America’s democracy will again be put to the test, and its government will veer sharply to the right. Kamala Harris and Democrats were dealt stunning defeats across the country.
Americans have voted former President Donald Trump back into the nation’s highest office four years after he fomented a riot at the Capitol to try to block his removal from power.
His election is likely to again place the country’s democracy under enormous stress. For the last decade, he has demonstrated that he has little regard for the checks and balances that have defined US government since the dawn of the republic.
Now, after Trump’s defeat of Vice-President Kamala Harris, the nation faces momentous changes certain to cut across political and cultural lines. Republicans demonstrated strength all over the map and up and down the ballot. They seized control of the Senate and could retain the House. Winning both would give Trump an important source of legislative power.
As it was during Trump’s first term, the nation is set to be governed at the whims of a President with little interest in the details of policy. But under the government he assembles, major issues like abortion rights, taxation, immigration and foreign policy will be pushed hard to the right, from not only legislation and executive orders but also the inevitable appointment of Trump-friendly judges and, potentially, more Supreme Court justices.
Here are 10 takeaways from an election that again upends American politics.
America’s democracy is likely to be put under tremendous strain.
Trump has already sought to undermine the independence of the justice system. During his first term, he demanded personal loyalty from officials across the executive branch and fired those who resisted his demands.
Now he returns to the White House with the knowledge of how the system restricted his impulses and with a roster of officials more willing to help him circumvent long-standing norms.
The last time he took office, a culture of resistance emerged from corners that included Democrats, the federal government’s civil servants and even some of his own appointees. This time, he is unlikely to elevate people willing to speak against him. His circle of influential allies now includes men like Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the vice-president-elect; tech billionaire Elon Musk; and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the conspiracy theorist who has long cast doubt on the established science of vaccines.
Trump will be a President who has already whipped up political violence and who promised to use the US military against his domestic opponents, a prospect that may chill public resistance to his boundary-breaking ambitions.
The country, and its foreign allies, is in for major whiplash
The relative stability on domestic and international affairs during the last four years is about to be gone, replaced by a volatile President who often operates without regard to national precedent.
Trump has praised the authoritarian leaders of China, North Korea and Russia while demeaning democratic US allies in Europe and Asia. Whether the United States remains part of Nato is a live question. Aid to Ukraine as it struggles to fight off Russia’s invasion is in peril. And the Mideast conflict will have a powerful, unpredictable new actor who has not demonstrated an interest in calming tensions.
And then there are the domestic issues that will turn on a dime.
Trump campaigned in front of signage that read “deport illegals now”. He has promised a 20% tariff on imported goods. His allies have said a Trump administration could severely restrict or try to outright ban abortion.
And Trump will have an opportunity to appoint – and have a Republican-controlled Senate confirm – scores more federal judges and perhaps more Supreme Court justices, if seats open up. That would lock in conservative control of the judicial system for generations.
Trump remains the nation’s most durable political force
Harris said over and over that her campaign was designed to “turn the page” on Trump-era politics.
Now the Trump story may have years more to go.
While the former President’s party lost or underperformed in every major election since he won in 2016, he remained the most powerful force in American politics. He beat back every Republican who challenged him, and the Democrat who managed to defeat him in 2020 defined much of his presidency as being an antidote to Trump.
In the meantime, Trump was criminally indicted four times, convicted once, was found liable for sexual assault, lied enough times to keep an army of fact-checkers employed, and spent the final days of his campaign giving a platform to racist jokes and using threatening language toward his political opponents, one of whom he suggested should have guns shooting at her.
Enough Americans looked past it all to send him back to the White House.
Harris could not outrun Biden
The recriminations of Harris’ poor showing will be swift for President Joe Biden, who despite his legislative accomplishments remained unpopular with voters. Americans widely judged him too old for a second term and saw him as a poor steward of the economy and the country’s southern border.
For more than a year, top Democrats including Harris rejected what the party’s voters were telling them: the octogenarian Biden should not run again.
While Harris shot the ticket back into contention after replacing Biden, he remained a political albatross. She struggled to articulate how she would be different, and Biden proved to be such an unsteady surrogate that Democrats winced whenever he ventured onto the campaign trail.
Whether Harris’ struggles stemmed more from her decisions or from the situation Biden left her in will be a subject of fierce debate as Democrats fling accusations of blame in the coming days, weeks and months.
America will keep waiting for a female President
Hillary Clinton made the prospect of breaking what she once called “the highest, hardest glass ceiling” a centrepiece of her 2016 campaign. Expecting to win, she held her election-night event at the Javits Center in New York, under an actual glass ceiling.
Harris did not make her gender or her race – she is the daughter of a Jamaican father and a South Asian mother – central to her abbreviated campaign as she sought to disqualify Trump and present herself as the face of a new generation of leadership.
Neither approach has worked against Trump.
Trump’s federal criminal trials are imperilled
Trump’s Justice Department is likely to drop the federal charges against him in his classified documents and election interference cases.
He has already said he would fire Jack Smith, the special counsel who has led the federal investigations and prosecutions into the former President over the last two years. There is not much doubt that a Trump-appointed Attorney-General would drop the charges shortly after being confirmed.
Trump still faces a sentencing hearing this month in New York City for his felony convictions from this spring, though how that might change now that he is President-elect remains to be seen.
Trump will have a Republican Senate, and possibly a GOP House
Republicans will control the Senate and could retain the House, though it remains up for grabs and may not be called for days.
A Republican trifecta would give Trump free rein to carry out his policies and leave Democrats unable to mount the sort of congressional investigations that often unearth politically damaging revelations.
Unlike when Trump first entered office in 2017, he will inherit a Congress full of members in his image who endorse his style and politics. While the Republican Senate majority still has two moderates in Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Trump might not need their votes to pass sweeping right-wing policies in the new Senate.
The contest for House control remains a seesaw battle, with key races in California, Oregon and Washington still uncalled. Democrats will almost certainly flip some Republican seats, but Harris’ struggles in industrial Pennsylvania and Michigan will cost her party – and could possibly preserve the slender Republican majority in the lower chamber.
A brief era of good feelings is over for Democrats
When Biden was finally forced out after his poor debate performance, the party had a collective moment of joy as it coalesced around Harris.
For just over 100 days, there was little dissent as she executed a controversy-free campaign with few evident mistakes. Fundraising surged, and the party cheered as she built a coalition that stretched from Liz Cheney to Bernie Sanders.
But there is nothing like a poor electoral showing to ignite an intraparty civil war.
The entire country moved to the right
Trump won Florida by roughly 13 percentage points – 10 more than in 2020. Texas also moved 10 points in his favour. He won Ohio by about 11 points, three more than in 2020.
Blue states shifted, too. New York moved 13 points toward him, and Virginia shifted six points in his direction.
The former President did it while running an erratic and sometimes outwardly racist campaign – marked by two attempts on his life – that made the twin arguments that Biden and Harris were responsible for post-pandemic inflation and an unpopular approach to immigration. At the same time, Trump bet big on anti-transgender advertising while warning that Democratic elites had contempt for his supporters.
Harris and other Democrats largely chose not to answer Trump’s cultural attacks, believing that abortion rights would motivate enough voters to defeat him again.
But even though Trump appointed the justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, the anger that powered surprisingly large Democratic victories did not lead to similar results when Trump himself was on the ballot.
Rural America grew even redder
When Harris named Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate, part of his remit was to serve as her ambassador to rural areas, where voters would presumably be familiar with his football coach persona and appreciate his upbringing in a tiny Nebraska town.
It did not slow the rush of rural America to Trump.
Walz spent much of his time stumping in small towns while leaving the big arenas in major markets to Harris. Democrats spoke openly about a lose-by-less campaign in rural areas of the battleground states, but in the end they lost by the same or more while not making up enough ground in suburban counties – and losing some of their advantage in major cities.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Reid J. Epstein
Photographs by: Doug Mills, Haiyun Jiang, Erin Schaff and Maansi Srivastava
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