The US republicans appear set to win control of both the White House and houses of congress as Donald Trump sweeps votes across the country following Tuesday’s closely watched polls.
Trump has won in two battle ground states of Georgia and North Carolina taking his tally close to the required 270 electoral college votes he needs to be declared president. And his party has also taken control of the senate as votes are counted and projections made by the US media.
For the third consecutive election, the nation remains divided almost exactly in half around the polarizing presence of Donald Trump.
Early on Wednesday morning, the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris appears likely to again come down to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the same states that decided Trump’s 2016 and 2020 races by razor-thin margins. Trump held a narrow but clear advantage in all of them as of midnight yesterday.
In 2016, those three Rust Belt battlegrounds made Trump president when he dislodged them, from the “Blue Wall” of states Democrats had won in all six presidential races from 1992 to 2012, by a combined margin of about 80,000 votes; four years later, they made Joe Biden president when he wrested them back from Trump by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes.
Now, with Trump regaining an upper hand across Sun Belt battlegrounds where Biden made inroads in 2020, the three Rust Belt behemoths appeared likely to decide the winner once more.
The results as of midnight suggested that those three states were tipping slightly to Trump; the patterns of returns in them looked more like 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in them, than in 2020, when Biden beat Trump.
Given that Trump appears highly likely to also win the Southeast battlegrounds of North Carolina and Georgia, and has a strong hand in Arizona, Trump will likely win the presidency again if he captures any of the three Blue Wall states. He would become only the second man, after Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s, to win the presidency, lose it, and then regain it again on a third try.
Not only are the same industrial-state battlegrounds at the fulcrum of Trump’s third race, but they remain mostly divided along very familiar lines. As he did in both 2016 and 2020, Trump is running up big margins in exurbs, small towns, and rural communities where most voters are white people without a college degree, and where most of voters are culturally conservative. Harris is amassing big—though, in some cases, diminished—margins in the populous, well-educated suburbs around the major cities of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Milwaukee. The one potentially crucial shift from 2020: The exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations showed Trump making gains among Black and Latino voters, and especially men, not only in the pivotal former Blue Wall states but also elsewhere.
In many respects, the results available as of midnight yesterday were a reminder that even in a race involving a figure as unique as Donald Trump, in politics (as in Casablanca), the fundamental things apply. Since World War II, it has been extremely difficult for parties to hold the White House when an outgoing president was unpopular: The White House flipped partisan control when Harry Truman left office in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968, and George W. Bush in 2008. Popular presidents haven’t always been able to guarantee victory for their party when they leave (the White House changed hands when relatively popular chief executives stepped down in 1960, 2000, and 2016), but unpopular outgoing presidents have usually presented an insurmountable obstacle.
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