Tuesday evening, while waiting for national election results to come in, I dropped by the victory party for Mark Robinson, the North Carolina Republican nominee for governor. It was, as you might expect, a strange scene.

Robinson, the lieutenant governor, had become persona non grata among most other Republicans in September, when a CNN report revealed his bizarre posts—about slavery, being a “Black Nazi,” transgender porn, and more—on the porn site Nude Africa. He was no longer invited to attend rallies for the Donald Trump campaign, his fundraising dried up, and his campaign was left for dead.

The party, held on the top floor of a skyscraper in Raleigh, was pointedly separate from other North Carolina GOP festivities. Some 60 or 70 supporters crammed into a small room in a private club watching Fox News. It was a more diverse crowd than any other Republican gathering I’ve ever attended, and nearly everyone was decked out in Robinson gear. I noticed only one piece of Trump swag, and a wide range of other fashion choices. A younger Black man wore a satin jacket with red-sequin embroidery; an older white guy wore a white tuxedo jacket, complete with bow tie, over a red Mark Robinson T-shirt.

Polls in North Carolina closed at 7:30 p.m. ET. Just a few minutes later, Fox News projected that the Democrat Josh Stein, the current state attorney general, would beat Robinson. I expected to hear jeers or a murmur or feel some deflation in the room, but nothing happened. I started wondering if I’d misread, but no: Fox repeated the call several times in the next few minutes, and eventually someone changed the channel to Spectrum News. I asked some attendees what they made of the news, and was told over and over that they had hope that the call was premature.

[David A. Graham: The great, disappearing Trump campaign]

This was not exactly a denial, and around 9, Robinson took the stage and conceded the race. “The window of opportunity for us to win this race is closing quick, folks,” he said. “Doesn’t seem like it’s going our way tonight. But it’s always going our way. Whether people want it to or not, people of faith know it’s going to go the right way, because we’ve read the back of the book. We know how this all comes to an end.” He barely alluded to the scandals that had sunk his campaign, saying, “It’s not about the lies; it’s not about the half-truths.” Soon, attendees began streaming out, clutching handfuls of campaign signs and hats.

It was a fittingly weird start to a weird night in North Carolina politics. The Old North State delivered a series of results that show why national Democrats have been so hopeful about flipping it, while likely discouraging them from trying again for some time.

Trump won the state in the presidential election. Kamala Harris received both a smaller percentage of the vote than President Joe Biden did four years ago and (in unofficial results) a smaller absolute number of votes. That all happened despite a massive campaign infrastructure and get-out-the-vote operation, especially as compared with the Trump campaign. In the deep-red counties where Harris had hoped to cut into Republican margins, she barely managed to move the ball or else lost ground. National Democrats poured money into the state, and once again, it broke their hearts.

Down the ballot, however, North Carolina Democrats had a good night. Stein beat Robinson by almost 15 points. That matches with some of the public polling on the race, but most insiders seemed to expect a margin closer to the high single-digits. The Democrat Rachel Hunt flipped the lieutenant governor’s seat. Jeff Jackson held off Dan Bishop for attorney general; no Republican has won the seat since the 19th century. Secretary of State Elaine Marshall won another term. For superintendent of public instruction, Mo Green beat Michele Morrow, who attended the January 6, 2021, rally and called for Barack Obama’s execution. In a heartbreaker for Democrats, state-supreme-court justice Allison Riggs appears to have lost her seat narrowly, but in the state legislature, Democrats broke a veto-proof Republican supermajority. U.S. Representative Don Davis eked out a win in northeastern North Carolina.

[David A. Graham: Mark Robinson is testing the bounds of GOP extremism]

One lesson from this is that North Carolina really is a purple state, as the political scientist Chris Cooper describes in a new book. Voters are happy to elect Democrats at the state level; they just don’t want them in the White House or the U.S. Senate. (The last election North Carolinians selected a Democrat for either was in 2008.)

Across the country, the election looks similar—more a repudiation of national Democrats, and especially the Democratic candidate for president, than a rejection of Democratic policy priorities. (I argued yesterday that Trump’s simple message on the economy is what carried him to victory.) Harris made abortion a centerpiece of her campaign and lost, but voters in seven states passed ballot referenda protecting abortion rights—some in blue states, but also in purple and red states including Arizona, Nevada, and Montana. Missouri voters overturned an abortion ban. And 57 percent of Floridians supported a ballot issue, a number that nonetheless fell short of the 60 percent required for passage. A majority, but not the requisite supermajority, of Floridians also voted to legalize recreational cannabis use. Even in U.S. Senate races, Democratic candidates ran ahead of Harris in almost every competitive contest. (Florida was the odd race out.)

That mixed result is also a mixed message for Democrats trying to figure out where the party goes from here. Having a reasonably popular policy platform is theoretically good news for them, but that isn’t much use if they can’t win the offices required to institute or defend those policies. But with little real power in Washington for the next two years, they’ll have plenty of time to think about the conundrum.

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Democrats and liberal pundits are already trying to figure out how the Trump campaign not only bested Kamala Harris in the “Blue Wall” states of the Midwest and the Rust Belt, but gained on her even in areas that should have been safe for a Democrat. Almost everywhere, Donald Trump expanded his coalition, and this time, unlike in 2016, he didn’t have to thread the needle of the Electoral College to win: He can claim the legitimacy of winning the popular vote.

Trump’s opponents are now muttering about the choice of Tim Walz, the influence of the Russians, the role of the right-wing media, and whether President Joe Biden should not have stepped aside in favor of Harris. Even the old saw about “economic anxiety” is making a comeback.

These explanations all have some merit, but mostly, they miss the point. Yes, some voters still stubbornly believe that presidents magically control the price of basic goods. Others have genuine concerns about immigration and gave in to Trump’s booming call of fascism and nativism. And some of them were just never going to vote for a woman, much less a Black woman.

But in the end, a majority of American voters chose Trump because they wanted what he was selling: a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment. Some Democrats, still gripped by the lure of wonkery, continue to scratch their heads over which policy proposals might have unlocked more votes, but that was always a mug’s game. Trump voters never cared about policies, and he rarely gave them any. (Choosing to be eaten by a shark rather than electrocuted might be a personal preference, but it’s not a policy.) His rallies involved long rants about the way he’s been treated, like a giant therapy session or a huge family gathering around a bellowing, impaired grandpa.

Back in 2021, I wrote a book about the rise of “illiberal populism,” the self-destructive tendency in some nations that leads people to participate in democratic institutions such as voting while being hostile to democracy itself, casting ballots primarily to punish other people and to curtail everyone’s rights—even their own. These movements are sometimes led by fantastically wealthy faux populists who hoodwink gullible voters by promising to solve a litany of problems that always seem to involve money, immigrants, and minorities. The appeals from these charlatans resonate most not among the very poor, but among a bored, relatively well-off middle class, usually those who are deeply uncomfortable with racial and demographic changes in their own countries.

And so it came to pass: Last night, a gaggle of millionaires and billionaires grinned and applauded for Trump. They were part of an alliance with the very people another Trump term would hurt—the young, minorities, and working families among them.

Trump, as he has shown repeatedly over the years, couldn’t care less about any of these groups. He ran for office to seize control of the apparatus of government and to evade judicial accountability for his previous actions as president. Once he is safe, he will embark on the other project he seems to truly care about: the destruction of the rule of law and any other impediments to enlarging his power.

Americans who wish to stop Trump in this assault on the American constitutional order, then, should get it out of their heads that this election could have been won if only a better candidate had made a better pitch to a few thousand people in Pennsylvania. Biden, too old and tired to mount a proper campaign, likely would have lost worse than Harris; more to the point, there was nothing even a more invigorated Biden or a less, you know, female alternative could have offered. Racial grievances, dissatisfaction with life’s travails (including substance addiction and lack of education), and resentment toward the villainous elites in faraway cities cannot be placated by housing policy or interest-rate cuts.

No candidate can reason about facts and policies with voters who have no real interest in such things. They like the promises of social revenge that flow from Trump, the tough-guy rhetoric, the simplistic “I will fix it” solutions. And he’s interesting to them, because he supports and encourages their conspiracist beliefs. (I knew Harris was in trouble when I was in Pennsylvania last week for an event and a fairly well-off business owner, who was an ardent Trump supporter, told me that Michelle Obama had conspired with the Canadians to change the state’s vote tally in 2020. And that wasn’t even the weirdest part of the conversation.)

As Jonathan Last, editor of The Bulwark, put it in a social-media post last night: The election went the way it did “because America wanted Trump. That’s it. People reaching to construct [policy] alibis for the public because they don’t want to grapple with this are whistling past the graveyard.” Last worries that we might now be in a transition to authoritarianism of the kind Russia went through in the 1990s, but I visited Russia often in those days, and much of the Russian democratic implosion was driven by genuinely brutal economic conditions and the rapid collapse of basic public services. Americans have done this to themselves during a time of peace, prosperity, and astonishingly high living standards. An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions.

The bright spot in all this is that Trump and his coterie must now govern. The last time around, Trump was surrounded by a small group of moderately competent people, and these adults basically put baby bumpers and pool noodles on all the sharp edges of government. This time, Trump will rule with greater power but fewer excuses, and he—and his voters—will have to own the messes and outrages he is already planning to create.

Those voters expect that Trump will hurt others and not them. They will likely be unpleasantly surprised, much as they were in Trump’s first term. (He was, after all, voted out of office for a reason.) For the moment, some number of them have memory-holed that experience and are pretending that his vicious attacks on other Americans are just so much hot air.

Trump, unfortunately, means most of what he says. In this election, he has triggered the unfocused ire and unfounded grievances of millions of voters. Soon we will learn whether he can still trigger their decency—if there is any to be found.

Related:

What Trump understood, and Harris did not Democracy is not over.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

George T. Conway III: What we’re in for Voters wanted lower prices at any cost. Blame Biden, Tyler Austin Harper argues. Trump won. Now what?

Today’s News

The Republicans have won back control of the Senate. Votes are still being counted in multiple House races that could determine which party controls the House. Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a concession speech at Howard University, emphasizing that there will be a peaceful transfer of power. In an interview on Fox News, a Trump spokesperson said that Trump plans to launch “the largest mass-deportation operation of illegal immigrants” on his first day in office.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: “Trump’s victory is a reverberation of trends set in motion in 2020,” Derek Thompson writes. “In politics, as in nature, the largest tsunami generated by an earthquake is often not the first wave but the next one.”

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Evening Read

OK McCausland for The Atlantic

The Night They Hadn’t Prepared For

By Elaine Godfrey

The vibe shifted sometime around 10:30 p.m. Eastern.

For several hours beforehand, the scene at the Howard University Yard had been jubilant: all glitter and sequins and billowing American flags. The earrings were big, and the risers were full. Men in fraternity jackets and women in pink tweed suits grooved to a bass-forward playlist of hip-hop and classic rock. The Howard gospel choir, in brilliant-blue robes, performed a gorgeous rendition of “Oh Happy Day,” and people sang along in a way that made you feel as if the university’s alumna of the hour, Kamala Harris, had already won.

But Harris had not won—a fact that, by 10:30, had become very noticeable.

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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