He was less popular than the candidate he ran against, the polls said for months.
He raised alarm when he called his political opponents “the enemy from within.”
His comments about migrants and women caused even some of his supporters to recoil.
But in the end, it wasn’t about Donald Trump. It was the everyday experiences of tens of millions of Americans who felt squeezed by inflation, worried about tightening finances and who face constant reminders that basic necessities cost more than they used to.
The issue that pushed the former president ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris more than any other is the economy — a persistent concern that voters had been telling pollsters throughout the race was going to be key to their decision, according to surveys and political experts.
The signs were there all through Election Day, as voters in Pennsylvania — the hardest fought of all the battleground states — lined up, sometimes for hours, to cast their ballots.
“Prices have been going up and we’re on Social Security,” Jack Burke, 82, of Ross, told the Post-Gazette outside his polling place. A lifelong Democrat, Mr. Burke was voting for Trump. “Each year, it’s getting harder to keep up.”
In Beaver County, Grace Zierden, 76, didn’t bring up abortion rights or the war in Ukraine when asked why she was once again going to cast her ballot for Trump.
“I just went to Walmart the other day and eggs were $5,” she said. “I can’t afford that.”
Just over half of those who voted in the election Tuesday said they trusted Trump to handle the economy — 51% to 47% for Ms. Harris, according to exit polls.
As the votes continued to be counted Wednesday, Trump led in the national popular vote for the first time in his three campaigns for president. The margin: 51% to 47.5%.
“The economy just swamped all the other concerns,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “You had a lot of people out there who just simply said, ‘I remember paying a lot less for my groceries when Donald Trump was president.’”
The trouble for Democrats began soon after President Joe Biden took office. The economy was slowly emerging from the throes of the pandemic, and Mr. Biden shepherded through Congress a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that included $1,400 to Americans whose lives and livelihoods were upended by the coronavirus crisis.
As the economy reopened and the job market saw record hiring from businesses that scrambled to rebuild their workforces, the inflation rate shot up from 1.4% in Mr. Biden’s first month in office to 9.1% midway through his second year, federal statistics show. The president blamed the higher prices on worldwide supply chains that had yet to recover from pandemic-related shutdowns.
In the years that followed, as the Federal Reserve and the Biden administration took steps to bring that rate back down, it plummeted to just 2.4% in September, almost at pre-pandemic levels.
But the damage had been done. Americans emerging from the traumatic experience of the pandemic had experienced more than a year of prices rising far faster than normal. But falling inflation didn’t mean lower prices, just lower price increases.
People blamed Mr. Biden for the higher prices they had endured for years. As his vice president and running mate from four years earlier, that created a dilemma for Ms. Harris throughout the campaign.
“Most vice presidents… they’re saddled with the perceived sins of the person they’re serving with,” said Ken Gormley, president of Duquesne University. “Their job is to be faithful to that person and stand beside them. She was faced with a real Hobson’s choice here and it was impossible for her to totally distance herself from the Biden administration policies that were unpopular.”
Chief among them: the economy. On Election Day, more voters rated the economy as their top concern — 39% — than any other issue, according to the Associated Press.
In Pennsylvania, what happened at the polls was as much a drop in support for the Democratic nominee compared to 2020 as it was a surge for the Republican, results show. As of Wednesday, Trump had won about 83,000 more votes than he did four years ago — about equal to what Mr. Biden won in that election.
Ms. Harris, however, had about 130,000 fewer votes than Mr. Biden received in 2020.
The drop-off in Democratic support from an electorate that was unhappy with the economy and primed to change the country’s leadership had stark effects further down the ballot.
In the U.S. Senate race, which remained too close to call Thursday, Republican David McCormick was leading three-term incumbent Sen. Bob Casey by half a percentage point.
Republican Dave Sunday won the attorney general’s race — the first time the GOP captured the prominent office since former Gov. Tom Corbett’s victory in 2008. And Republican incumbents won re-election races for auditor general and treasurer, the only other statewide offices on the ballot Tuesday.
Across the country, in what some observers have called a red wave, Republican Senate candidates won a series of key races that swung control of the chamber to the GOP. In his victory speech early Wednesday morning, Trump predicted Republicans would hold their edge in the U.S. House as well, which would give his party unified control over the federal government.
“The mood of the voters was incredibly negative and it meant that Democrats were facing serious head winds,” said Berwood Yost, director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll. “Is this [election] going to be about content or candidate? In the end, it was about content.”
Nowhere did that play out more prominently than in Philadelphia, where Ms. Harris was running 56,000 votes behind Biden’s 2020 total and 36,000 votes behind Hillary Clinton’s 2016 total as of Wednesday.
Ms. Harris’ underperformance in the Democratic stronghold mirrored results across the country, where her support among some of the party’s key constituencies slipped.
Ms. Harris did worse among Black voters in Pennsylvania than Mr. Biden, winning them by 89% to Trump’s 10%, according to network exit polls reported by NBC. Mr. Biden had a 93% to 7% advantage in 2020, according to CNN.
The drop-off was more stark among Hispanics, where she won that critical voting bloc by only 53% to 45% compared with Mr. Biden’s 69%-27% edge over Trump four years ago.
Like the disaffected white working-class voters who powered Trump’s surprise 2016 victory and whose rightward drift has caused a political realignment in recent years, a driving force behind the change was economic concerns, experts said.
“What I think Democrats have failed to do well is to really come to grips with the fact that you have large swaths of the middle class and lower-middle class who feel ignored,” Mr. Gormley said.
It’s a pattern that has played out across the world during a year in which 4 billion people across nearly 40 countries voted in their own elections. Often, they’ve resulted in incumbents being tossed from power.
In the United Kingdom, the Conservative Party lost control of the government for the first time in 14 years. The Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, a ruling coalition in Germany and African National Congress each lost power in their own elections.
That same global anti-institutional backlash was on stark display in the United State on Tuesday, said Rutgers University pollster Ashley Koning.
“This was voters taking out their frustrations on the economy and inflation and the current administration on Harris,” Ms. Koning said.
First Published: November 6, 2024, 10:51 p.m.
Updated: November 7, 2024, 3:56 p.m.
