The reason Trump won

Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump quickly defeated Democratic rival Kamala Harris by winning a series of important battleground states in this year’s election.

He became the first US president in more than 120 years to lose the White House, then run again and win it back, following President Grover Cleveland’s performance in 1892.

Trump surpassed the threshold of 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House after a long campaign with polls in 7 key battleground states showing a gap between the two candidates until today. The election was extremely close.

He finally had a convincing achievement when he brought the battleground state of Georgia back to the Republican Party, maintained the stronghold of North Carolina and broke the “blue wall” of the Democratic Party when winning in Pennsylvania. Trump also surpassed his opponent in the popular vote, something he failed to do in 2016 and the Republicans have only succeeded once since 1992.

He did that while facing a series of criminal charges, two failed assassination plots and a turning point in the election campaign, when President Joe Biden withdrew from the race, passing the torch to Ms. Harris.

According to analysts, to achieve this achievement, Trump and his deputy JD Vance applied a wise strategy of taking advantage of public dissatisfaction with the rising cost of living and the wave of migration at the border. southern world and the unstable situation abroad under the Biden administration to convince them to place their trust in his policies.

Exit polls showed Trump winning big among Latino voters, while also consolidating a strong margin of support in rural areas.

Trump has pledged to carry out the largest deportation campaign in the nation’s history, extend tax cuts he signed into law in 2017, impose broad tariffs on foreign imports, and roll back other measures. protect transgender youth and limit environmental regulations.

According to Christian Paz, senior political correspondent at the magazine Voxone reason why Trump won lies in the fact that he took full advantage of his support momentum in rural areas.

Before election day, everyone expected Trump to prevail in rural areas. However, what is unclear is whether he can increase the margin significantly compared to his 2020 performance.

Reality shows that he was successful. As election day has just begun, Trump has achieved positive results in Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia and North Carolina. That trend continued throughout the day. For example, in rural counties across Pennsylvania, the general trend as votes were counted was that Trump was able to both increase turnout and increase his margin of support.

A clear example of this growing trend is in Lackawanna County, where President Biden’s hometown of Scranton is located. In this year’s election, Lackawanna leaned Republican by a margin of 5.6 percentage points compared to 2020.

According to experts, the gloomy feeling about the US economy under President Biden is also an important reason why voters side with Mr. Trump.

According to the poll ABC/Ipsos announced on November 3, 74% of voters believe that the country is going in the wrong direction. Since 1980, this statistic has been considered a surefire indicator of whether the ruling party will lose the White House.

Trump’s election means he was right to pursue the strategy of linking Vice President Harris with President Biden’s policies.

The economy, or rather the public perception of the economy, shows how worried voters are. Prices rose just 2.1% in September from a year earlier, and the economy grew a robust 2.8% last quarter. But 75% of voters said the country’s economy is in bad shape, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in October.

And when the pre-election day report from the Labor Department showed weak job growth trends, mainly due to the impact of storms and a major worker strike, Mr. Trump seized the opportunity.

“That brand new jobs report proves conclusively that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have driven our economy off a cliff,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan last week.

Pre-election polls showed Trump on track to gain historic support from non-white voters. Although national data is not yet available, some significant changes have been seen in places with large Latino populations.

The most obvious example is Florida. The state has swung heavily Republican, and so have its Latino voters. Miami-Dade, once a traditionally Democratic county with a large Cuban-American population, has flipped to support Trump by double-digit percentages. Osceola, a county with a large Puerto Rican community, also leaned in favor of Trump after Biden won by a 14-point margin here in 2020.

Cities with large Puerto Rican and Cuban populations, such as Kissimmee and Hialeah, also saw significant declines in Democratic support, according to analysis from Equis Research.

Another success of Trump is that he successfully captured voters’ anxiety about immigration. He frequently highlights the issue that defines his political brand: The threat and chaos caused by illegal immigration.

His ads contain black-and-white images depicting immigrants rushing across the border or looting American streets. He called for the death penalty for immigrants who kill law enforcement officers.

“The suburbs are under attack,” Trump said in Virginia on November 2.

He focused heavily on the large numbers of immigrants appearing in cities far from the southern border during the campaign, as well as information about crime committed by immigrants to exaggerate the feeling that voters may soon find themselves surrounded within their own communities.

In the final national New York Times/Siena College poll of the two campaigns, 15% of respondents said immigration was the most important deciding issue for them.

This is Trump’s second victory in his three presidential runs. On both occasions, he defeated his female opponents. This once again shows that America has not yet been able to break the “glass ceiling” of letting a woman lead the White House.

It may be difficult to prove that Vice President Harris lost because of gender factors, but this clearly plays a role in how Americans vote.

A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in late October showed Trump leading Harris among men, 55% to 41%.

His confident, freewheeling style, along with his promises of a booming economy, especially resonated with black and Latino men. That helped him attract a very important part of the Democratic base, contributing to his victory, observers emphasized.