Colin Allred could oust Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, or that former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell could buck Florida’s rightward trend and beat Sen. Rick Scott. Neither came close.
Three Senate races in the Great Lakes battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were also neck-and-neck. Their outcome will determine the size of the GOP majority.
Republicans now face a battle to replace Mitch McConnell as the party’s leader in the chamber, after the Kentucky senator said in February he would step down from his leadership post. Texas Sen. John Cornyn and South Dakota Sen. John Thune are the two top candidates.
Democrats could find some shelter in the House
Democrats didn’t want to discuss it before the election, but they’re talking about it now.
With Harris’ loss of the presidency and with the Senate coming under GOP control, the House could become the party’s last line of defense in Washington.
With so many votes still to be counted and races to be called, it’s hard to say whether House Democrats are on a path to victory or are headed for another close defeat. Democrats have had some good news out of New York and California, which could on their own kick out enough GOP incumbents to make Hakeem Jeffries the next House speaker.
What that would mean is, simply, that Trump would be unable to pass much, if any, legislation and perhaps more importantly would find himself hamstrung as he tries to wind back Biden’s policies.
The CHIPS Act, a bipartisan law investing in memory chip manufacturing, would be on the chopping block if Republicans keep their majority, but absent that, most would assume it’s off the table. Same goes for any move to uproot the public investments doled out by the Bipartisan Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction acts, which appear safe for the time being.
Obamacare, too, would almost surely be in the clear. (Republicans couldn’t repeal it with a governing trifecta in 2017, so talk of repeal might be over anyway.) Though all of these laws – the signature achievements of the last two Democratic administrations – seem safe if Democrats get their majority, there will still be tough fights at the administration and agency levels about how they’re managed.
But on an otherwise bleak night for Democrats, a fighting chance is the best the party can ask for.
Rural voters are an even more potent force than many realized
If Trump does return to the White House, he will have rural counties across the battleground states to thank.
There will be a lot of back-and-forth over why Harris underperformed Biden in big cities and their suburbs, but the fact remains she won in those places mostly by significant margins.
Still, Trump’s margins in rural America appear to have been simply too large to overtake. It turns out that there were, in fact, more votes for the former president to mine in counties like central Pennsylvania’s Huntingdon, a short drive from the campus of Penn State University, where he’s on pace to outperform both his vote total and margin from four years ago.
Harris’s performance in corresponding strongholds was pretty much the inverse.
In Montgomery County, home to a big chunk of the Philadelphia suburbs, Harris is on pace to win about 60% of the vote. The problem for the vice president – and it’ll be something Democrats spend a lot of time chewing on – is Biden fared about 2.5 points better than that.
There was a similar dynamic on display in Michigan’s Oakland County, too, where Trump again turned out his base and, in some places, added to it, while Harris appears unlikely to match Biden’s 14-point advantage.
Small numbers in the grander scheme of an election so big, expensive and plainly complicated could seem negligible – but they add up. And on Tuesday, the math appeared to be on Trump’s side.
Democrats will do some soul searching
Well before the outcome of the presidential election came into view, one thing was crystal clear for Democrats as Tuesday night rolled on: There would be lots of finger-pointing around the party. The results were not just a disappointment at the presidential level. In parts of the country where Democrats won and expected to win, the margin was far from comfortable.
Even in a scenario where Trump would be able to turn out his base, Democrats thought a surge of support among women voters thanks to an emphasis on abortion rights in races across the country would keep the presidential race close.
“As we have known all along, this is a razor thin race,” wrote Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon in an email at one point in the night.
But as the night dragged on, it was not nearly as narrow as Democratic polling and public polling had projected. It became clear to Democrats that they were no longer the party with an ongoing advantage among minority voters and labor unions. And they will have to think about how to win over those constituencies and where they went wrong in messaging and ground game.
“There’ll be plenty of critiques and so on,” Democratic strategist David Axelrod said on CNN – before going on to praise Harris as a candidate despite the results.
Trump makes big gains with Latino men
Trump’s campaign pushed hard to court men, and particularly men of color. CNN’s exit polls showed it paid off.
Chief among Trump’s gains compared with his performance against Biden in 2020: Latino men. Trump won that cohort by 8 points, four years after losing them by 23 points. It’s a result that showed his campaign’s efforts to court those voters paid off — and that the late focus on a comedian mocking Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally didn’t cause the damage Harris’ campaign hoped it would. The gains were concentrated most heavily among Latinos under age 65.
Trump also made gains in key places among Black men, more than doubling his 2020 performance in North Carolina.
Overall, the exit polls painted a picture of an electorate displeased with the state of the nation and its leadership.
Nearly three-fourths of voters said they were dissatisfied or angry with the way things are going in the United States, CNN’s exit polls found. Trump won about three-fifths of those voters. Biden was deeply underwater, with 58% of voters saying they disapprove of his performance as president. Four in five of those voters backed Trump.
Harris slipped compared with Biden’s performance four years ago among young voters, independents, moderates and union households.
Voters who said democracy was the most important issue overwhelmingly backed Harris, but Trump won those who identified the economy as most important by nearly the same margin.
Florida and Ohio are no longer battlegrounds
Florida’s decades-long status as a presidential swing state is over.
Two years after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis romped to a 19-percentage-point reelection victory, Trump backed it up with another double-digit GOP win.
In heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade County — traditionally a huge source of Democratic votes — the massive swing was on full display. What had been a 29-point Hillary Clinton win in 2016 was an 11-point Trump victory this year.
Florida even bucked the national trend of states of all political stripes backing abortion rights ballot measures in the two and a half years since Roe v. Wade’s reversal.
A majority of Florida voters there backed a ballot measure to legalize abortion, but it fell short of the state’s 60% threshold to win passage — meaning the state’s six-week ban remains in place.
There are deeper reasons for Democrats to despair. The party’s historic voter registration edge has all but evaporated by 2020, and now Republicans — fueled by migration to the state since the coronavirus pandemic — have the lead. The GOP has won every governor’s race since 1994, and gerrymandered districts have locked in its supermajority in both chambers of the state legislature.
As it sheds its swing-state status, Florida could be on track to become the next Texas — poised for a generation of Republican dominance built on a coalition of older, non-college-educated voters, younger Hispanic voters, conservatives migrating from other states and more.
Ohio, another traditional presidential battleground, is also now solidly in the red column. Trump was cruising to a double-digit victory there..
This story has been updated with additional developments.
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