Voters across the country rejected what Vice President Harris and Democrats were selling on Tuesday, a development already triggering major soul-searching by the party.
President-elect Trump ran up margins in states he won last cycle, but also reduced his losses in some Democratic strongholds.
In New Jersey, which went to President Biden by 16 points in 2020, Harris was ahead by a just less than 5 points Wednesday evening. In New York, which Biden won by 23 points last cycle, Harris won by around 11 points on Tuesday.
Most of the country’s 3,000-some counties moved rightward on Tuesday, according to The Washington Post’s tracker.
All five boroughs in New York City shifted to the right, according to analysis from pollster Nate Silver, in some cases by as much as 11 points.
The vice president underperformed against Biden’s 2020 numbers in counties around Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia. In Harris County, Texas, around Houston, Harris won by just 5 points after Biden won by around 14 points.
Harris easily won blue Maryland, but by just 23 points — after Biden defeated Trump there by 33 points a cycle prior.
Illinois has voted for Democratic presidential candidates by double-digit margins since the early 1990s, but Harris appears set to win it by only about 8 points.
Trump didn’t just run up the score in a number of blue states. He also ran up the score in the red states.
Trump won ruby-red Alabama by 25 points in 2020 but raised his lead to more than 30 points this cycle.
In Iowa, days after a gold-standard pollster showed Harris with a surprising 3-point edge, Trump won comfortably. The latest numbers show Trump up roughly 13 points, better than his past performances there.
Trump lost the popular vote in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. As of Wednesday evening, he seemed certain to win the popular vote in 2024. He led by nearly 5 million votes, a remarkable turnaround.
Harris’s difficult night translated down the ballot, as Democratic Senate candidates lost uphill battles in Montana and Ohio, and were in danger of losing two more in Pennsylvania and Nevada. Two other Democratic candidates for the Senate in Wisconsin and Michigan won highly competitive races.
Democrats were debating a day later whether tactical and strategic decisions or policy issues were to blame for their defeats.
Democratic strategist Jon Reinish argued Harris “did the best that she could” given the unique circumstances of the race, and he cast blame on President Biden for not backing out of his reelection bid sooner.
Democratic strategist Fred Hicks, on the other hand, disagreed with Democrats pointing fingers at the president. He said headwinds in the form of inflation from the COVID-19 era would have made it difficult for any incumbent president to win in 2024.
He also said Harris struggled to separate herself from her boss on two of the biggest issues for Republican and center voters: immigration and inflation.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), noting how blue-collar voters were leaving the Democratic Party in droves, argued the party had abandoned the working class.
“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well,” he wrote in a statement. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
Trump flipped all three of the “blue wall” states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, all of which went to Biden last cycle.
He also flipped Georgia, where Biden eked out a 2020 win, and extended his battleground streak with a win in Nevada. He was winning by a little less than 5 points in Arizona, which Biden also won last time around, as of Wednesday morning.
Polling ahead of the election also showed the economy was the top issue for many Americans, whose votes on Tuesday indicated they were largely taken with Trump’s promises to handle it better than Biden.
That raised questions about whether Harris focused too much on abortion rights and the threat to democracy she said Trump represented given his actions to overturn the 2020 election.
“I think it was a high-intensity issue for certain voters, but it wasn't the overall number one or number two issue,” David Paleologos, the director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center, said of abortion rights.
Hicks argued GOP attacks on inflation and immigration, and the Democrats’ inability to come up with better arguments on those issues, were to blame.
“It was the [twins] that sank the Democrats in this case: inflation and immigration. And then you throw on the social issue of transgender students in sports and taxpayer dollars going to that, which goes right into the whole inflation point, then Democrats did not — specifically, the Harris campaign could not seem to overcome that,” Hicks said.
Democrats broadly, according to Reinish, didn’t hone the right messaging to reach voters in the middle, and they alienated some of their own base frustrated by “just how far the left has gone over the past couple of years.”
GOP strategist Joshua Novotney said whether Republicans can build on the gains they made is a concern for him because Trump is a “brand” that attracts a lot of people, one that will not be up for election again in the future.
He said Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the vice president-elect, appears to be the “heir” to the new GOP, but the best path to future success is pairing the older ideals of limited government and lower taxes with the “populism streak” of the Trump presidency.
“If they can vary those, which I think they did pretty well yesterday, if we can continue to vary those, I think that's the winning recipe,” he said. “Whether that happens or not I think it is based highly on what kind of candidates we [put] up.”
Democrats will be spending the next several months trying to agree on what went wrong, and seeking to come up with compelling messages for why voters should return to them in the 2026 midterms, and then again in 2028.
Moving forward, Hicks said, the party has to refine its economic messaging and work to win over key Trump demographics: non-college educated voters, middle-age voters and male voters.
“Today is the first day of the next election cycle,” Hicks said.
