The story of Trump's win was foretold in New York City

The Democratic Party needs to ask WTF just happened, and the answers may be right there on the 7 train.

I went to bed at 5:45 a.m. last night and woke up at 8:45. So, OK, it isn’t the largest sample size. I haven’t had much “walking around time” or any other form of relaxation.

But when I was walking around New York this morning, I was surprised at how normal it all felt.

Nothing like 2016, the last time Donald Trump became president. That was basically the zombie apocalypse. I took the subway to the ABC News offices on Nov. 9 and the man sitting next to me on the 1 train recognized me but could barely get words out. I think he was trying to communicate sympathy. But he was a bad bluffer. His body language betrayed that his real reaction was, “Bro, what the fuck just happened?” 

There was none of that this time. Maybe a little aloofness. But no funny looks. People were going about their day.

I’d like to think some of that is because, after 2016, people are more prepared for uncertainty and the fact that elections don’t always go their way. Of course, that was easier to communicate in an election where the polls said the odds were literally 50/50.

And I don’t think I was the only one who had a gut feeling that Trump was going to win. That article I wrote for the New York Times was misinterpreted as my secret “prediction” for Trump. As much as I’d like to take credit for it, it wasn’t. The whole point, right there in the headline, was that I didn’t trust anyone’s gut when it comes to presidential elections.

Rather, it was a simple statement of fact: that was just how I felt, and I’d been lying when people asked me and I said I had no gut feeling at all. To the extent there was anything that resembled actual insight, it was that it was much easier to come up with a list of reasons that Trump would win — inflation, immigration, Joe Biden wanting to be president until he was 86, the illiberal backlash around the world — than to make the same list for Kamala Harris. I tried and could maybe come up with 6 or 7 good points for her, but not 24. So that may have weighed on my “mental model” of the race.

But mostly it was the emotional scar tissue of 2016. It was the Trumpification of the media environment, particularly Twitter. And it was living in New York City.

Because for all those profiles of Trump voters as exotic creatures in Youngstown, Ohio diners, almost no place¹ has seen a bigger increase in Trump support than the five boroughs.

The 2024 vote counts are preliminary and will probably become slightly more Democratic as more votes are counted. But still. In 2012, Mitt Romney got 19.9 percent of the vote in Queens. Despite it being the borough where he grew up, Trump only improved on that slightly in 2016, taking 21.8 percent. But yesterday, he got 38 percent!

And the Bronx! Trump received 27 percent of the vote in the Bronx yesterday, roughly three times as much as his 10 percent in 2016 or Romney’s 8 percent in 2012. The Bronx, which is only 8.6 percent non-Hispanic white. The Bronx, which used to break my Congressional models because it was so Democratic.²

Even as whites have declined as a share of the population, the Emerging Democratic Majority is neither emerging nor a majority. Instead, Trump will almost certainly win Republicans the popular vote and perhaps an outright majority for just the second time since 1988. And he’s gained the most support among the fastest-growing ethnic groups — in particular, Hispanic voters, according to both exit polls and the ecological evidence.

The other factor is that last night wasn’t even particularly suspenseful. Kamala Harris got some promising early returns in places like Indiana. But the problem was that they were indeed early votes — the Election Day vote came in heavily Trump. As a frequent attendee of sporting events, I know that people are bit more rational about defeat when it comes quickly — you go to a baseball game, the Mets are down 5-0 after the first inning, and you’re not angry so much as disappointed. You realize that “hey, we just don’t have it right now — what can we do to improve?”.

I believe the clarity of this election may prove to be helpful in the long run to Democrats. There won’t be quite so much second-guessing of the little decisions — I’ll shut up about She Shoulda Picked Shapiro because it wouldn’t have mattered when Harris lost every swing state.³ The most important decision — Biden’s choice to run for another term — will and should be scrutinized. But I suppose my gut is that a Whitmer-Shapiro ticket would have won a few of those swing states and probably the popular vote, but still not the Electoral College.

This isn’t the time for the incrementalism of Clinton or Biden or Harris. Rather, this is the election when the party very much should be asking, “Bro, what the fuck just happened?”. And it will need to get its act together quickly. In his second term, Trump will have fewer guardrails and more of a mandate — and his performance may be even more erratic since he’ll be even older than Biden is now by the end of his term.

The Democratic Party’s whole theory of the case is wrong. You’re going to read a lot of diagnoses over the next few weeks about why it was wrong or how it went wrong or what might done to correct it. (I may even give you a few of those myself.) The party has a strong bench, and their congressional candidates outperformed the top of the ticket last night. They’ll probably retake the House in 2026 (and still retain an outside chance of doing so this year) but they’ll have their work cut out for them in the Senate, where the GOP majority will probably be 53 or 54 seats.

For now, I don’t have the answers. But I do know this is a problem the party should have been prepared for, because there was plenty of evidence for it in polls and election data, evidence that was unskewed and denied at every turn. Maybe the first move should be going out to a diner in Queens.

1. The obvious exceptions are South Florida and South Texas.

2. It means you have to account for the fact that vote shares are bounded between 0 and 100. You didn’t want to have a confidence interval for a Congressional race in the Bronx that runs between 15 percent and -5 percent. 

3. Though maybe it would have saved Bob Casey. She Shoulda Picked Shapiro. UPDATE: Casey still has a shot!