The most impressive aspect of Donald Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris last week was the uniformity of his gains across the electoral landscape.
But paradoxically, the very magnitude of his gains may offer Democrats their best hope of recovery in the next few elections. The across-the-board nature of Trump’s improvement suggests that his victory wasn’t primarily driven by the two campaigns’ tactical choices, messaging decisions or advertising strategies.
Trump gained ground in urban, suburban and rural counties and improved on his vote share, as of the latest counts, in 49 of the 50 states. A preliminary analysis concluded that Trump ran better than he did in 2020 in fully 9 in 10 of the nation’s counties where results are available.
Those sweeping gains document how much ground Democrats lost this year — not only in places where they were bracing for further retreat (including both in rural communities and urban centers) but also the racially diverse, well-educated suburbs that had earlier keyed the resistance to Trump. Those losses leave Democrats in a weaker electoral position, in most respects, at the start of the second Trump presidency than at the outset of his first.
But the scale of Trump’s advance this year points toward a common national experience in all regions of the country — a shared disappointment in the results generated by President Joe Biden’s administration, primarily on inflation, but secondarily around other issues led by immigration and crime. The evidence that the outcome was driven largely by a negative verdict on Biden’s performance underscores the possibility that Democrats could recover sooner than now seems possible if Americans one day conclude that Trump hasn’t delivered the better results he has promised.
