Why Donald Trump won

Trump is headed to the White House. As I write, that is the consensus of almost all political experts. Trump is set to pick up at least one — and possibly all three — of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. It looks likely Trump will win all seven swing states.

Cohn also projects a Trump lead in the popular vote. That would be the first time a Republican has won the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004.

There will be many postmortems to come, including from my firm, J.L. Partners. We tentatively look like the most accurate polling and modeling firm in the race, with our model being the most bullish for Trump and our final national poll calling the popular vote for Trump. Some pollsters herded, we did not.

Others went off wildly in the wrong direction. Ann Selzer, in her poll of Iowa last week, projected a three-point Harris lead in the Hawkeye State. Trump is set to win Iowa this morning by fourteen points. That is one of the most egregious polling misses in history.

There are three key patterns in the results that explain how we got here.

One, the older female voters who Selzer predicted would turn out for Harris probably did lean to Harris, but not in the numbers needed. In affluent suburbs like Loudoun County, Virginia, Trump was the candidate who made gains. In other counties, such as some Philadelphia suburbs, Harris did gain on Biden. But this was far outweighed by the performance of Trump in rural areas.

Those rural areas are the second pattern: last night we saw massive turnout for Trump in the countryside. Rural county after rural county — from Butler County, Pennsylvania, to Clark County, Michigan — saw Trump add support on his 2020 numbers both in percentage and numerical terms. A lot of this was likely due to men, who Trump led by a larger margin than Harris did women (twenty-two points to fourteen).

Third, and I think most significant, was the non-white switcher to Trump. NBC News projects that Trump won one in three non-white voters. That is an exceptional turnaround for a demographic group that Republicans have traditionally struggled with. Indeed, Trump is set to win a bigger proportion of the non-white vote than any Republican candidate for more than forty years. This allowed him to eat into Harris’s advantage in places like Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, but also convert new voters — allowing him to flip heavily black counties like Baldwin County, Georgia. He won Hispanics in bigger numbers than ever before too — they are still counting, but this is likely to get him over the line in Nevada and Arizona.

Trump won by powering his white rural voters to the polls, while also winning a whole new coalition of non-white voters. I will leave the final word to Gabriel, a mixed-race man I met just down the road from Baldwin County, a year ago. He was talking to me about Stacey Abrams then, the black candidate for governor who failed to win the state in 2022. The words he said have stuck with me ever since, and I think they tell the story of this campaign.

“If you think white men have a problem with black women, wait until you hear what black men think.”

Black men — and white and Hispanic too — spoke, and the result is Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.