I felt, subjectively, that Trump was going to pull it out around 11 o’clock in the evening, Eastern Time.
I had put up the election night livestream from NBC News in on of the windows on my home computer, and it was around 11 or so that one of their presenters, standing next to a giant electronic map, began to show county by county results from, I think, Pennsylvania. In particular, the man, whose name unfortunately escapes me, made a real-time comparison between the returns for Trump and Harris in 2024, and the returns for Biden and Trump in 2020. And in every single county he highlighted – at one point, basically just going down the map in geographical order – Trump was beating his vote total from 2020, while Harris was lagging behind Biden’s results. Every one.
To be sure, at that juncture there were still a lot of votes left to be counted, including in Pennsylvania. And yet, mathematically speaking, when one sees one candidate do better than before, while the other does worse than before, and in perhaps the most crucial of all of the battleground states, the writing does begin to slowly appear on the proverbial wall.
I think everyone in the NBC News studio had realized which way the wind was blowing by around midnight or so, but it took another hour or two before they could speak openly about it. To be sure, they were careful not to officially call the election for as long as it could be avoided, and not merely due some pro-Harris partisanship – the vote counting process in several states, including the key battleground of Wisconsin, lasted until nearly this afternoon. Nevertheless, by the time November 6th rolled around, there was a lot more talk around the table about Harris campaign failures and Trump campaign successes, than about any sort of a competitive race.
For myself, while I was certainly not a fan of the first Trump regime, and am sure to be profoundly unimpressed with the sequel, there was a bit of vindication in that my somewhat subjective pre-electoral reading of the tea leaves proved to be, if not completely spot on, then at least broadly correct. I had thought that Trump had a much better chance of victory than Harris, and lo, Trump emerged as the victor, though to be fair, I did not quite expect him to sweep all of the battleground states as it now seems he’s managed to do. I had thought that the Harris campaign made a number of strategic and tactical mistakes that were going to hurt them on election night, and lo, they did. I had thought that the Arab-American vote was going to cost the Harris campaign dearly in Michigan, and lo, Harris lost Michigan by, as of this writing, approximately 81 thousand votes, with at least some early reports suggesting that many Arab-Americans there opted for a third-party candidate, Jill Stein, in lieu of supporting the Democrats. Ironically, it can be argued that the Middle Eastern fiasco will only get worse under a Trump Administration, though this is a topic for another post altogether.
In addition, there is the question of turnout. As of this writing, I have not yet seen the final popular vote tally, however on a very preliminary basis it seems that we are headed for a total in the 140-million range. If correct, this would be roughly 15 million below the 2020 figure, though still considerably higher than for the preceding several elections. A 10% drop in voter turnout, evidently weighted more to the Democratic side, is a pretty significant event, and once again places the fault for the loss squarely on the doorstep of Harris and her political advisors. Trump clearly managed to feed just enough red meat to his voter base to get them to at least show up. The Democrats, by replaying largely the same electoral strategy they had used in both 2016 and 2020 – albeit with some important tactical, on the ground differences – caused their voter base to tune out. Certainly not all of it, but just enough for Trump to finally get the clear popular vote majority that he had always claimed, but was never able to actually obtain until now.
What is left at present is to see who is going into the Trump cabinet this time, and whether the Republicans manage to retain control of the House of Representatives for a complete election night sweep. In the ideal, one would have expected the Democratic Party to use this opportunity for a serious reappraisal of its electoral strategy and priorities, however, I suspect that nothing of the sort will be done, at least not in earnest. Deplorables will be blamed, goats will be scaped, and promises to do more of the same, but harder, in 2028 solemnly made. Though on the bright side, it will be fun to watch the fur fly during the 2028 primaries.