How to understand the election results so far

For the third year in a row, the nation is split almost exactly in half due to the polarizing presence of Donald Trump.

This morning it seems likely that the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will once again come down to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the same states that decided Trump's 2016 and 2020 races by razor-thin margins. Trump had a narrow but clear lead in all cases by midnight.

In 2016, these three Rust Belt battlegrounds made Trump president when he pushed them out of the “Blue Wall” of states that Democrats won in all six presidential elections from 1992 to 2012 by a combined margin of about 80,000 votes; Four years later, they made Joe Biden president when he took them from Trump by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes. Now that Trump regained the upper hand in the Sun Belt battlegrounds where Biden made inroads in 2020, it seemed likely that the three Rust Belt giants would once again decide the winner.

The midnight results suggest these three states lean slightly toward Trump; The return patterns were more reminiscent of 2016, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, than 2020, when Biden defeated Trump. Given that Trump is also most likely to win the southeastern battlegrounds of North Carolina and Georgia and has a strong hand in Arizona, Trump is likely to win the presidency again if he captures one of the three blue wall states. He became only the second man, after Grover Cleveland in the late 18th century, to win the presidency, lose it, and then regain it in a third attempt.

Not only are Trump's third campaign centered on the same developed-state battlegrounds, but they remain largely divided along very familiar lines. As he did in 2016 and 2020, Trump is making large margins in suburbs, small towns and rural communities where most voters are white, culturally conservative people without college degrees. Harris earns large – although sometimes smaller – margins in the populous, well-educated suburbs surrounding the major cities of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Milwaukee. The one potentially crucial change from 2020: Election polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations showed Trump making gains among black and Latino voters, and particularly among men, not just in key former blue wall states but elsewhere .

In many ways, the results, available as of midnight, were a reminder that even in a race involving a figure as unique as Donald Trump, in politics (as in Casablanca), the basics hold true. Since World War II, it has been extremely difficult for parties to retain the White House when an outgoing president was unpopular: the White House relinquished party control when Harry Truman left office in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968, and George W. Bush in 2008 Presidents have not always been able to guarantee their party's victory when they leave the White House, as relatively popular leaders resigned in 1960, 2000 and 2016, but unpopular outgoing presidents usually presented an insurmountable obstacle.

If Harris ultimately fails, this pattern would be a big reason why. Biden's deep unpopularity at the end of his term was a major headwind for them. In the national exit poll, only 40 percent of voters said they approved of Biden's performance as president. In the battlegrounds, Biden's approval rating ranged from a low of just 39 percent (in Wisconsin) to a high of 43 percent (Pennsylvania). Among voters who disapproved of the outgoing president's performance, Harris performed better than usual for a candidate from the same party. Still, the vast majority of dissatisfied voters in all of these states formed a huge base of support for Trump. In the nationwide election survey, fully two thirds of voters assessed the economy as negative. Only one in four said they had not suffered any burden from inflation in the past year.

A lot has changed for Trump since the 2020 election. He launched a sustained campaign to overturn the results of that election, culminating in the January 6 insurrection. Supreme Court justices he appointed helped overturn the constitutional right to abortion; he was charged with multiple crimes in four separate cases and convicted in 34 of them; and he was hit with civil judgments for financial fraud and sexual abuse.

But at least the exit polls showed that his support level has changed remarkably little since 2020 among white voters in all battleground states. In Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia, his white support has remained virtually unchanged since 2020; It suffered a small decline in Pennsylvania and a slightly larger one in North Carolina.

Compared to 2020, white voters with at least a four-year college degree moved slightly, but not dramatically, away from Trump in these five major battlegrounds. Harris won about three in five college-educated white women, a big improvement from what exit polls showed in 2020. But Trump made up for that by making at least a slight improvement since 2020 among white voters without college degrees, who tended to give Biden particularly low marks for his performance. Crucially for Trump, he retained the overwhelming support of white women without college degrees in every corner of the world except Wisconsin, where he divided it evenly. Democrats had hoped that these women would abandon him over abortion rights and a general distaste for his demeaning language about women. With these white working-class women appearing to be on track to give Trump as big a lead as he had in 2016 and 2020, national exit polls showed Trump winning most white women against Harris — just as he did against Biden and Clinton. This is likely to be the subject of intense frustration and debate among Democrats in the coming weeks, regardless of whether Trump wins the race or not.

Overall, the abortion issue benefited Harris significantly, but not as much as the Democratic gubernatorial candidates who won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in 2022, the first election after the Supreme Court's overturning decision roe. In that election, exit polls showed Democrats Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania winning over four-fifths of voters who said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances; In Wisconsin, Democrat Tony Evers won three-quarters of it. But this time — with the economy weighing on those voters — Harris won only about two-thirds of pro-choice voters in Michigan and Wisconsin and about seven in 10 in Pennsylvania. This slight shift could prove crucial. (In the national exit poll, Trump won nearly three in 10 voters who said abortion should be legal all or most of the time; a quarter of women who supported legal abortion supported Trump.)

With abortion rights not giving her as much of a boost as the 2022 Democratic gubernatorial candidates, Harris did not appear on track to expand Biden's lead in many of the large suburban districts that are crucial to the modern Democratic coalition. It appeared to roughly match Biden's enormous advantages in the four large suburban counties outside Philadelphia. But it failed to narrow the roughly 3-2 deficit Biden faced as of midnight in Waukesha County outside Milwaukee, perhaps the largest Republican-leaning white-collar suburb north of the Mason-Dixon Line. In Oakland County, outside Detroit, Trump appeared on track to narrow their lead slightly, dealing a potentially fatal blow to their chances.

In the well-educated county surrounding Ann Arbor, Harris' margin of victory appeared to narrow from 2020, perhaps reflecting youth discontent over the support she and Biden gave to Israel's war in Gaza. In Dane County, Wisconsin, centered on Madison, she appeared only on track to reach Biden's share in 2020, rather than the even higher number Evers achieved in 2022. Overall, Harris appeared to be on track in several suburban counties in the blue wall states, closer to Hillary Clinton's margin in 2016 when she lost those states than to Biden's margin in 2020 when he won them.

The failure to improve Biden's performance in suburban areas left Harris vulnerable to what I have described as Trump's pincer movement against her.

As in his previous two races, he posted huge numbers in rural areas and small towns. Trump enjoyed his usual commanding advantages in the working-class suburbs surrounding Pittsburgh and appeared to be winning dramatically in predominantly working-class counties, including and around Green Bay.

From the other direction, he appeared to further narrow traditional Democratic margins in heavily minority central cities. This was particularly clear in Philadelphia. Exit polls showed Trump improving slightly among black voters in North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania; That contributed to his victory in North Carolina and gave him gains that had him on the verge of defeating Wisconsin and Michigan as of midnight. In the national exit poll, Harris essentially matched Biden's share of the vote among white voters overall – but fell slightly among black voters and more significantly among Hispanic voters.

In the ominous news for Democrats from battleground states, the possibility that Harris would win the national popular vote was all but lost, even as Trump was also expected to improve his performance on that front in 2016 and 2020. If Harris does indeed win the national popular vote, it would be the eighth time in the last nine presidential elections that Democrats have done so – something no party has achieved since the founding of the modern party system in 1828.

But even if Democrats achieved this historic feat, they would face the heartening prospect that Republicans could win unified control of the House, Senate and White House while losing the national popular vote. Until the 21st century, this had only happened once in American history, in 1888; If that happens again this year, it would be the third time this century that Republicans won complete control of Washington while losing a majority of the electoral vote.

If Trump loses the national popular vote for a third time (only William Jennings Bryan did so before), he is unlikely to view this as a precautionary measure. If anything, he will likely view the prospect that he could win key battleground states by larger margins than in 2016 and gain among voters of color as a signal to vigorously pursue the combative agenda he laid out this year. These include plans for massive new tariffs, the largest deportation program in U.S. history, a purge of the civil service and the deployment of the military against what he calls “the enemy within.” Unless there are dramatic changes in the final counts in the crucial states, American voters will have once again decided to leap into this murky unknown.