How Donald Trump was able to win the US election

It’s official; Donald Trump will again be US president come January 2025. With results from two states pending according to the Associated Press (AP), whose standard DW follows, Trump has not just comfortably won the Electoral College, but also the popular vote.
As of Wednesday evening local time in Washington, the Republican candidate and president-elect had more than 72 million votes, while his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris had fewer than 68 million votes.
While some world leaders like India’s Narendra Modi and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu have excitedly congratulated Trump, the mood among many people in Western Europe is one of shock and incomprehension.
DW shared a video on social media platform X that shows a number of Germans saying they’re sad, scared and disappointed. While that may be true for roughly half the people in the US, others expressed excitement at Trump’s win.
It’s fair to say there’s a large gap between what people outside the US expected, and the way Americans actually voted.
“No doubt Trump had a strong electoral college majority and even won the popular vote, which was unexpected,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor emeritus at American University in Washington DC, and author of the 2024 book “Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in US Presidential Elections.”
“But the shock and surprise this year are nothing compared to what it was like in the US in 2016” when Trump first won, Campbell told DW.
Now Trump has won a second time. One big contributing factor was the coalition of voters he managed to build.
“Trump did pretty well with minorities, that’s unusual for a Republican candidate,” Campbell said.
Trump increased his support among both Black and Latino voters in the 2024 election compared to the vote shares he won in 2020.
Four years ago, 8% of Black voters cast their ballot for Trump, this year it was 16%. His share of Latino voters increased from 35% in 2020 to 42% in 2024, according to AP.
The former president and president-elect was also successful in winning over young men. In 2020, 45% of men aged 18 to 44 voted for Trump, this year that number rose to 52%, according to AP.
Among male voters aged 18 to 29, Trump won with a 13 percentage-point margin ahead of Kamala Harris. Four years ago, Joe Biden had still managed to win this group with a 15 percentage-point margin.
“Trump made an aggressive pitch to 18- to 29-year-old men across different ethnic groups and was successful,” Michelle Egan, a professor of politics, governance and economics at American University, told DW.
“One factor was that he managed to reach them on social media and didn’t bank on traditional get-out-the-vote measures like door-knocking.”
Another one of Harris’s problems was that a main talking point she brought up at pretty much every campaign appearance didn’t reach young male voters: Abortion rights.
“Harris banked on this issue and it appealed to 18- to 29-year-old women, where she made inroads,” said Egan. “But it didn’t appeal the same way to 18- to 29-year-old men.”
Harris had said she would fight to bring back the nationwide right to access abortions that a conservative Supreme Court majority had repealed in 2022.
Egan said the big issues that determined the 2024 election  — and that hurt Harris — were “the two ‘i’s: inflation and immigration.”
Biden had made Harris responsible for immigration and border security, and Trump used this to blame her for a host of problems that according to Republicans were due to irregular immigration across the southern US border.
“I think a lot of it came down to the fact that prices remained high under Biden,” J. Miles Coleman, an analyst with the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, told DW.
Egan stressed that “people vote with their pocketbook.” Many Americans, she said, were focused on how expensive everything, from food to gas and housing, had gotten under the Biden and Harris administration.
Campbell agreed that the economy played a major role in Trump’s win. 
“Elections in this country are almost always a referendum on the incumbent administration and Harris didn’t divorce herself enough from that,” he said.
“The hard economic times aren’t over. Many Americans struggle with making ends meet, with buying a house, with putting food on the table.”
There’s a concern from the European side that Trump is going to severely limit aid to Ukraine, based on how close he is with Putin and the skeptical way he has talked about NATO.
This potentially curtailed Ukraine support has not hurt him in the election.
“A lot of what Americans care about is bread and butter domestic issues,” Egan said. “Ukraine and Israel just weren’t as important.”

Edited by: Wesley Rahn