Trump rides wave of economic, immigration anxiety to reclaim U.S. presidency

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Donald Trump roared back to the U.S. presidency by increasing his vote share in virtually every corner of the country, flipping at least four swing states and connecting with traditionally Democratic constituencies. He was also on track to become the first Republican to win the popular vote in two decades.

The former president pulled off his astounding resurgence despite trying to overturn a previous election, being convicted of 34 felonies and facing three other criminal cases.

But he tapped into voter anxiety over inflation and immigration to fend off Democratic accusations that he represents an authoritarian threat to democracy. The result was an increase in votes in both blue and red states, rural areas and major cities.

Mr. Trump’s Republicans also took control of the Senate from the Democrats, may keep their majority in the House of Representatives, and already have a six-to-three conservative majority on the Supreme Court. It all means that Mr. Trump will arrive in Washington in January with the most power and political capital he has ever held.

He has vowed to use it to implement a far broader agenda than in his chaotic first term, including rounding up and deporting undocumented immigrants, imposing across-the-board tariffs on all imports to the U.S. and replacing civil servants with political loyalists.

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Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, on Wednesday afternoon promised “a peaceful transfer of power” – a pointed reference to supporters of Mr. Trump storming the Capitol in 2021.

“While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuelled this campaign,” the Vice-President told supporters at Howard University, her alma mater in Washington. “The fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people.”

At times, Ms. Harris appeared to be on the verge of tears as she tried to project the sunny persona she contrasted with the former president’s incendiary rhetoric on the campaign trail.

“To the young people who are watching, it is okay to feel sad and disappointed, but please know, it’s going to be okay,” she said in her concession speech. “Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win.”

She told supporters, “do not despair,” adding: “This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves.”

The Trump campaign said that President Joe Biden had called to invite Mr. Trump to the White House to start working on the transfer of power. The rite is routine in U.S. politics, but Mr. Trump did not do this for Mr. Biden in 2020, did not attend his inauguration and has never acknowledged that he lost.

Ms. Harris had assailed Mr. Trump as a “petty tyrant” during the campaign and attacked his central role in ending Roe v. Wade protections for abortion rights. She also promised a package of tax credits and subsidies intended to help people raise children, afford health insurance and buy homes in a bid to ease voters’ economic angst.

But her campaign came up well short. In many places, she was on track to finish with fewer votes than Mr. Biden did in his 2020 victory. And nearly everywhere, Mr. Trump pushed his vote totals up.

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This was true in swing-state Pennsylvania, which he flipped by getting at least 100,000 more votes and improving his vote share by three percentage points. It was also the case in Democratic strongholds such as New York and New Jersey, in which he was on track to finish six percentage points ahead of his 2020 result. And it held in ruby-red Texas and Florida, in which he improved his margins of victory by nine and 10 percentage points, respectively.

The result of the election, which some had expected to take days to call, was clear by early morning Wednesday.

In AP VoteCast, a survey of 120,000 voters across the country, 40 per cent of respondents listed the economy as the top problem facing the country.

Mr. Biden pointed out in a speech last year that, by that point, pandemic-induced inflation in the U.S. was less severe than it was in many other wealthy countries. But this was cold comfort to Americans facing higher prices for food, housing and gasoline than in 2020. Ms. Harris also argued that Mr. Trump’s tariffs would impose costs of US$4,000 per year on American families. Voters, however, consistently ranked him more highly on the ability to manage the economy than they did Mr. Biden or Ms. Harris.

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Mr. Trump also benefited from the relative weight voters placed on immigration compared with abortion – 20 per cent said the former was the country’s largest issue, according to AP VoteCast, and 10 per cent said the latter – to press his signature issue.

In every stump speech, Mr. Trump portrayed migrants as dangerous criminals and falsely claimed that other countries were deliberately emptying prisons and “insane asylums” to send the inmates to the U.S.’s doorstep. Even amid such rhetoric, the former president improved his standing with Latino men, taking about half their vote, according to AP, up from 40 per cent in 2020.

Where Mr. Biden relied on Mr. Trump’s handling of the pandemic and racial justice protests to motivate voters in 2020, the Democrats struggled to find a similar issue this time. Even supporters of abortion rights did not necessarily break Ms. Harris’s way: In swing-state Arizona, for instance, returns Wednesday showed voters backing a constitutional amendment protecting abortion by 65 per cent but Ms. Harris by 47 per cent.

Women voters didn’t propel Harris into the White House

While much of Mr. Trump’s agenda resembles that of his first term, he has signalled that he will be better prepared to implement it this time, thanks both to a coterie of loyalists on board with his nationalistic makeover of the Republican Party and a better understanding of how he can use executive authority without going through Congress.

This will include a policy of rounding up the at least 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., placing them into military camps and ultimately deporting them, which his campaign has previously said will start on his first day in office. He is also promising tariffs of 10 to 20 per cent on all goods imported into the country, and to renegotiate the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

He may also soon get a reprieve from some of his legal problems. Unidentified Department of Justice officials told U.S. media Wednesday that special counsel Jack Smith will wind up his two criminal cases against Mr. Trump before the president-elect takes power on Jan. 20 of next year.

Mr. Smith had hoped to try the former president on both matters – one concerning his effort to overturn the 2020 election and the other over refusing to return classified documents after leaving office – before Tuesday’s vote. But Mr. Trump successfully executed a strategy of delaying both until after the election, with the help of the Supreme Court on the first one and of Trump-appointed Florida judge Aileen Cannon on the second.

According to the Department of Justice, Mr. Smith will now back down on both cases to comply with the department’s policy of not prosecuting a sitting president.

Mr. Trump is still scheduled to be in a Manhattan courtroom on Nov. 26 to be sentenced over convictions related to his hush-money trial. He is also fighting in Georgia courts against a state-level indictment for trying to overturn the 2020 election.

The Democrats, meanwhile, spent Wednesday trading recriminations.

Vermont Senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said the party needed to tack further left to win over voters with economic anxiety. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he said in a statement.

David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Ms. Harris’s campaign, appeared to subtly lay the blame at Mr. Biden’s feet. The 81-year-old president stayed in the race until July despite concerns about age-related decline before bowing out under pressure.

“We dug out of a deep hole but not enough,” Mr. Plouffe tweeted of the Harris campaign’s efforts. “A devastating loss.”