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.

The last weeks of Donald Trump’s successful campaign for president were a festival of crudeness. In light of this, Tucker Carlson’s warm-up act at a Georgia rally late last month was, if notably creepy, still typical of the sunken depths of rhetoric. Carlson offered an extended metaphor in which Trump was an angry “dad” with a household of misbehaving children (a 2-year-old who has smeared “the contents of his diapers on the wall,” “a hormone-addled” 15-year-old girl who has decided to “slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger”). The children in this metaphor, if it wasn’t clear, are the citizens of this country.

“Dad comes home, and he’s pissed,” Carlson said to wild cheers. “He’s not vengeful; he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them, because they’re his children. They live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior, and he’s going to have to let them know.” Then came the grossest part: Carlson’s fantasy of Trump spanking “a bad little girl” as punishment.

What America did on Tuesday was elect that dad—vengeful, disappointed, erratic, and in the minds of his followers, benevolent.

A majority of voters preferred Trump, and likely for a variety of reasons; it may have been “the inflation, stupid” after all. But psychological forces also lie behind Trump’s appeal. Largely unexamined among these is the aura of paternalism exuded by the president-elect. Carlson, in his reptilian way, was getting at this idea in its most vulgar iteration. Trump wanted to be seen as a father figure for a nation he insisted needed discipline and defending. This felt like a role reversal from his 2016 persona: the class clown sitting in the back, lobbing spitballs at the establishment. If during his first administration he was a child dependent on “adults in the room” to make sure he didn’t fiddle with the nuclear code, this year he gave off the more assured air of an imposing patriarch in an overcoat; he’s been in the White House already and doesn’t need any help. This infused the slogan from his 2016 Republican National Convention, “I alone can fix it,” with new resonance eight years later.

[Read: Trump won. Now what?]

When Trump started using this line again, I immediately understood its efficacy. I have a fairly egalitarian marriage, yet a common refrain in my house, whenever something breaks, is “Aba will fix it” (my kids call me “Aba,” Hebrew for “dad”). My wife even laughs at how quickly our determination to avoid traditional gender roles breaks down if there is a dead bird in the backyard that needs to be disposed of or an IKEA shelf that has to be built. The notion of a dad who can—or at least will try to—“fix it” is deeply embedded in our cultural psyche, and not just among Americans who consider themselves conservative. Even for people who didn’t grow up with a father—maybe especially for those who didn’t—the longing for a mythical male protector can run deep. Just think of J. D. Vance, the vice-president-elect, who has written that the “revolving door of father figures” his mother would bring into his life was the worst part of his childhood. He longed for stability and firmness, and he has allied himself with a right-wing movement that aims to restore a “father knows best” nation of single-earner households tended to by stay-at-home moms.

Consciously or not, Trump exploited this desire, and he did so at a moment of deep economic and social flux in the country. He painted an exaggerated (and often fictional) portrait of a nation of vulnerable children menaced by murderous immigrants, one that requires a paterfamilias to provide a defense—and to guard their reproductive rights (he is, of course, the self-styled “father of IVF”). At a Wisconsin rally late last month, Trump described a conversation with his advisers in which he told them he wanted to use this sort of paternalistic language on the stump. They disagreed, according to his story, and told him it would be “very inappropriate” for him to say, for example, “I want to protect the women of our country.” To this, he responded: “Well, I’m going to do it—whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them.”

Authoritarian leaders thrive on this kind of familial imagery. One of the most memorable photos of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is from 1936: He smiles as an apple-cheeked little girl named Engelsina Markizova sits on his lap and throws her arms around his neck. (The year after the photo was taken, Markizova later said, her actual father was disappeared one night; he was executed in 1938 as part of Stalin’s purge.) During Benito Mussolini’s 1925 “Battle for Grain” propaganda campaign to boost Italy’s wheat production, the leader himself went out, sickle in hand, to thresh, as cameras captured the image of a man vigorously pretending to provide for his family. And, of course, “father” is a title borne by generations of dictators, including Muammar Qaddafi, who often went by “Father of the Nation,” and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (who gave himself a surname meaning “father of the Turks”).

Joseph Stalin, in 1936, in a fatherly photo op with Engelsina Markizova, whose real father would be executed under his regime two years later.
(Russian State Film and Photo Archive / Alamy)

Trump might be too undisciplined (or unfamiliar with history) to follow this script exactly—though even some of his flights of fancy might be generously described as dad humor of a sort—but his projection of paternalism does fit a recognizable mold. In the 1960s, the clinical psychologist Diana Baumrind identified three distinct parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. A good example of the “permissive” dad might be Tim Walz, a hugger and an emoter who is always up for a chat. As for Trump, all you needed to do was spend a few minutes at one of his rallies to see that he comes off as a classic “authoritarian” father: withholding, demanding, not open to negotiation over, say, curfew time.

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

The upside of the authoritarian style of parenting, according to Baumrind, is that it results in well-behaved, orderly children, and this is the society that Trump is promising: one without the flung diapers and slammed doors. But there is a clear downside to having a father like this.

According to the National Institutes of Health, children of authoritarian parents can have “higher levels of aggression” and exhibit “shyness, social ineptitude, and difficulty making their own decisions.” They may have low self-esteem and difficulty controlling their anger. I’m not seeing a recipe here for good citizens—just loyal subjects.  

Is this who we might become? Trump’s paternalism, his projection of power and control, may have held appeal for his voters. It allowed them to project onto him all the things people project onto dads: that they are brave and indestructible and always there to kill an insect for us. Trump might have won his supporters’ love by fashioning himself as America’s father. But a democracy doesn’t need scared and obedient children. It needs grown-ups—vigilant, conscientious ones. And the president exists to serve them, not the other way around.

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