Trump wins a second term

To win, Trump needed a decisive number of voters to believe America’s economy and borders were broken and that he alone could fix them.

So what? They did. To win, Harris needed a decisive number to vote for abortion rights, and to believe Trump was too criminal and craven to be electable. They didn’t. By 7am he appeared on course to win a second term.

The impact of second-order factors including social media, Musk, bomb threats, individual campaign gaffes and a Trumpward drift by Black and Hispanic voters was hard to measure on election night, but they all contributed to a swing towards the first convicted felon ever to run for president that was evident soon after polls closed.

If that swing holds as blue-wall votes are tallied, Trump will

• avoid jail;
• punish his enemies;
• become the first ex-president in 120 years to return to the White House after an absence; and
• have four years in which to show whether his critics’ fears of old American chauvinism and a new American tyranny are justified.

“Fair”. He surprised some observers by saying as he voted in West Palm Beach that he considered the election to have been fair, and that if he lost he’d be the first to acknowledge it. No need.

Canaries. At 7pm eastern time a CNN exit poll in Georgia showed a 20-point swing to Trump among independents. In Florida, Osceola County voted for him decisively despite the presence there of a big Puerto Rican community supposedly offended by a joke at their expense in Trump’s last rally in New York. In New Jersey, a Democratic stronghold, Harris was five points ahead at a point in the counting when Biden had a 20 point lead in 2020. In New York state, where for decades he was reviled as a developer who didn’t pay his bills, the Democrats’ lead halved.

First draft of history. The verdict years hence will be that Trump cut through

• on the economy, despite rising growth and wages, because of inflation that three-quarters of voters say caused their families severe or moderate hardship; because of the long tail of the 2008 crash which hurt the poor more than the rich; and because of the outsourcing of 5 million manufacturing jobs which led to the closure of 70,000 factories between 1998 and 2021;
• on immigration – not just because of absurd fabrications about migrants eating pets in small-town Ohio, but because of a fivefold increase in apprehensions on the southern border between 2020 and 2022 after Biden reversed Trump’s order to “remain in Mexico”;
• on messaging, with significant help from Elon Musk, whose money helped compensate for Harris’s vastly superior fundraising and whose 200 million followers on his personal social media platform helped compensate for Trump’s failure to mount an effective ground game even in Pennsylvania.

Abortion. The overturning of Roe v Wade delivered startling results for abortion rights campaigners in the 2022 midterms. Their hopes of a repeat last night were dashed. In the end their message – delivered with passion and harrowing detail by Michelle Obama among many others – may have encouraged a move away from Harris among Catholic Hispanic voters, and it didn’t turn Iowa blue despite indications in a late poll that it might.

Dogs that didn’t bark. Pollsters undercounted the Trump vote in 2016 and 2020. Determined to compensate this time, their findings mostly pointed to a Trump win. But Democrats hoped this cycle would be different because in addition to the end of Roe

• their base would turn out in force to avoid a repeat of their 2016 defeat;
• their enthusiasm would carry the day for a first woman president, as it did for the first Black president in 2008; and
• their adversary was on a losing streak, having stumbled in the 2018 midterms, lost in 2020 and stumbled again as a populist standard-bearer in 2022.

He had also faced four criminal prosecutions and been convicted in one.

Dogs that will. David Frum, the former Republican presidential speechwriter, predicted last night that Trump’s first priority now will be to shut down all legal efforts against him.

• His second will be to appoint a cabinet whose membership will say much about how far he has really distanced himself from Project 2025, the 900-page policy platform prepared in his name by hard-right social conservatives.
• Abroad, China’s Xi Jinping “knows I’m crazy,” Trump has said. He also knows to expect prohibitive tariffs on Chinese imports including via third countries like Mexico – tariffs that Trump says will bring more manufacturing back to the US but which economists say will simply bring back inflation.
• In the warming atmosphere, Trump 2.0 will mean more carbon. The new Republican senator for Ohio, Bernie Moreno, gave a flavour of what’s ahead by calling in his victory speech for electric vehicle mandates “to be gone first thing in January”.

What now? A cycle of grief and bewilderment – no hyperbole there – among democrats the world over. The soul-searching will encompass deep questions about the future of representative government, its relationship with technology and capitalism, the rule of law and, not least, the point of journalism in an age when fake news and confected grievance can determine the fate of the world’s richest democracy.

As voting got under way Garry Kasparov, the Russian-born chess grandmaster, urged Americans to savour the rare privilege of an unpredictable election. Roughly half the country will find that hard today. Keir Starmer, at least, looks prescient for having dined at length with Trump, when he was last in New York.