Fascist former president Donald Trump has won the US presidential election, according to overnight projections of state-by-state results, which showed him winning 276 electoral votes, above the 270 required for victory.
While votes are still being counted in many states, and three of the seven “battleground” states were still not called by the Associated Press, Trump won the remaining four, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
This is not so much a victory for Trump as it is a debacle for the Democratic Party. Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president, ran behind the vote totals won by President Joe Biden in 2020, in virtually every state and county across the US.
With the bulk of the ballots counted, except in the heavily Democratic West Coast, Trump leads Kamala Harris by a commanding five million votes and a 51-47 percent margin. Four years after Trump attempted a coup to overthrow the Constitution, he appears to have won election for a second term.
Exit polls indicate a collapse of the Democratic Party’s strategy of combining a ruthless, genocidal imperialist agenda with appeals to identity politics. Trump made substantial inroads among young people who voted, winning a majority of young men. Among first-time young voters nationwide, Trump won by 9 percent, compared to a 30-point loss to Biden in 2020. State exit polling data shows Trump won a majority of Latino voters in Pennsylvania, a majority of young voters in Michigan, and a majority of Latino men in North Carolina, and that he doubled his support among African-American voters in Wisconsin.
Turnout appears to have been high overall, and exit polls show an electorate that was motivated by profound social anger over economic conditions.
Two thirds of voters said economic conditions in the country are bad, with only 35 percent saying they are good. Just under half of voters said their own economic situation was worse than four years ago, double the number who said their economic situation had improved under the Biden administration. These voters went for Trump over Harris by a 40-point margin.
Seventy-five percent said inflation had caused their family hardship in the last year. Over 70 percent of voters said they were angry or dissatisfied with the state of the country, with only 7 percent saying they were enthusiastic. In Pennsylvania, voters were asked “How much change is needed in the way the country is run?”, to which 81 percent said “total upheaval” or “substantial change.”
Harris underperformed even in some traditional Democratic strongholds. With 95 percent of votes tallied in New York City, Harris leads Trump with only 68 percent of the vote—the lowest margin for any Democrat since 1988. Harris lost in the heavily Arab-American neighborhood of southern Dearborn, Michigan, where there is massive opposition to the Biden-Harris administration’s involvement in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Biden won south Dearborn by 88 percent in 2020.
Republicans have won control of the Senate, flipping at least West Virginia, Montana and Ohio from the Democrats, with Republicans presently leading in previously Democratic seats in Pennsylvania and Nevada. It appears that the Republicans have narrow control of the House of Representatives, though final results will not be known for several days, at least. Democrats captured three Republican seats in New York, but Republicans won two Democratic seats in Pennsylvania and one in Michigan. State referenda protecting the right to abortion passed in New York, Colorado and Maryland.
Commenting on the initial results, Socialist Equality Party National Chairman David North wrote, “Following the attempted coup d’etat of January 6, 2021, Biden and Nancy Pelosi insisted on the need for a ‘strong Republican Party.’ Well, that’s the one major objective that the Democrats have achieved. If Trump wins this election, he owes his victory to the Democratic Party.”
SEP presidential candidate Joseph Kishore commented, “If Trump, a fascist and convicted felon, wins, the responsibility will be on the Democratic Party, a party of war and genocide. It is impossible to oppose the danger of the far-right through this rotten party of Wall Street and the privileged, complacent upper middle class.”
The results of the presidential election have produced a crisis. Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon sent a memo to staff late Tuesday stating: “This is what we’ve been built for, so let’s finish up what we have in front of us tonight, get some sleep, and get ready to close out strong tomorrow,” reminiscent of a similar memo sent by Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, when Trump was elected present. Aides described a “funereal” mood permeating a Harris event at a hotel in Washington D.C.