A political comeback
Donald J. Trump has made a stunning political comeback. Only one other president in U.S. history has managed to do that. Glover Cleveland, a Democrat, was elected in 1884, defeated in 1888, and elected again in 1892. Trump turned every poll on its head by winning the electoral votes (312) and the popular votes (50.3 percent). The last Republican president to have won the popular vote was George W. Bush when he was reelected in 2004.
Though a complete picture of the monumental reshaping of the American political landscape has yet to emerge, pundits are beginning to parse the exit poll data to make sense of it all.
Speaking at a panel of experts at an Ethnic Media Services briefing on November 8, Kelly Dittmar, professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and director at the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics said, “To me, this election is less about who Kamala Harris is, but more about if we can ever elect a woman as president of the U.S. And it’s also about fathoming what drives our electorate to vote for the kind of man that they did.”
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How did Asian Americans vote?
The Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), whose goal is to promote civil rights for Asian Americans, conducted a poll in the two-and-a-half weeks leading up to the election. “9,000 people, including over 1,800 Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, also known as AANHPI, were polled, which helped us see the voting patterns within this group,” said John C. Yang, president and executive director of AAJC.
Sixty-one percent of Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders voted, which is down from 68% in 2020.
The data revealed that there was more enthusiasm and engagement among the AANHPI community, though. About one in eight voters in this election were voting for the first time and 28 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 29 were voting for the first time.
“We elected the first Korean American senator from New Jersey, Representative Andy Kim. He joins Senator Maisie Hirono, who won reelection in Hawaii, and Senator Tammy Duckworth in Illinois in the U.S. Senate. Likewise, we have about a dozen Asian American members of Congress who were elected or reelected, including Virginia’s first Asian American Congressman, Suhas Subramanyam, who carried Loudoun County. In Arizona, we have a new Iranian American member of Congress, Yassamin Ansari,” said Yang.
Top issues for Asian Americans
The top four issues that Asian Americans cared about in this election were the economy, protecting democracy, protecting reproductive rights, and immigration.
Concerns about immigration appear in the Asian American community is a “distinct” way. About 86 percent of Asian Americans support policies related to family-based immigration,” Yang explained, which allows U.S. citizens to bring over their relatives—grown kids, spouses, parents, siblings—to America.
This set of laws was created in 1965 under our Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. So when we hear rumblings of cutting them, we get exceptionally concerned about it, he added. This is a sentiment that’s shared not only by Asian American immigrants but also by native-born Asian Americans as well.
The same poll also showed two other trends. One: Asian Americans are mostly supportive of changes to policies that ensure that immigrants without paperwork have a path to becoming legal immigrants. Two: About 60 percent of Asian Americans are worried that elected officials won’t speak out against white nationalists who promote hate and attacks on our community, Yang said.
Women did not turn up for Harris
“Another thing that we saw was that not as many women turned up for Harris,” said Robert Pape, professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Kelly Dittmar agreed.
Some may have expected that having a woman on the ballot would lead to a huge gender gap, which is the difference in the percentage of women and the percentage of men who voted for the winner. But Harris’ gender was not a “primary motivator” of how most women voted, Ditmar said. According to the CNN exit polls, 53 percent of women and 45 percent of men favored Harris. 48 percent of married women and 59 percent of non-married women favored Harris. By race, those numbers are: 45 percent (white), 91 percent (Black), 60 percent (Latina), and 54 percent (Asian.)
How much did abortion measures sway women voters? It didn’t move women in ways more than did other issues, such as the state of their family’s economic well-being.
Blue Collar Hispanics
Robert Pape explained that a key group that landed Trump victory was “blue-collar Hispanics.” According to the Washington Post, while 36 percent of Hispanic men voted for Trump in 2020, over half of them supported him in 2024.
“What we saw was that the Republicans, led by Trump, were able to build a far stronger multiracial coalition than the Democrats,” Pape said. Not only could they play the Democrats’ game, but they could also play it better, enough to be able to beat them.
“Something that has not been in the conversation much is that those blue-collar Hispanics are very pro-family and they’re very anti-abortion,” he added. And those values were perfectly in line with the strong conservative messaging of the Republicans. This, among other reasons, cut across the cleavages of race and helped to bring about the outcome it did.
Loss of industrial sector jobs
Ben Jealous, executive director of the environmental nonprofit, Sierra Club, looked to explain Trump’s electoral triumph by going back to the mid-1990s.
“We need to ask ourselves what’s going on in our country?” Jealous asked. “You can’t account for the deep divisions in our country and the toxicity in our politics without looking at the de-industrialization of our nation since NAFTA was passed.”
NAFTA, which stands for North American Free Trade Agreement, was a trade pact made by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico in 1992. It gradually eliminated most tariffs on goods that passed between these three countries, creating a free-trade block in North America.
Due to NAFTA and similar agreements, between 1997 and 2020, more than 90,000 factories closed in the U.S. 90,000. Even after those factories shut down, most Americans, barring the well-educated ones, continued to live at the same place. Only now, their income was gone and their purpose was gone. What they were left within the place of a plant that brimmed with the hum of machinery and the bustle of workers was hopelessness, homelessness, opiates, and drugs.
“The question becomes, well, what do we do now? And the answer is simple. We’ve got to get back to the American formula of building an economy that lifts all the boats. And you do that by doing what we’ve done for decades in this country after World War II but stopped doing in the mid-1990s. You build things in America,” he said.
Could Trump’s return mean a Gilded Age 2.0? The Gilded Age was a period in the late 19th century during which much economic expansion took place in the U.S. American wages grew much higher than in Europe and the average annual wage of an industrial worker rose from $380 in 1880 to $584 in 1890. But it was also an era of great political corruption.
