The political scientist Wilson Carey McWilliams once observed that alienation is not the loss of an old homeland, but the discovery of a new homeland that casts the former in a more dismal light. Today, the country indeed looks alien. The America many of us believed we knew now appears stranger in retrospect: The anger and resentment we may have thought was pitched at a simmer turned out to be at a rollicking boil. And one of liberals’ most cherished shibboleths from 2016—that Trumpism is a movement for aggrieved white men—unraveled in the face of a realignment that saw the GOP appear to give birth to a multiracial working-class movement. A second Trump presidency is the result of this misjudgment.

There is plenty of blame to go around, and much of it will be directed at Kamala Harris. Rightly so. Her campaign strategy was often confounding. Harris gambled on suburban-Republican support, which she tried to juice by touring with Liz Cheney and moving right on the border, a strategy that many warned was questionable. Meanwhile, in her quest to bring these new conservative voters into the Democratic fold, Harris neglected many of the voters the party has long relied on. She took far too long to reach out to Black men—despite a year’s worth of polling that said she was losing their support—and when she finally did, she had little to offer them but slapdash policies and half-baked promises. It was the same story for Hispanic men. Despite polling showing Donald Trump increasing his Hispanic support, Harris largely ignored the problem until a month before Election Day, when she stitched together a condescending last-minute “Hombres con Harris” push. As for Arab American voters, she and her surrogates couldn’t be bothered to do much more than lecture them.

[David A. Graham: What Trump understood, and Harris did not]

The results speak for themselves: Trump won a stunning victory in a heavily Black county in North Carolina and carried the largest Arab-majority city, Dearborn, Michigan. Early exit polls suggest that he doubled his Black support in Wisconsin and won Hispanic men by 1o points. Meanwhile, Harris’s scheme to run up the score in the suburbs plainly failed to bear fruit: She underperformed Biden’s numbers with these voters. Simply put, almost nothing about the Harris game plan worked. But as easy as it is to play Monday-morning (or rather, Wednesday-morning) quarterback—and her dubious campaigning provides plenty of material to work with—the reality is that Harris was probably doomed from the jump.

The reason is that she had an 81-year-old albatross hanging around her neck: Joe Biden. When Biden got into the 2020 presidential race, he said he was motivated to defeat the man who blamed “both sides” for a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Five years later, Biden’s inability to see his own limitations handed that same man the White House once more. Nobody bears more responsibility for Trump’s reascension to the presidency than the current president. This failure lies at his feet.

Biden was supposed to be a one-term candidate. During his 2019 campaign, he heavily signaled that he would not run again if he won. “He is going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection,” one of his advisers declared. Biden himself promised to be a “transition” candidate, holding off Trump for four years while making room for a fresh Democratic challenger in 2024. “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not anything else,” he said at a Michigan campaign event with Governor Gretchen Whitmer, one of those promising younger Democrats Biden was ostensibly making room for.

Of course, that’s not what happened. Scranton Joe, supposed paragon of aw-shucks decency, ultimately wouldn’t relinquish his power. He decided in the spring of 2023 to run for reelection despite no shortage of warning signs, including a basement-level approval rating, flashing bright red. He also ignored the will of the voters. As early as 2022, an overwhelming percentage of Democratic voters said they preferred a candidate other than Biden, and support for an alternative candidate persisted even as the president threw his hat back in the ring. This past February, one poll found that 86 percent of Americans and 73 percent of Democrats believed Biden was too old to serve another term, and another revealed that only a third of Americans believed that he was mentally fit for four more years.

The idea that Americans would vote for a man who they overwhelmingly thought was too old and cognitively infirm stretched reason to its breaking point. And yet Biden and his enablers in the Democratic Party doubled down on magical thinking. This was a species of madness worthy of King Lear shaking his fist before the encroaching storm. And like Lear, what the current president ultimately raged against was nature itself—that final frailty, aging and decline—as he stubbornly clung to the delusion that he could outrun human biology.

[Adam Serwer: There is no constitutional mandate for fascism]

Nature won, as it always does. After flouting the will of his own voters, after his party did everything in its power to clear the runway for his reelection bid, and after benefiting from an army of commentators and superfans who insisted that mounting video evidence of his mental slips were “cheap fakes,” Biden crashed and burned at the debate in June. He hung on for another month, fueling the flames of scandal and intraparty revolt and robbing his successor of badly needed time to begin campaigning. And yet when he finally did stand down, Biden World immediately spun up the just-so story that the president is an honorable man who stepped aside for the good of the country.

He did not stand down soon enough. The cake was baked. The powers that be decided the hour was too late for a primary or contested convention, so an unpopular president was replaced with an unpopular vice president, who wasted no time in reminding America why her own presidential bid failed just a few years before. The limitations of Harris’s campaign are now laid bare for all to see, but her grave was dug before she ever took the podium at the Democratic National Convention.

Harris could not distance herself from Biden’s unpopular record on inflation and the southern border. She could not distance herself from his unpopular foreign policy in the Middle East. She could not break from him while she simultaneously served as his deputy. And she could not tell an obvious truth—that the sitting U.S. president is not fit for office—when asked by reporters, and so she was forced into Orwellian contortions. If the worst comes to pass, if the next four years are as bad as Biden warned, if the country—teetering before the abyss—stumbles toward that last precipice, it will have been American democracy’s self-styled savior who helped push it, tumbling end over end, into the dark.

Trump almost doubles support among Black voters compared with 2020, exit polls say. How and where? We break it down.

Trump makes inroads with Black voters; projected to win swing states North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin

For the third consecutive election, the nation remains divided almost exactly in half around the polarizing presence of Donald Trump.

Early this morning, the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris appears likely to again come down to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the same states that decided Trump’s 2016 and 2020 races by razor-thin margins. Trump held a narrow but clear advantage in all of them as of midnight.

In 2016, those three Rust Belt battlegrounds made Trump president when he dislodged them by a combined margin of about 80,000 votes from the “Blue Wall” of states Democrats had won in all six presidential races from 1992 to 2012; four years later, they made Joe Biden president when he wrested them back from Trump by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes. Now, with Trump regaining an upper hand across Sun Belt battlegrounds where Biden made inroads in 2020, the three Rust Belt behemoths appeared likely to decide the winner once more.

The results as of midnight suggested that those three states were tipping slightly to Trump; the patterns of returns looked more like 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in them, than 2020, when Biden beat Trump. Given that Trump appears highly likely to also win the Southeast battlegrounds of North Carolina and Georgia, and has a strong hand in Arizona, Trump will likely win the presidency again if he captures any of the three Blue Wall states. He would become only the second man, after Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s, to win the presidency, lose it, and then regain it again on a third try.

Not only are the same industrial-state battlegrounds at the fulcrum of Trump’s third race, but they remain mostly divided along very familiar lines. As he did in both 2016 and 2020, Trump is running up big margins in exurbs, small towns, and rural communities where most voters are white, culturally conservative people without a college degree. Harris is amassing big—though, in some cases, diminished—margins in the populous, well-educated suburbs around the major cities of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Milwaukee. The one potentially crucial shift from 2020: The exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations showed Trump making gains among Black and Latino voters, and especially men, not only in the pivotal former Blue Wall states but also elsewhere.

In many respects, the results available as of midnight were a reminder that even in a race involving a figure as unique as Donald Trump, in politics (as in Casablanca), the fundamental things apply. Since World War II, it has been extremely difficult for parties to hold the White House when an outgoing president was unpopular: The White House flipped partisan control when Harry Truman left office in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968, and George W. Bush in 2008. Popular presidents haven’t always been able to guarantee victory for their party when they leave (the White House changed hands when relatively popular chief executives stepped down in 1960, 2000, and 2016), but unpopular outgoing presidents have usually presented an insurmountable obstacle.

If Harris ultimately falls short, that pattern would represent a big part of the reason. Biden’s deep unpopularity at the end of his term operated as a huge headwind for her. In the national exit poll, only 40 percent of voters said they approved of Biden’s job performance as president. In the battlegrounds, Biden’s approval rating ranged from a low of only 39 percent (in Wisconsin) to a high of 43 percent (Pennsylvania). Harris ran better than usual for a nominee from the same party among voters who disapproved of the outgoing president’s performance. But even so, the large majority of discontented voters in all of these states provided a huge base of support for Trump. In the national exit poll, fully two-thirds of voters described the economy in negative terms. Only one in four said they had suffered no hardship from inflation over the past year.

A lot has changed for Trump since the 2020 election. He launched a sustained campaign to overturn the results of that election, which culminated in the January 6 insurrection; Supreme Court justices he’d appointed helped overturn the constitutional right to abortion; he was indicted on multiple felony counts in four separate cases, and convicted on 34 of them; and he was hit with civil judgments for financial fraud and sexual abuse.

Yet the exit polls, at least, found remarkably little change in his support levels from 2020 among white voters across the battlegrounds. In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, his white support was virtually unchanged from 2020; he suffered a small decline in Pennsylvania, and a slightly larger one in North Carolina.

Compared with 2020, white voters with at least a four-year college degree moved slightly, but not dramatically, away from Trump in those five big battlegrounds. Harris won about three in five white women with a college degree, a big improvement from what the exit polls recorded in 2020. But Trump offset that by improving at least slightly since 2020 among white voters without a college education, who tended to give Biden especially low marks for his performance. Crucially for Trump, he retained overwhelming support among white women without a college degree everywhere except Wisconsin, where he split them evenly. Democrats had hoped those women might abandon him over abortion rights and a general revulsion to his demeaning language about women. Because those blue-collar white women appeared on track to provide Trump as big a margin as they did in 2016 and 2020, the national exit polls showed Trump winning most white women against Harris—just as he did against Biden and Clinton. That will likely be a subject of intense frustration and debate among Democrats in the weeks ahead, whether or not Trump wins the race.

Overall, the abortion issue benefited Harris substantially, but not as much as it did the Democratic gubernatorial candidates who swept Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2022, the first election after the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe. In that election, the exit polls found that Democrats Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania won more than four-fifths of voters who said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances; in Wisconsin, Democrat Tony Evers won three-fourths of them. But this time—with the economy weighing on those voters—Harris won only about two-thirds of those pro-choice voters in Michigan and Wisconsin, and about seven in 10 in Pennsylvania. That slight shift might prove decisive. (In the national exit poll, Trump won almost three in 10  voters who said abortion should be legal all or most of the time; one-fourth of women who supported legal abortion backed Trump.)

Because abortion rights did not give her as much of a lift as it did the Democratic gubernatorial candidates in 2022, Harris did not appear on track to expand on Biden’s margins in many of the big suburban counties key to the modern Democratic coalition. She looked to be roughly matching Biden’s huge advantages in the big four suburban counties outside Philadelphia. But she did not narrow the roughly 3–2 deficit Biden faced in Waukesha County, outside Milwaukee, perhaps the biggest Republican-leaning white-collar suburb north of the Mason-Dixon line, as of midnight. In Oakland County, outside Detroit, Trump appeared on track to slightly narrow her margin, perhaps dealing a fatal blow to her chances.

In the well-educated county centered on Ann Arbor, Harris’s margin of victory seemed on track to decline from 2020, in what might be a reflection of youthful discontent over the support she and Biden have provided for Israel’s war in Gaza. In Dane County, Wisconsin, centered on Madison, she appeared in line to match only Biden’s 2020 share and not the even higher number Evers reached in 2022. Overall, in several of the suburban counties across the Blue Wall states, Harris appeared on track to finish closer to Hillary Clinton’s margins in 2016, when she lost these states, than Biden’s in 2020, when he won them.

The failure to expand on Biden’s performance in suburban areas left Harris vulnerable to what I’ve called Trump’s pincer movement against her.

As in both of his earlier races, he posted towering numbers in rural areas and small towns. Trump posted his usual imposing advantages in the blue-collar suburbs around Pittsburgh, and appeared to gain dramatically in the mostly blue-collar counties including and around Green Bay.

From the other direction, he appeared to further narrow the traditional Democratic margins in heavily minority central cities. That was particularly evident in Philadelphia. Exit polls showed Trump slightly improving among Black voters in North Carolina, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; that contributed to his win in North Carolina and gave him gains that placed him on the brink of flipping Wisconsin and Michigan as of midnight. In the national exit poll, Harris basically matched Biden’s vote share among white voters overall—but she fell slightly among Black voters and more substantially among Hispanic voters.

Almost lost in the ominous news for Democrats from the battleground states was the possibility that Harris would win the national popular vote, even if Trump also appeared likely to improve on his showings on that front from 2016 and 2020. If Harris did win the national popular vote, it would mark the eighth time in the past nine presidential elections that Democrats have done so—something no party has done since the formation of the modern party system, in 1828.

Yet even if Democrats achieved that historic feat, they faced the bracing prospect that Republicans could win unified control of the House, the Senate, and the White House while losing the national popular vote. Until the 21st century, that had happened only once in American history, in 1888; if it happens again this year, it would mark the third time in this century that Republicans will have won complete control of Washington while losing the popular vote.

Trump isn’t likely to view losing the national popular vote, if he does, for a third time (something only William Jennings Bryan had previously done) as a caution light. If anything, he will likely view the prospect that he could win the decisive battleground states by bigger margins than he did in 2016 and gain among voters of color as a signal to aggressively pursue the combative agenda he laid out this year. That includes plans for massive new tariffs, the largest deportation program in U.S. history, a purge of the civil service, and the use of the military against what he calls “the enemy from within.” Unless something changes dramatically in the final counts from the decisive states, American voters will have chosen, once again, to leap into that murky unknown.