Outside the Beltway

Trump Wins Pennsylvania, Likely the Presidency

The 45th President looks to be the 47th.

James Joyner · Wednesday, November 6, 2024 · 12 comments

After an early morning for both of us, my wife and I decided to turn in just before 11. We tried the talking heads on NBC and then ABC, and listening to them drone on with comparisons of partial counts to 2020 total counts and exit polls in a normal race vs. those in a COVID-altered election was just exhausting.

I awoke to this:

Thus far, things have gone exactly as I predicted with the all-important exception of Pennsylvania going slightly for Trump rather than slightly for Harris. But, if the NYT Needle is right, Trump would sweep the swing states. Few predicted that.

As far as I can tell, no reputable outlet has yet made an official call. But it would take a miracle at this point for Harris to win. I don’t expect one.

Trump, naturally, didn’t wait for the media or for a Harris concession.

AP (“With Harris’ path to victory narrowing, Trump declares victory“):

Former President Donald Trump took the stage with his family at West Palm Beach County Convention Center early Wednesday morning to the raucous cheers of supporters

As Trump neared the projected 270 electoral votes needed to win, he declared victory as Vice President Kamala Harris’ path to reach that threshold narrowed following projections for Trump in North Carolina, Georgia and in highly prized Pennsylvania.

At the time ABC News had not yet projected a winner in the overall race, or in the four remaining swing states, as results continued to come in.

“We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible,” Trump said. “And it is now clear that we’ve achieved the most incredible political — hey, look what happened, isn’t this crazy? But it’s a political victory.”

“It’s a political victory that our country is never seen before, nothing like this,” he added. “I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president.”

He did not mention Harris.

Trump told the crowd they ushered in a new “golden age of America.”

“Every citizen, I will fight for you, for your family, and your future,” he said. “Every single day I will be fighting for you, and with every breath in my body.”

Thus far, the major papers are still in live-blog mode rather than putting out feature stories.

WaPo (“Trump close to winning second presidency, pledges to ‘fix everything’“):

Former president Donald Trump claimed victory early Wednesday as he was closing in on the 270 electoral votes he needed to clinch the presidency. Speaking from Florida, Trump promised to “fix everything” and praised his supporters as the “greatest political movement of all time.” Trump spoke after he was projected the winner in Pennsylvania, a crucial battleground state in his high-stakes race against Vice President Kamala Harris. He was also the projected winner in North Carolina and Georgia, but other swing states remained too close to call.

NYT (“Battleground victories are powering Trump.“):

Donald J. Trump has captured Pennsylvania, the biggest prize of the seven battleground states in one of the most consequential presidential elections in modern American history. It all but seals his return to the White House four years after voters turned him out.

Georgia, a state that Mr. Trump narrowly lost in 2020, and North Carolina, a state he narrowly won, had already moved into the win column for the former president. With Pennsylvania gone, Vice President Kamala Harris’s “blue wall” along the Great Lakes has cracked, and her path to becoming the first woman in the Oval Office has nearly disappeared.

Republicans also flipped control of the Senate with a string of key victories. In Ohio, Bernie Moreno defeated Senator Sherrod Brown, a resilient red-state Democrat. The retiring Senator Joseph Manchin, an independent, will be replaced by the state’s Republican governor, Jim Justice. And Senator Deb Fischer held off a dark-horse challenge in Nebraska from a blue-collar independent, Dan Osborn, eliminating any path Democrats had toward retaining control of the chamber.

Speaking to supporters in Palm Beach, Fla., in the early hours of the morning, Mr. Trump declared, “This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country.”

Two hours before, the crowd at Ms. Harris’s election watch party at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, D.C., had already thinned by midnight, and the mood was glum when Cedric Richmond, a co-chairman of the Harris campaign, told those who were left that the vice president would not be coming to campus. Her supporters streamed for the exits.

UPDATE: As I was compiling my roundup, NBC News called it for Trump (“Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris to become the next U.S. president, NBC News projects“):

Donald J. Trump, the once and now future president, capped an improbable political comeback by defeating Vice President Kamala Harris on promises to turbocharge the economy and deport undocumented immigrants by the millions.

NBC News projected the Trump victory over Harris, who was the first woman of color to win a major party nomination for president, early Wednesday morning. She took the reins of the Democratic campaign after President Joe Biden abandoned his bid for a second term, a decision made in the wake of a disastrous June debate performance.

The most polarizing figure in modern American politics, Trump now must preside over a nation deeply riven by social, racial, cultural and economic hostilities that he has strategically exploited on the campaign trail for nearly a decade. It was, for him, a successful strategy. The last time a defeated U.S. president avenged his loss was Grover Cleveland — in 1892.

“This was the greatest political movement of all time,” Trump said just before 2:30 a.m. Wednesday at a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida. “Now it’s going to reach a new level of importance because we’re going to help our country heal.”

Trump’s path back to the White House ran through Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin, states he reclaimed after losing them in 2020. He remained locked in close contests with Harris in Michigan, Arizona and Nevada as he looked to pad his Electoral College margin.

It was a campaign unlike any other, waged by a unique figure in American history. Trump emerged victorious despite facing a dozen Republican primary challengers, four indictments, a criminal conviction, a finding that he was liable for sexual abuse, the bullet of a would-be assassin and the Democratic candidacies of the president and his vice president.

Nothing served as a more apt metaphor for Trump’s perseverance than his reaction to being shot at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. After a bullet clipped his right ear, a bloodied Trump rose to his feet, jabbed his fist in the air and yelled “Fight, Fight, Fight!” The iconic sequence was incorporated into late-campaign ads as part of his closing argument.

Trump’s return to the White House extends a volatile era in which both the presidency and control of Congress have routinely been decided by the thin margins, reflecting an electorate almost evenly split between the two major parties. Through a firehose of false and polarizing information and smears of his rivals, especially Harris, Trump painted America as a corrupt, economically failing and crime-ridden nation. He leaned into violent rhetoric, referring to a shooter firing into the reporters covering his rallies or guns being pointed at a former U.S. Republican representative who doesn’t support him.

Voters chose him to lead the path forward, despite warnings from the left and his own former aides that he will rule as an authoritarian.

It wasn’t just Trump who endured. His Make America Great Again movement proved resilient with voters. Trump re-harnessed the backlash against establishment powers during his grievance-filled third campaign, according to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is an informal adviser to the president-elect.

“The great mistake that analysts make is that they focus on Trump, rather than the underlying momentum that has created Trump,” Gingrich said in an interview with NBC News. “Trump is the personification of at least half the country rejecting, decisively and vehemently, the governing elite.”

And yet Trump will have to work with the governing elites in Congress to enact laws and fulfill his mandate. During Trump’s first term, he found resistance to the most extreme elements of his agenda in both parties. Riding his coattails, Republicans in 2024 seized control of the Senate, while control of the House still hung in the balance as of Wednesday morning.

The call is likely premature but also likely correct.

The nature of swing states and the polling over the last several months is such that none of the results are all that surprising. I fully expected Trump to win Georgia and North Carolina and, of course, Iowa, the one weird poll notwithstanding. But sweeping the swing states—if that happens—is something else altogether. Not exactly a wave election, but a rejection of the status quo at what seems a rather high cost.

In his prediction yesterday, Steven Taylor mentioned the Democrats’ seeming advantage in the ground game. Months ago, I had expressed my bafflement at Trump essentially destroying the Republican National Committee and its infrastructure, raiding its funds to support his personal legal battles. It didn’t matter. Or, if it did, his support was strong enough to overcome it.

I’ve argued for a while now that 2020 was an anomaly because of the weird way we conducted the election in the midst of a pandemic—compounded by Trump’s self-sabotage in telling people not to trust mail-in balloting. While likely not decisive overall, it almost certainly gave Biden to Georgia.

The one thing that has surprised me this morning is the number of states that had abortion rights measures on the ballots, passed them (or, in the case of Florida, had sizable majorities vote for them in defeat because of absurd supermajority requirements), and yet elected Trump. Relatedly, the predicted—and quite plausible—wave of women breaking with their husbands and siding with Her over Him would seem not to have materialized.

Parsing all of this is extremely challenging. Exit polls were always a bit suspect but are nigh unto useless in an era where huge numbers vote by mail and/or before Election Day. Traditionalists who vote the day of (which included all five voting members of my immediate family) are likely unrepresentative.

But I’ve been saying all along that Trump’s bizarre rants and boorish behavior are simply baked in. As outrageous as his pronouncements are, they merely reinforce pre-existing beliefs. It either confirms what Democrat-leaners already thought or is dismissed as Trump Being Trump.

In which case, we basically had a normal election under abnormal circumstances. We had a quasi-incumbent lose an election when the incumbent was broadly unpopular and the overwhelming majority of the country thought we were going in the wrong direction. So, folks who aren’t strong partisans voted for the out-party candidate.

Also surprising but definitely premature: Trump is currently leading the popular vote by 5 million, 51% to 47.5%. In 2016 and 2020, Democrats gained millions of votes as the week went on owing to the slow counting in states that are overwhelmingly blue, especially California. If Trump wins the popular vote after having lost by 3 million in 2016 and 8 million in 2020, it would indeed be a stunner.

Overall, though, the polls look to have been pretty solid. As of 6:15, here’s what NYT is tracking:

Literally every state expected to be won by either candidate, even narrowly, will be won by that candidate. Trump looks to be in the process of sweeping the seven swing states, all by pretty narrow margins.