While his comments were directed at a game, legendary wordsmith and baseball icon Yogi Berra’s words of it being ‘déjà vu all over again,’ came to pass on Election Night 2024 for ex-president Donald Trump.
Despite facing 34 felony convictions in a New York court case, fines of half a billion dollars, and other court cases pending in Florida, Georgia and the District of Columbia, the twice impeached Trump has won a second term and now rightfully owns the moniker of ‘The Comeback Kid,’ if a 78-year-old man can even be considered a kid.
The vaunted ‘blue wall’ confidence Kamala Harris’ team came into Tuesday with, slowly crumbled as states and key voting blocs she was counting on failed to deliver. As evening darkened,so too did the hopes of the country having the first woman and woman of color sitting in the Oval Office.
While the election of 2024 will be dissected a thousand different ways in the coming days and provide future historians with the same challenge, a couple of factors they’ll certainly examine is the consequential drift right by Latino voters.
Over the course of recent Presidential Elections, Latino voters, once a sure-thing bloc, have drifted right. That proved to be the case on Tuesday but in even bigger numbers than anyone imagined.
In exit polling conducted by NBC News, Latino men were backing Trump by a 54-44 margin. Team Harris had counted on reversing this trend, but hope—especially in politics—can be fickle as it was last night. The best Harris could do was 54-44.
The same exit polling also showed a lesser but equally as demoralizing drop in support among Latino women. While Harris enjoyed a 25-point margin with this group, it was significantly lower than Biden’s 39-point margin in 2020.
Democrats went into Tuesday with ‘casino dreams,’ optimistic but tinged with reality. Former Colorado state Republican Senator Norma Anderson—the only woman to lead her party in both houses—spent Tuesday trying to escape what she knew might happen as results coalesced.
“I went shopping, had lunch with a friend and tried to enjoy my time before I had to look at the results,” she said, punctuating her words with, “I’m worried.”
What worried Anderson were some of the often poorly considered campaign promises Trump has been known to make, including one recent commitment to noted vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The ex-president said he would give Kennedy a “big role” in healthcare saying he would let Kennedy “go wild” on food and drug regulation.
Doing that, said Anderson, ought to worry everyone. “Children need to be vaccinated,” she said. “I lived through the polio (pandemic) and had a friend who lost one of her brothers. I saw him in an iron lung.”
In the end and despite Democrats exhortations that the U.S. economy had recovered from the pandemic and was the strongest among all industrial nations, it wasn’t enough.
Trump’s main arguments in his nearly two-year quest to regain the White House—where he could presumably sweep away his legal problems—the economy and immigration, outweighed the Harris chorus of ‘hope and joy.’
The argument was enough to entice enough young White men, Latinos and African Americans in swing states to the Trump side, especially the argument on the economy.
“Voters will vote for literally anyone who is not the incumbent when they’re still ticked off about spikes in the cost of groceries,” said Trump Republican strategist, Liz Mair. Her assessment seemed to hold considering many of Trump’s often racially tinged comments in the closing days of the campaign.
Based on nothing more than rumor, Trump pumped air into a false story about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, stealing and eating family pets. He also denied any knowledge of a comedian’s slur against Puerto Ricans at a closing rally that labeled the U.S. territory as a “floating island of garbage.”
While Trump’s win, a 277-244 Electoral College margin according to the Associated Press, was not entirely unexpected, Democrats still thought Harris almost seamless campaign along with Trump’s criminal challenges would result in a win. “My wife said we were being ‘nauseously optimistic’ about Harris,” said former Democratic state legislator and civil rights attorney Joe Salazar.
With Trump now headed back to the White House, Democrats and the nation remain uncertain about what awaits. Will Trump, in fact, award high level jobs to dubiously qualified people like Robert F. Kennedy or General Mike Flynn? Will the ultra-right wing of his party implement Project 2025? How will the ‘ex’ and soon to be next president deal with conflicts in both Ukraine and Israel? Will he end them in “24 hours,” as he has boasted?
While news coverage will remain stationary hovering over the election, one sure to be a big story on a day of big stories is Vice President Harris’ concession. Several news outlets say it is expected to be delivered sometime Wednesday afternoon.
The 2024 Electoral vote count will be certified on January 6th, 2025.
