Donald Trump won a resounding victory over Kamala Harris on Tuesday, and unlike in 2016, this one wasn’t a shock. What was stunning was the depth of his gains all over the electoral map. Trump’s huge improvements relative to 2020 raised a host of difficult questions for Democrats, and Republican hopes of a new electoral coalition. To get a sense of Tuesday’s implications — and whether it could ever have gone any differently — I spoke with Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

We’re only a few days out from this election and don’t have complete data on it, but what jumps out at you so far?
If I had brought back a political scientist from 40 years ago who had not been paying attention to this election at all and just gave them a top-line number — if I said the incumbent party is deeply unpopular, the president has a 40 percent job-approval rating, people are upset about the economy, almost 70 percent think the country is on the wrong track — do you think the incumbent party would win?” That person would say “Of course not.” That is a recipe for loss.

But there are two things that kept this from being an obvious and predictable loss for the incumbent party. First was that the incumbent party switched its nominee at the very last minute. The second is that the challenger wasn’t your typical challenger. This wasn’t an outsider who nobody knew anything about — this is somebody who is both an incumbent and a non-incumbent at the same time, and he brought with him all of his baggage, too. That’s what always made this a little bit tricky, and it also is why the Harris campaign was always counting on this race being more about the ex-incumbent than the current incumbent. It’s why they talked about turning the page and that he’s unhinged, because if this were a race that ultimately came down to “Do you think the economy is good right now? Do you think the economy was better when Trump was in office?” — that’s a race she could never win.

Ultimately, it seems like that’s what happened — voters were willing to say, “Yeah, I know this guy, I don’t necessarily like him, but he’s going to get the economy back.” Which, at its most basic, is what every campaign is about.

It’s the economy, stupid?
It’s the economy, but also, of the last ten elections, so going back to 2006 — every single one of them, with the exception of 2012, has been a change election. We have gotten used to people being like, “Well, I don’t like the party that’s in power. Let’s kick them out, let’s bring the new people in. Oh, the new people didn’t do it either. Punish them.”

So fickle, the American people.
We want what we want. But because we’re so polarized, you come in as the winning party knowing that a good 47, 48 percent of the electorate is never going to give you credit for anything. You could solve cancer, you could do the most amazing things, and that other party will find a way to say, “Yeah, but they’re still terrible.” That makes it really hard, too.

I think the other thing to appreciate is, for those of us who live our lives thinking about politics, the people who decide elections are the people who live their lives not thinking about politics. And they are basing their decision on what their day-to-day lives look like. That was always the challenge for Harris and why you saw her and her campaign and the outside groups spend so much time talking about the economy: “I’m going to lower prices, I’m going to take on the pharmaceuticals, I’m going to take on the price gougers.” I think a lot of voters said, “Okay, that’s cool and everything, but aren’t you the party in power right now? Shouldn’t you have already done that?”

That fits in with one thing Democrats are taking some comfort in, which is that this pattern has been repeated throughout the world recently. Incumbent parties up for reelection this year have almost all gotten their asses kicked, usually worse than they just did.
And that’s what Democrats can also look to. But as I said, it goes back to even before that. When I first started covering politics and getting involved in politics in the early 1990s, and Republicans took control of the House in 1994, that was the first time in 40 years that the House had flipped. Forty years — and now it........

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