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Anthony Zurcher: Trump in touching distance of White House comeback Anthony Zurcher: What's next after Trump's remarkable comeback
(31 minutes later)
Democratic supporters react to results at Kamala Harris's event in Washington DC Donald Trump has done it again. Eight years after his stunning upset of Hillary Clinton and four years after Joe Biden evicted him from the White House, the former president is on the cusp of becoming the president-elect.
While it is not yet over, Donald Trump is on the cusp of completing one of the most remarkable comebacks in presidential history. On the back of a victory that swept across the key early voting battleground states – and improved on his electoral margins in much of America – he claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” to govern.
The electoral map looks more like 2016, when Trump won, than 2020, when he lost to Joe Biden. “This will truly be the golden age of America,” he promised the cheering crowd at his election night rally in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump has been projected to win Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, the first three of the seven battleground states to be decided. Those victories came on the back of a strong performance in traditional rural areas. His victory cements a fundamental realignment of American politics toward a conservative populism that began in 2016 and was thought to have been discarded with his defeat in 2020.
Across the US, in counties that have reported their results, the former president is making clear headway. His political movement is back and seemingly more durable than ever.
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Path to the presidency: The states Harris and Trump need to win
Watch: How election night unfoldedWatch: How election night unfolded
Trump now will have the opportunity to set about building his new administration and enacting the policies that he has promised will create that new golden age.
Kamala Harris is largely matching Joe Biden’s totals in the urban and suburban counties, but it has not been enough for her to close the gap with the former president. Trump will be joined in power by a Senate that is now again in Republican hands after four years of Democratic control. This will greatly ease the path for Trump’s political appointees, including Cabinet officials and judicial picks, who require Senate confirmation.
The Sun Belt door to a Harris presidential victory is slamming shut. North Carolina, the one battleground state that Trump won in 2020, remains in his column. And he flipped Georgia, a state he lost by just over 11,000 votes last time. Pennsylvania was the most coveted prize of all. It will take days, if not weeks, to determine if Republicans retain control of the House of Representatives. But in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Trump predicted his party would prevail there as well.
In the Democratic “Blue Wall” states along the Great Lakes, where Trump has also built narrow leads, there are indications that Harris is not meeting Democratic expectations in the urban and suburban areas of those states. A Republican Congress will be integral to Trump’s plan to enact a platform that includes an aggressive plan to restructure the federal bureaucracy, replacing senior career government employees with political appointments. His supporters have vetted thousands of loyalists who are poised to take control of all facets of the sprawling federal government.
In close presidential elections, key battleground states tend to break in one direction. So far, the movement has been toward the Republicans – both for Donald Trump and for many of the party’s top Senate candidates. Among those being swept into the corridors of power along with the new president are multi-billionaire Elon Musk, vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr., Democrat turned Republican Tulsi Gabbard, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and a host of other figures who have become part of this unusual electoral coalition.
Watch: Trump promises to "help our country heal"
Trump has also pledged to impose broad new tariffs on imported goods to protect domestic industry, enact a range of new targeted tax breaks and credits, and implement a mass deportation of undocumented migrants living in the US.
On foreign policy, he said he would quickly end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and prioritise America’s interest above all others. Those global crises will be his to solve once he takes office in January.
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Kamala Harris, her fellow Democrats and some former Trump White House officials warned that these policies will create massive economic and social disruptions and threaten global stability – and that a second Trump presidency would be unhinged and set loose from political guardrails.
On Sunday, Trump himself said that his second presidential term might be “nasty a little bit at times, and maybe at the beginning in particular,” but he promised the end results would be good.
On Tuesday, an electoral majority – and likely even a majority of the America’s voting public – agreed.
Anxiety v excitement: BBC correspondents report from the Harris and Trump HQsAnxiety v excitement: BBC correspondents report from the Harris and Trump HQs
At Trump’s election-watch party in Mar-a-Lago, the mood is festive. At Howard University, where Harris faithful have gathered, the situation is tense. If Congress is fully under Republican control, it will give the new president the opportunity to roll back many of the programmes instituted under the past four years of Democratic rule and enact conservative legislation – on tax policy, government spending, and trade and immigration – that will allow him to leave a more lasting mark on American government.
If the current electoral trends continue, former president Trump will be on his way toward becoming president-elect Trump. Trump’s victory represents a remarkable comeback for a man who departed the presidency amidst the wreckage of 6 January, with his reputation seemingly in tatters. After being roundly condemned by Democrats and even some Republicans, he set out on a four-year journey that returned him to the pinnacle of American power.
What we learned from the exit poll so far Along the way he was indicted in federal and state courts. He was convicted of multiple felonies. He was found liable in a civil court in case relating to a sexual assault. Another court levied massive fines on his business empire.
A batch of exit poll data also provides some early clues about how Americans voted, shedding light on the divide between men and women in this election. He shrugged all these off and pressed on to march to the Republican nomination.
Not surprisingly, a majority of women are backing Kamala Harris, while men are giving their support to Donald Trump. Trump was at times unfocused and abrasive in his rally speeches, but he surrounded himself with a savvy, professional staff. Surveys indicated that Americans trusted Trump on the top two issues of this election - immigration and the economy – and his campaign relentlessly hammered his message on them.
What is a bit surprising, at least according to these findings, is that the 54% of women voting for Harris doesn’t match the 57% that backed Joe Biden in 2020. Being on the right side of the big issues, at a time when the electoral mood in the US – and, for that matter, across may of the world’s democracies – was decidedly anti-incumbent was what mattered most.
Across the map, the former president improved many of his margins from 2020, sometime dramatically. His campaign successfully turned out rural voters that were intensely loyal to him and ate into Democratic margins in the cities. While exit polls are still being adjusted to reflect the latest results, Trump appears to have made inroads into the traditional Democratic coalitions of young, Hispanic and black voters.
All that talk of a historic political divide between the two genders may have been premature. While Trump’s team appeared initially uncertain about how to handle the late switch from Biden to Kamala Harris, the former president ultimately found his footing and rode the wave of anti-incumbent sentiment back to the White House.
Exit poll results often shift as the hours tick by and should be seen as general guide and not a detailed map, but if Democrats have lost ground with women voters compared to four years ago, it would be extremely concerning for the Harris camp. Now he has four more years to govern – this time with a more developed political organisation behind him, eager to turn his campaign promises into action.
One thing is clear at this point, however. Turnout in this election is once again approaching the highest level in modern American history. It may even eclipse the 65.9% mark set in 2020.
Both Trump and Harris have repeatedly said that the stakes in this election are high. The American public seems to have heeded that call.
This analysis will be updated as more results come in.
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