How should the women who didn’t vote for Trump go about their lives, knowing that a majority of Americans voted not just against their immediate health and well-being, but for a candidate who actively sidelined and maligned people like them? After months and months of watching Donald Trump and his band of bros belittle Kamala Harris and all women generally—the childless, the childbearing, and the post-childbearing—55 percent of male voters supported him, according to CNN’s exit polls. So did 45 percent of female voters. What are the other women—those who feel that they’re living in a nation that is hostile to their very existence—to do?

The answer is something different from what they did the last time.

In 2016, when Hillary Clinton’s loss sent thousands of women into the streets of Washington, D.C., with their signs and their pussy hats, many assumed that the sexism Clinton had experienced was a bug of the Trump era. That if women banded together, expanded their notion of feminism to include experiences across race and class, and fought back, they could change things.

[Read: How Trump neutralized his abortion problem]

And in some ways, they did. That collective strength laid the foundation for the #MeToo movement in 2017. More women ran for office, and won, in the 2018 midterms than ever before. But the ground has shifted in the intervening years.

Sexism, it turned out, was not a bug but a feature of the Trump years. Misogyny certainly appears to come naturally to Trump, but it was strategically amplified—through surrogates and messaging—to attract supporters, particularly younger men of all races. Elon Musk’s political-action committee even put out an ad referring to Harris as “a big ole C-word”—and Communist was only one of its intended meanings. Trump has always been good at exploiting the ugliest aspects of America, and the growing isolation and rightward drift of young men was a perfect target.

American men are lonely—in 2021, 15 percent were likely to say they had no close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990. They are also more likely to not be in a relationship: In 2022, six in 10 men under 30 were single. In a 2023 survey of men ages 18 to 45, a majority agreed with the statement “No one really knows me.” Many find solace online, where they consume their news on Reddit and X and soak up content from influencers such as Andrew Tate, Adin Ross, and Joe Rogan. The content, like its creators, is often blatantly misogynistic.

Many of these young men apparently see Trump—with his microphone-fellating pantomime and his crowds chanting the word bitch—as presidential. He spoke to young men, in a voice they recognized. More than half of men ages 18 to 29 voted for him.

But Trump didn’t just pick up support from young men; he picked up support from almost every group. For many older white men, and the many, many Latino men who broke for Trump—well, the misogyny may have seemed macho. And what about his female supporters? Representative Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for president, wrote in 1970 that “women in America are much more brainwashed and content with their roles as second-class citizens than Blacks ever were.” This remains true today. No matter the number of marches women hold or memes they post online about sisterhood, many women are unswayed: 53 percent of white women (and a growing percentage of Latinas) voted for Trump. Women can enforce patriarchy just as well as men, as the “trad wives” on the internet have demonstrated.

Many had hoped that as president, Harris would have reached across not just the political aisle, but the gender divide. In her concession speech yesterday, she listed women’s rights as one cause among many, speaking of the need for women to “have the freedom to make decisions about their own body,” for schools to be safe from gun violence, “for the rule of law, for equal justice.”

No such repair will happen under a second Trump administration, for the obvious reason that division benefits him. Misogyny helps disempowered men feel empowered. After Trump’s victory, the right-wing activist Nick Fuentes tweeted: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” It really is a man’s world now.

The situation isn’t hopeless, but it may require new tactics. The time for thumping on our chests and railing against the patriarchy might be past. The protests that felt so powerful in 2016 may have backfired to some extent, by causing the people women most needed to listen to their message to tune them out instead. But women can’t simply retreat, either—their lives and futures depend on it.  

The answer is engagement: soft diplomacy in everyday life. “We will continue to wage this fight in the voting booth, in the courts, and in the public square,” Harris said in her speech. But “we will also wage it in quieter ways.”

Start easy: Thank the men in your life who supported Harris; thank them for trusting and respecting women and believing that they can lead. It seems small, but millions of men apparently don’t feel that way, so let’s encourage the ones who do.

[Listen: Are we living in a different America?]

For mothers and aunties of young men and boys: You may not be able to control what they are reading on the internet, but you can combat it, through conversation and counterprogramming.

And most important, women who voted against Trump should talk honestly with the men in their lives—their cousins and fathers and colleagues and friends—who voted the other way. Talk to them about women’s lives and values. Better yet, enlist other men to help you. One reason fewer Black men drifted toward Trump than Latino men is because, in the months leading up to the election, on social media and in private conversations and at church, many Black people talked honestly about the importance of valuing women. They addressed voters’ hesitance about female leadership directly, by discussing the long history of excellent Black female leaders. Minds can be molded by the internet and its algorithms, yes, but minds can be changed by conversations as well. As Harris reminded everyone, “You have power.”

Despite what many say, the modern woman doesn’t need a man. But women’s lives can certainly be improved by men not hating them.

Donald Trump’s decisive victory may proclaim an unpredictable new era for American government and society, but it also reaffirmed an enduring political truth: It is virtually impossible for the incumbent president’s party to hold the White House when Americans are discontented with that president’s performance.

Americans provided Trump with a sweeping victory after a campaign in which he had darkly promised “retribution” against a long list of enemies and offered an agenda centered on mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Trump seems within reach of winning the popular vote, becoming the first Republican to do so since 2004. Republicans, exulting in winning at least three Senate seats as well as the White House, instantly called the magnitude of the victory “a mandate”—and Trump seems sure to treat it as a license to pursue his most aggressive ideas.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her team, recognizing the threat of widespread disillusionment with President Joe Biden, tried to transform the Democratic campaign from a retrospective referendum on the performance of the administration in which she served into a prospective choice about the agenda and style of leadership she and Trump would bring to the next four years. Ultimately, she could not overcome the widespread unhappiness over the country’s current conditions. Biden’s approval rating among voters never exceeded 43 percent in any of the major swing states, according to exit polls. At least 55 percent of voters in each of those states said that they disapproved of Biden’s performance, and Trump typically won four-fifths or more of them.

Overall, despite any expectation to the contrary, the gender gap was not especially large. Harris’s inability to amass a greater advantage among women likely reflected the fact that they were at least as dissatisfied with the economy and Biden’s performance as men were, according to exit polls. Just 44 percent of women in exit polls said they approved of Biden’s performance, and nearly seven in 10 described the economy in negative terms—a view even more emphatic than the one men expressed.

Disapproval of Biden’s record and disaffection over the economy proved a headwind that Harris could not overcome. Exit polls showed that Americans remained concerned about the possible excesses of a second Trump presidency. But in their deep frustration over current conditions, they placed less weight on those worries.

[Read: How Donald Trump won everywhere]

As Doug Sosnik, the top White House political adviser to Bill Clinton, wrote in an email yesterday: “The 2024 election marks the biggest shift to the right in our country since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.” The New York Times calculated that nine in 10 U.S. counties moved at least somewhat toward Trump in this cycle. A striking sign of that change was his dramatic improvement in big urban centers with large populations of Black and/or Latino voters, including the counties encompassing Philadelphia, Detroit, and Las Vegas. But Trump also improved (compared with 2020) in communities dominated by working-class white voters, such as Macomb in Michigan, Luzerne in Pennsylvania, and Kenosha and the small cities around Green Bay in Wisconsin.

Harris maintained the Democratic hold on the prosperous, well-educated inner suburbs around major cities. But in most of them, her party’s margins declined relative to its 2020 results. She slipped just slightly in predominantly white-collar areas such as Montgomery and Delaware Counties outside Philadelphia, and Oakland outside Detroit, and failed to improve on Biden’s deficit in Waukesha, around Milwaukee. The result was that in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Harris’s margins in these big suburbs were closer to Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 than Biden’s in 2020. That wasn’t enough to withstand what I’ve called the “pincer” move of Trump’s concurrent gains in the smaller, mostly white, blue-collar places and the much more diverse urban cores.

The geographic pattern of actual vote tallies for Trump captured the magnitude of the red shift more vividly than the two major surveys that try to measure voters’ behavior for media organizations: the exit polls conducted by Edison Research and the VoteCast survey done by NORC. Neither found any increase from 2020 in the national level of support for Trump among white voters; nor did the exit polls show more than minimal improvement for him among white voters in the Rust Belt states. The exit polls recorded modest improvements for Trump among Black voters, with his gains coming entirely from men, and a big improvement among Latinos. (VoteCast found solid advances for Trump among both Black and Latino voters.) In each survey, Trump made his most dramatic gains with Latino men but scored notable improvements among Latina women as well. Young voters, in both data sets, moved notably toward Trump as well.

The exit polls showed Harris winning women (of all races) by eight percentage points and losing men by 13 points. The VoteCast study similarly showed Harris winning women by seven points and Trump winning men by 10 percentage points. At that level, Harris’s lead with women was much smaller than Biden’s in 2020, and even smaller than Clinton’s advantage in 2016.

The story on the economy was similar. Two-thirds of voters in the national exit polls described the economy as only fair or poor; roughly that many expressed negative views in each of the three former “Blue Wall” states and Arizona, with discontent rising to about seven in 10 in North Carolina and Nevada, and beyond that in Georgia. Solid majorities of those economically discontented voters backed Trump in each state. So did a big majority of the roughly 45 percent of voters who said they were worse off than four years ago.

Harris did win handsomely among those who said they were better off, but they constituted just one in four voters. She also won the narrow backing of those who said their condition was unchanged. But none of that was enough to overcome Trump’s preponderant advantage among those who thought their condition had deteriorated under Biden.

Working-class voters without a college degree—many of them living paycheck to paycheck—were especially down on the economy. More than three-fourths of white voters without a college degree nationwide described the economy in negative terms—as did seven in 10 Latino voters. (An even more telling eight in 10 Latinos did so in the Sun Belt swing state of Nevada.)

The issues that Harris and the Democrats had hoped would offset economic discontent simply did not have enough bite. Two-thirds of voters in the national exit polls said that abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances, but about three in 10 of those voters supported Trump anyway. More than a quarter of women nationwide who supported legal abortion backed Trump.

[Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

The muting of the abortion issue was especially dramatic in the former Blue Wall states that ultimately settled Harris’s fate. In 2022, the first election after the Supreme Court rescinded the constitutional right to abortion, Democratic gubernatorial candidates Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania each won about four-fifths of voters who supported legal abortion, while Tony Evers in Wisconsin carried about three-fourths of them. But, in a crucial erosion of that pro-choice support, Harris won only about two-thirds of those voters in Michigan and Wisconsin and about seven in 10 in Pennsylvania. A much smaller share of voters in each state said abortion should be illegal most of the time, but Trump won about nine in 10 of those.

Harris did not entirely fail at raising alarms about Trump. In the national exit polls, 54 percent of voters agreed that Trump was “too extreme.” But about one in nine voters who viewed Trump as too extreme voted for him anyway—a striking measure of their willingness to risk an uncertain future over an unacceptable present. Likewise, in the VoteCast survey, 55 percent of voters said they were very or somewhat concerned that Trump would steer the U.S. in a more authoritarian direction; yet nearly one in six of those voters supported him.

“I think that Trump has been helped by this sense that things are careening out of control at home and abroad, and it makes people more willing to contemplate the smack of authority,” William Galston, a senior fellow at the center-left Brookings Institution, told me.

Jackie Payne, the founder and executive director of Galvanize Action, which studies moderate white women, told me that according to her research, many female voters who believed Trump would improve their economic situation simply brushed aside rhetoric and proposals from him that they found troubling. “They were choosing to believe a vision of him that was aligned with what they wanted to get out of him—a strong economy—and they were absolutely discounting anything that felt extreme as disinformation or hyperbole, even if he said he would do it,” she said.

Voters around the world have reached similar judgments this year in the aftermath of the inflation that followed the coronavirus pandemic: As a Financial Times analyst pointed out this week, incumbent parties have lost ground, or lost power altogether, in all 10 major democracies that held elections in 2024. The priority voters gave to current economic conditions in their decision making followed a long U.S. tradition too. Incumbent presidents with low public-approval ratings almost never win reelection—as Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H. W. Bush in 1992, and Trump himself in 2020 demonstrated. The similar but less discussed scenario is the difficulty facing a party seeking to hold the White House even when its unpopular president isn’t running. That applied when Harry Truman in 1952, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, and George W. Bush in 2008 were off the ballot; their party lost the race to replace them in each case. Biden now joins that dour procession.

But the most apt precedent for this election may be 1980. Laboring under widespread discontent, including over a raging bout of inflation, Carter tried to use his campaign to shift attention to the risks he said his right-wing rival, Ronald Reagan, represented, with some success: Doubts about Reagan did keep Carter close in the polls. But in the campaign’s final days, voters decided that continuity with Carter represented a greater risk than change with Reagan—and flocked to the challenger in crushing numbers.

[Read: How Trump neutralized his abortion problem]

Voters were willing to take an even greater leap this time. Trump made almost no accommodation for voters uneasy about him. Instead, he intensified his false accusations, inflammatory racist rhetoric, and profane personal attacks. Trump has surrounded himself with extreme figures who promise a revolution in government and society.

His senior immigration advisers have promoted plans for a militarized mass-deportation operation, complete with internment camps, and the possible removal of U.S.-citizen children of undocumented adults. His party is likely to control both chambers of Congress—and in any case, the president has broad unilateral authority to set immigration policy, as well as to impose the large tariffs Trump has pledged. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has already rendered him virtually immune to criminal prosecution for any action he takes as president. Trump is returning to the White House unbound.

Reagan’s victory in 1980 solidified a realignment in American politics that began under his Republican predecessor, Richard Nixon. Reagan cemented working-class white voters into the conservative movement’s electoral coalition—both white southern evangelical Christians and northern industrial workers in places such as Michigan’s Macomb County—who became lastingly known as “Reagan Democrats.” Those voters remain a cornerstone GOP constituency: Even four-plus decades later, they were the two groups that supported Trump in the largest numbers on Tuesday.

Many Republicans believe that Trump now has the chance to secure an equally significant shift in the party allegiance of Black men and Latino voters of both genders, who voted for him in historic numbers this week. That opportunity surely exists. But realizing it in a lasting way will require Trump and the Republican Party to maintain the support of millions of voters of color and justify their faith in him on the economy over any concern about policies such as mass deportation and more aggressive law enforcement.

Now those communities, along with all of the other Americans disappointed in Biden over the past four years, will learn whether Trump can deliver the economic benefits he promised without plunging the country into deeper acrimony.