This decisive win marks a seismic shift in American politics, fueled by a broad coalition of working-class and multi-ethnic voters rallying behind the former president

Donald J Trump completed one of the greatest comebacks in American political history by securing a landslide victory over Democratic Presidential Nominee, Kamala Harris. He also became the only President to win two non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland in 1892.

Almost all the polls had indicated a close fight between the former president and the incumbent vice-president but as results started trickling in on Tuesday night, it became clear relatively quickly that the Democratic Party would not only lose control of the white house but also the House and the Senate. Trump did not just win an electoral college landslide(312-220) but also became the first Republican Nominee to win the popular vote in 20 years. President-elect Trump’s victory is being viewed as a major realignment in American politics with a multi-racial coalition of working-class Americans voting for a second term for the former Reality-TV star after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Despite his refusal to concede that election, the violent insurrection that followed at the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, two impeachments, and 34 felony convictions in a trial that coincided with the start of his reelection campaign, Donald Trump defied all odds and received a historic mandate from the American people.

The decisiveness of Donald Trump’svictory was underlined by the fact that he swept all 7 swing states. The former President retained North Carolina, and flipped Nevada, Arizona and the three “Blue Wall” states in the midwest - Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Trump further managed to cut into the Democratic Party’s traditionally huge leads in deep blue states like New York and New Jersey by 10-12 percentage points. He also performed better with African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, Arab Americans and a host of other ethnic groups.

When compared to the previous two elections, Donald Trump performed better with all demographic groups of the electorate except with white women with college degrees. Reports following election night suggested that the Democrats were caught off guard by the results. However, several indicators were there for all to see.The Democrats replaced their nominee with only 107 days left to go in the campaign.

An 81-year-old Joe Biden was forced to drop out of the race following a disastrous presidential debate against Donald Trump when growing concerns regarding his diminishing mental faculties reached a tipping point with party donors.

The timing of Biden’s decision and his attached endorsement of Kamala Harris meant there was no possibility of another primary and the incumbent vice president got the Nomination - something the voters, according to exit poll data, perceived more as a coronation rather than an earned democratic nomination.

The fact that she had failed to get past the first round of primaries when she first ran for president in 2020, only further played into this narrative.One of the biggest indicators, according to polls leading up to the election, was that 3 out of 4 Americans thought that the country was on the wrong track under the current administration. Various polls also suggested that the issues most concerning Americans were those of economy, immigration and inflation and the Republicans polled better than the Democrats on all three of those issues. The incumbent President’s historically low approval ratings only added to the vice president’s woes, and it was clear that the headwinds for a Harris victory were considerably strong. Moreover, the Democratic Party was haemorrhaging support among core constituencies right through the campaign. Turnout and enthusiasm were extremely low among black men and this was reflected in the final results with Trump doubling his support among African American men.

And even though Harris, when all votes are accounted for, will win with around 80 per cent of the Black vote, this reflects a drop of 10 percentage points from Biden’s 2020 victory in which he won 9 out of 10 black votes. Meanwhile, some analysts attribute Republicans successfully flipping Michigan to the waning support for the Democratic Party among Arab Americans -who constitute a significant part of the state’s electorate - as a result of the current administration’s stance on the war in Gaza. The biggest blow to the Democratic Party, however, came from Hispanic Americans with around 45 per cent of Latinos choosing to vote for Donald Trump despite the Democrats making an allegedly racist joke about Puerto Rico, by a stand-up comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, the centrepiece of their campaign in the final two weeks.

Furthermore, the Democrats also lost the suburban vote

(The writer is a journalist; views are personal)