Trump wins a second term: the comeback that defied the polls

On 5 November 2024, Donald Trump won a second term in the White House, beating Vice-President Kamala Harris to become the first president since Grover Cleveland in 1892 to serve two non-consecutive terms. The result became clear in the early hours of the following morning, when Trump swept the seven states that mattered most and crossed the 270 electoral votes he needed.

The scale of the victory surprised many. Trump took the Electoral College by a projected 312 to 226 and, for the first time for a Republican since 2004, won the national popular vote. Republicans also won control of the Senate and held the House, which gave the incoming administration control of Washington for at least two years.

Harris conceded the next day and urged her supporters to accept the result. Trump, speaking to a crowd in Florida, called the night ‘the greatest political comeback in history’ and promised that a ‘golden age’ for America was beginning.

The exit polls told a fairly consistent story. Voters ranked inflation and the cost of living at the top of their concerns, and a majority said the country was heading in the wrong direction. Trump gained ground across nearly every demographic compared with 2020, and the shift was especially pronounced among working-class voters and Latino voters, groups that had been drifting away from the Democratic coalition for years. Harris carried the affluent suburbs and did well with college-educated voters, but the Electoral College rewarded the rural and blue-collar counties that swung back to Trump.

The campaigns spent well over a billion dollars between them and fought the closing weeks on abortion rights, the border and the economy. In the end, the issues that decided the race were closer to the pocketbook and to security than to the culture wars that had dominated the earlier months. Trump’s promise to bring prices down and seal the border proved more persuasive than the Democratic warning that his return would endanger democratic institutions.

The result has consequences well beyond the United States. Trump has promised large tariffs on imports, a harder line on immigration and a more transactional approach to alliances. Allies are already bracing for a less predictable partner, and adversaries for a more confrontational one. At home, the second Trump presidency begins with a Republican majority in both chambers and a much quieter legal calendar than the first term.

None of this settles the question of why so many forecasts got it wrong. The polls overstated Harris’s standing, just as they had overstated Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. The broader lesson is that a large share of the electorate does not respond to the arguments that preoccupy the media and the coastal parties, and that this disconnect has now cost the Democratic Party two presidential elections in eight years. The country did not become more progressive; it became more divided, and this time the division favoured the outsider again. I keep returning to a thought that has not been absorbed yet: the people who forecast elections and the people who actually vote in them are increasingly living in different countries, and no adjustment to a survey is going to close that gap.