At 5:00 PM EST Tuesday the Exit Polls started to trickle in.
I flipped on the TV to hear Chris Wallace, the erstwhile Fox News anchor-turned-CNN analyst, soberly opine on a statistic showing a whopping 72 percent of Americans were either dissatisfied or angry about the direction of the country.
It would be a ‘miracle,’ said Wallace, if Harris can win ‘with that kind of headwind.’
Co-host Dana Bash scoffed. It wasn’t clear which candidate, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, would bear blame for America’s problems, she argued.
Indeed, it was too early to tell.
I had expectations of a strong Trump showing, but even I lost my nerve a bit when the actual votes started coming in.
President Trump is seen here leaving an election watch party in the early hours of Wednesday morning in West Palm Beach, Florida, following early results
It would be a ‘miracle,’ said Wallace, right, if Harris can win ‘with that kind of headwind.’ Pictured with his co-host Dana Bash
In the majority-Hispanic Miami-Dade County, seen here on polling day, Trump was winning by a double-digit margin
My adopted home state of Florida was one of the first to start reporting results.
At 8:01 pm, the Associated Press called the longtime Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade County in the state’s southeast. A Republican presidential candidate hadn’t won there since George H.W. Bush in 1988.
Across the state, Trump was dramatically overperforming his 2020 results in the Sunshine State, winning with a margin closer to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s massive 2022 statewide romp.
In the majority-Hispanic Miami-Dade County, Trump was winning by a double-digit margin. He was prevailing in blue Hillsborough County, where the city of Tampa lies and was running neck-and-neck in ritzy, elite Palm Beach County (where he lives).
Trump considerably outperformed his RealClearPolitics average of polling in Florida, which had him winning by eight percentage points. (Today, he’s projected to win by more than 13 points).
Conservative causes on the ballot also won: A proposed measure to codify abortion into the Florida Constitution failed as did a pro-marijuana measure that had been widely expected to pass.
It was a red wave in Florida – but how far would the tide carry Trump and the Republicans?
Rural counties across the South and Midwest began to report. It became clear that Trump was overperforming elsewhere too – and Harris was trailing. Black voter turnout in the major metro areas, such as Atlanta and Charlotte, was lower than Team Harris had banked on.
Trump considerably outperformed his RealClearPolitics average of polling in Florida, which had him winning by eight percentage points
Before a single swing state was called, Democratic campaign guru James Carville (pictured) sounded the alarm
‘Let me just give you a gut check about what we are hearing from… the Harris headquarters,’ reported CNN’s Abby Phillips as the night rolled on. ‘I think the operative word right now is silence. There’s not a lot being said, because the Harris team appears to be searching for bright spots in the map.’
The lights were blinking red.
It became apparent that Harris was also struggling to match Biden’s vote count in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The Old Dominion was not supposed to be in play. Then, before a single swing state was called, Democratic campaign guru James Carville sounded the alarm.
‘There are troubling signs out there… early indications here are not sterling,’ the Ragin’ Cajun said on Amazon’s live Election Day coverage.
Liberal faces on the panel blanched and Democratic panic began to pick up steam.
Iowa was called for Trump. No big surprise there—it’s a bright-red state. But Trump’s Hawkeye State rout destroyed the myth spun by pollster Ann Selzer, who had confounded so many politicos over the weekend with her eyebrow-raising final poll showing Harris in the lead there.
The MAGA movement’s success in the Acela corridor was also remarkable.
Voters wait in line at a polling station on November 5, 2024 in Orlando, Florida
Harris won bright-blue New Jersey by a paltry margin of under five percent. In New York State, the statewide margin was barely double digits—with embattled down-ballot Republican congressmen, such as Mike Lawler, prevailing, and Trump picking up massive additional support in New York City and neighboring Nassau County from his victory four years ago.
In Queens County, one of the most racially and ethnically diverse counties in America, Trump gained 20 points from his 2020 performance.
The dominos started to fall quickly after that.
The first battleground, North Carolina, was called. Trump overperformed there— as he did in Georgia. Neither state was quite as close as the polls suggested.
Harris’s path to 270 Electoral College votes narrowed.
It was then apparent that the Harris campaign was forced to go all-in on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
But by 10:30 or 11:00 pm, it was already clear that prognosticators were projecting a likelier-than-not Trump victory in the Keystone State—as well as its fellow Rust Belt battlegrounds, Michigan and Wisconsin.
At around 12:30 AM or so, Team Harris announced that she would not be addressing supporters. They sent out Cedric Richmond to do that thankless task instead
The infamous New York Times ‘needle,’ the source of so many Hillary Clinton jokes eight years ago, began trending toward Trump.
Gloom descended on the sets at CNN and MSNBC.
Around 12:30 AM or so, Team Harris announced that she wouldn’t be addressing supporters. They sent out Cedric Richmond to do that thankless task instead. It was Hillary Clinton at the Javits Center all over again: ever-flowing liberal tears.
By 1:20 AM, many of the networks had called Pennsylvania. It was all over. It wasn’t just looking like a win, but an electoral blowout.
Subsequent results across the Rust Belt and Sun Belt have only confirmed the Electoral College massacre.
Ultimately, Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential standard-bearer to win the national popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004.
He did so by outright winning Hispanic men, winning a historically high percentage of black men and younger voters, and maintaining his margins with his bedrock demographic, the white working class.
The result: the death of the 2008 Barack Obama Democratic Party intersectional coalition, the further MAGA-ization of the erstwhile country club GOP, and the single greatest comeback story in American history.
