Credit: (AP Photo/Matt York, File)Aug. 29, 2023: A group who said they were from India sit in the shade of the border fence as they wait to be picked up by Border Patrol in the Tucson sector of the U.S.-Mexico border, in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Arizona.
WASHINGTON — Furious over the economy and immigrants, an angry American electorate that skewed toward white voters without college degrees and evangelical Christians fueled former President Donald Trump’s climb back to the White House.
Trump will become the first president since the late 1800s to win nonconsecutive terms — and the first felon to become commander in chief.
His opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, underperformed in critical swing states necessary to win the presidency, while Democratic Senate candidates in states she lost, including Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, performed better than she did.
Harris also ran slightly behind Sen.-elect Andy Kim, who won New Jersey with 53% of the vote versus Harris’ statewide showing of 52%, as of Wednesday evening.
Republicans’ winning strategy
As the results of Election Day came into stark view Tuesday night and into Wednesday, the decision by Republicans, in national campaigns and races in New Jersey, to run on immigration and the economy as their top issues proved to be a winning strategy over Democrats, who emphasized abortion rights and the fragile nature of American democracy.
With Trump en route to return to the White House and a Republican-majority Senate already guaranteed, a unified Republican majority in Washington could mean aggressive and wholesale changes to domestic and foreign policy.
Credit: (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)Nov. 6, 2024: Former President Donald Trump arrives at Republican election night watch party at the Palm Beach Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida.
If Republicans win the House, legislation for a national abortion ban would likely be an early goal for congressional Republicans, along with deep budget cuts to social programs and rollbacks of Biden-era climate, transportation, health and financial regulations.
As of late Wednesday, Republicans appeared on pace to expand their House majority. Dozens of House races remain outstanding. Results could take a week or more because some of the yet-to-be-called races are in California, which is known for its slow vote-counting processes.
Exit polls NBC News compiled show nearly three-quarters of voters, 73%, said they were “dissatisfied or angry” with the status of the country, and about 6 of every 10 of those voters were Republicans.
The key numbers
In its survey of 10 key states, NBC found 39% of voters were white and had not graduated from college, a group of Americans who helped drive Trump’s 2016 election and did again in 2024.
Another voting bloc that has doggedly supported Trump is Christians. While 63% of Christian voters said they are Republicans, the Republican hold is even stronger among evangelical Christians, 82% of whom said they are Republicans.
Seventy-one percent of voters in the survey were white and 57% of them reported that they are Republicans, including majorities of both women (53%) and men (60%).
More than 60% of voters NBC polled were over 45 and more than half of that age group — 52% — were Republicans.
Just as costs of living and inflation have hammered the political fortunes of political leaders in democracies abroad, in particular Canada, Australia, France and the United Kingdom, they sank Harris at the polls Tuesday, too.
Asked about the condition of the U.S. economy, 68% said it was “not so good” or “poor,” and 7 of 10 voters among that group were Republican voters.
Meanwhile, one-third of voters said the economy was their top issue, and 80% of those voters were Republicans. And while just 11% of voters said immigration was their No. 1 topic in deciding their choice for president, 90% of those voters were Republicans.
Better off or not?
“One of the things that we’re seeing with Trump voters is that many of them were saying things were better when he was president, because prices were lower, and that’s really what mattered to them,” Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, said. “I think there are probably some Democrats who felt that way too, but couldn’t bring themselves to ever vote for Trump, so they just stayed home.”
Data shows prices began to rise early in Joe Biden’s presidency, peaking at 9.1% in June 2022 and hovering at or below 3% since June, but the improvement wasn’t enough to ease the minds of voters.
Murphy said his reelection win in 2021 by roughly 3 percentage points ‘might have been the canary in the coal mine’ in warning Democrats what was to come.
Most people voted according to their pocketbooks, and in that climate, Democrats really couldn’t win, Murray said.
“If it had been any other Republican, except for Trump, we would have known the outcome of this election months ago, because it would have been impossible for a Democrat, even one that wasn’t directly associated with this administration, to have been competitive in an environment where the Democrats were being blamed for economic unease,” Murray said.
It takes months for inflation to ease and the public to realize, he added. “When we look historically at times when we’ve had inflationary spirals, it takes anywhere from nine to 12 months for consumer confidence to return to its pre-inflation days, and we just haven’t had that time,” Murray continued. He said that ironically, Americans will start feeling better about the economy in 2025, no matter who became president, but now Trump will get to use that for his own gain. “So he gets to take credit for that feeling that ‘everything’s OK now,’ which would have happened regardless. But the problem was that inflation didn’t come down soon enough for the Democrats to not have to worry about that as an overriding issue.”
Immigration trumps abortion
Peter Woolley, director of the School of Public and Global Affairs at Fairleigh Dickinson University who founded the FDU Poll, said that being a woman hurt Harris while the immigration issue influenced more voters than abortion.
Credit: (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)June 25, 2023: Anti-abortion demonstrators and abortion rights activists clash outside the Supreme Court in Washington at a time when abortion rights had become a major issue in the Republican presidential primary election.
The race also turned on the public’s general unhappiness with the direction the country was taking, Woolley said. “It was a race to define the other candidate as the incumbent. Trump won that race.”
Exit polls from CBS News documented slipping support for Democrats from Latinos, young voters and women from 2020 to 2024.
Just 53% of Latino voters backed Harris, down sharply from 2020, when that group backed the Biden-Harris ticket with 65% support.
On the economy, 75% of voters told CBS inflation in the past year has either been a “moderate” or “severe” hardship.
Final turnout numbers won’t be known for some time, but Gov. Phil Murphy said it appears between 4.2 million and 4.3 million New Jersey residents voted, a result he called a “very impressive number.” That total is down from the 4.64 million people who voted in New Jersey in 2020.
Votes lost and gained in NJ
“This year, there is no doubt the margins in our state were far tighter,” Murphy told reporters Wednesday. “If you look at other similar states, you’ll notice that their margins shrank just about the same.”
While Kim won handily Tuesday, his victory was by single digits, a much tighter race than Sen. Cory Booker’s in 2020, when he won by more than 16 points. With an estimated 9% of the vote still to be counted as of Wednesday afternoon, Kim had received 500,000 fewer votes than Booker did.
With some ballots expected to favor Democrats still to be counted, it looks like most Democrats received a smaller number of votes and a smaller share of the vote than in 2020.
Only Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-5th) and Mikie Sherrill (D-11th) appear to have won a larger percent of the vote this year than they did four years ago. Voter turnout is generally larger in presidential election years than in midterm elections.
Republican incumbents Jeff Van Drew in the 2nd Congressional District and Chris Smith in the 4th, both in South Jersey, appear to have won by significantly higher margins than in 2020: about six points for Van Drew and close to eight for Smith.
When Congress meets Jan. 6, to certify election results, Harris will have to preside over the certification of her own electoral loss, just as President Joe Biden did in 2016, when Trump first won.
The Democratic candidates in five districts currently have taken significantly smaller proportions of the vote — five points or less than what they won in 2020. These include incumbents Frank Pallone of the 6th and Bonnie Watson Coleman of the 12th, as well as LaMonica McIver in the 10th, compared with the late Rep. Donald Payne’s showing.
In the 8th District, Democratic Rep. Rob Menendez, whose father resigned his Senate seat in August following his conviction on public corruption charges, is currently 14 points behind the vote total when former Rep. Albio Sires won the district in 2020.
What happened in the 9th District?
The greatest falloff is in the 9th District, an ethnically diverse swath that covers parts of Bergen, Hudson and Passaic counties.
Credit: (YouTube/Nellie Pou Videos)The Associated Press called the 9th District race on Wednesday for Democratic state Sen. Nellie Pou.
“It looks like we may have been taking the Latino community nationally for granted, and shame on us that that’s true,” Murphy said. “You can’t do that with any community, and certainly not the Latino community. And we’ve got to figure it out.”
The Associated Press called the race midday Wednesday for Democratic state Sen. Nellie Pou over Republican Billy Prempeh, who has run three times for that seat. With nearly all votes counted, Pou’s victory margin was fewer than 5 points. She currently has won 50.6% of the vote. That’s a massive drop-off from 2020, when the late Rep. Bill Pascrell won nearly three-quarters of the votes. It’s possible, but unclear so far, whether protest votes, or not showing up at the polls, by Arab American voters contributed to Pou’s relatively poor showing.
Republicans pick up votes in NJ
Republicans also appear to have picked up the votes of people not registered with either major party. In nine of the 12 House districts, Republican candidates won more votes than the number of registered Republicans in that district.
Similarly in the Senate race, Republican Curtis Bashaw won 6% more votes than the number of registered Republicans. The 2.02 million votes for Kim, as of Wednesday afternoon, are 20% fewer than the number of registered Democrats.
In the presidential race, with about 94% of the vote counted, Trump won about 30,000 more votes this year in New Jersey than in 2020. Harris, on the other hand, is about 518,000 behind the number of votes President Biden won in 2020. She is underperforming compared with voter registration — about 440,000 fewer votes than registered voters — while Trump got some 300,000 more votes than the number registered as Republican.
Murphy said his reelection win in 2021 by roughly 3 percentage points “might have been the canary in the coal mine” in warning Democrats what was to come.
“It’s clearly economic, kitchen-table issues,” Murphy said of topics that motivate the public. He cited other issues, too. “It’s fearmongering on immigration. And by the way, that’s not to suggest we don’t need a comprehensive immigration reform as a country, which we do, but [Republicans] were able to play that card quite effectively. They were able to play a crime-and-safety card quite effectively.”
Harris’ gender and her late entry into the race — her campaign was just 107 days long — hampered her and limited the opportunities for her to introduce herself to the voting public.
“Being a woman on the ballot is never easy,” Murphy said. “But a woman of African American and South Asian descent, probably doubly, triply so. Again, it’s too early to parse through. Did we emphasize the wrong things? Did we not communicate it right? Was racism or sexism involved? It’s going to be, I think, a combination of all that.”
When Congress meets Jan. 6, to certify election results, Harris will have to preside over the certification of her own electoral loss, just as President Joe Biden did in 2016, when Trump first won.
— Graphics by Colleen O’Dea