The year may be drawing to a close, but the extraordinary political events of the U.S. election season will cast a long shadow over 2025 and beyond.
There have been many historic moments: since the unprecedented condemnation of President-elect Donald Trump in his speech in New York secret trialto the surprise of President Joe Biden – and much delayed – at the end of the race, to two assassination attempts against the future president-elect.
And of course there was Trump’s victory in November’s presidential election — a return to the top for a man many thought politically finished after losing the 2020 election and refusing to accept the outcome.
As the dust settles after Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, several trends have emerged about what is and isn’t motivating voters in one of the world’s most influential countries.
A resounding victory?
Trump effectively swept the battleground states, creating a Electoral College map on election night, it was a striking red.
He won 312 electoral votes, to Harris’ 226, and for the first time in his political career, won the national popular vote, improving on his 2020 results in several key demographics as well as long-considered northern urban areas. as Democratic territory.
But with the final voting results submitted on December 11, the “powerful and unprecedented mandate” Trump claimed on election night turned out to be a more muted change.
In the end, Trump failed to win the support of a majority of American voters, with 49.9 percent to Harris’ 48.4. This is one of the narrowest margins of victory since 1968, second only to George W Bush’s razor-thin margin against Al Gore in 2020.
This is a far cry from the 8.5 percent margin of victory won by President Bill Clinton in 1996, and even further from the 18.2 percent margin Ronald Reagan achieved in 1984, said Seth Masket, director from the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver. .
“We are still in the age of polarization,” said Masket, author of Learning from Loss: The Democrats 2016-2020.
He predicts less large-scale realignment in the coming years and more of the entrenched partisanship — and incremental changes — that have defined the United States.
Masket further highlighted attempts by both parties to highlight support from across the aisle, including Harris’ decision to campaign alongside Republican hawk Liz Cheney.
“I think there was a time when this sort of thing might have mattered,” he said. “But I think that’s in the past.”
A pocket book on “democracy”?
Trump’s victory may not have been resounding, but it was telling, revealing great tolerance among voters for both Trump’s criminal record and his desire to undermine American democracy.
It was already well known that Trump four indictments – and a conviction – had helped to stir up his base. This was widely expected, given Trump’s demonstrated resilience within the Republican Party and years of building his brand as the victim of a political “witch hunt.”
Nor have Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, an extraordinary campaign that struck at the very heart of American democracy, made him a political pariah. In the months and years following his supporters’ assault on the US legislature, the Republican Party instead united around Trump’s baseless claims that the vote was tainted by fraud.
So why hasn’t the Democrats’ message been successful?
“One possibility is that the arguments about the threat to democracy are a little too abstract or esoteric to make sense to people,” said Jennifer Victor, an associate professor of political science at the University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. George Mason University.
“Another way to read it is that there are simply a lot of Americans who are no longer as interested in democracy, or who are very attracted to…at least the rhetoric that accompanies more forms of government. undemocratic,” she said. said.
Then there’s voters’ perceptions of the economy, an issue that exit polls show outweighs concerns about immigration, abortion and, of course, democracy.
As voters grappled with the high cost of living in the United States, macroeconomic indicators such as job creation and income growth generally showed a relatively robust post-Covid recovery. The difference between individual experience and perception and these broader trends will inform the political years to come, Victor said.
“The difference between what macroeconomic indicators tell us and people’s perception of the economy is really one of the big news of this year,” Victor said.
“The narrative that Trump in particular has been telling about how bad the United States is is one that a lot of people seem to have internalized, even if it doesn’t fit some of the usual metrics that we would use to assess this. » she added.
Do American voters care about abortion?
Yes, but not necessarily as the Harris campaign – and Democrats in general – hoped.
Like the protection of democracy, the right to abortion has constituted a decisive platform in Harris’ candidacy for the White House. Federal protections against abortion were struck down during Trump’s first term by a Supreme Court dominated by his appointees.
Harris had repeatedly warned that Trump, if elected, would work with Republicans to pass a federal ban on abortion. Trump had toned down his previous support for such a ban in the final stretch of the election, saying the decision should instead be left to state governments, although his statements did little to allay concerns .
There was a gender gap in the presidential election: Harris won 53% of female voters, to Trump’s 46%. But we are still far from the increase in the number of voters hoped for by his campaign.
Perhaps more frustrating for Democrats, voters in three states – Arizona, Missouri and Montana – supported putting abortion in their state’s constitution, while voting for Trump.
“I think some of this is likely due to ballot voting — individuals who voted only in the presidential campaign, but not on other issues/contests,” said Kelly Dittmar, research director at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. University – Camden.
“But it may also be that some voters felt that preserving access to abortion through a direct initiative was enough to make them feel OK about voting for Trump because of alignment or expectations on other issues, like the economy,” she said.
“The bet that at least some Democrats were making on abortion as a key factor in galvanizing votes did not appear to materialize, as evidenced by declining turnout,” she said.
Did US policy towards the Israeli war in Gaza matter?
The Democratic Party faces the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel in the context of the war in Gaza. This became particularly clear when hundreds of thousands of voters voted “no strings attached” to protest Biden’s policies during the primary season.
To be sure, Arab and Muslim voters were among the many demographic groups that shifted away from the Democratic presidential candidate this year compared to 2020. Most striking is that in the city of Dearborn, Michigan, the largest city in America’s Arab majority, Harris won. just 36 percent of the vote, compared to 69 percent won by Biden in 2020.
Polls have repeatedly shown that the majority of Democrats support conditionality on aid to Israel, but Harris moved closer to Biden’s policies when she entered the race.
James Zogby, director of the Arab American Institute, warned against underestimating the impact of the decision. That’s likely a contributing factor to the lower-than-expected support from young people, he said, among other groups.
“There is no doubt that it has had an impact. We see it in the polls, and we saw it in the turnout,” Zogby told Al Jazeera. “What we saw was that certain groups were affected by this war, by the failure of the Biden administration to act decisively to address the humanitarian crisis and the genocide that was unfolding. »
“The net impact of this was a loss of votes among several constituent groups: Arabs, obviously, but also young people and black and Asian voters,” he said.
“This has resulted in people staying home, people just saying it doesn’t matter, people voting for rejected candidates but not voting for the president,” he said. he declared.
Racial realignment?
Finally, the 2024 elections saw Democrats continue to lose ground to white working-class voters – while increasing support among college-educated whites.
But it’s the shift in support for Trump among Latino and black voters, particularly men under 45, that has drawn the most analysis.
About three in ten black men under 45 voted for Trump — about double the share he received in 2020. Latino men in the age bracket were split evenly for Trump and Harris, solidifying a years-long trend away from Democrats.
Some analysts pointed to the results as evidence that the racial coalition that has long been considered the backbone of the Democratic Party no longer exists. Others have note that this change could have implications for federal laws intended to protect the voting rights of minorities, because these laws generally rely on the idea that certain groups vote largely in unison.
However, William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, cautioned against overly enthusiastic predictions of a broader party realignment. Although significant, these changes remain relatively gradual and may be a temporary phenomenon linked to global trends.
“This could be a ‘one-off’ electoral trend toward Republicans for black and Hispanic voters, who were still overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning,” Frey told Al Jazeera.
“It’s up to Trump to make this minority change more permanent.”
