JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
So what happened last night? That is a question on many people's minds. Donald Trump will return to the White House in a dramatic victory. Here he is speaking last night.
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DONALD TRUMP: We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible, and it is now clear that we've achieved the most incredible political thing. Look what happened. Is this crazy?
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SUMMERS: To help us answer that question, we're joined now by NPR's senior national political correspondent, Mara Liasson. Hi, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi there.
SUMMERS: So Mara, we know that Donald Trump came away with a decisive victory, but tell us what electoral forces were behind that win.
LIASSON: Yeah, and what you just heard him say - for once, he was not exaggerating. He won this election fair and square. He won the Electoral College vote. We're waiting for the popular vote to be called, but we expect him to win that as well. He is only the second Republican to win the popular vote since 1988, and George W. Bush won it in 2004.
But he did better with every segment of the electorate compared to his performance in 2020, except for white college-educated women and voters over 65. He made big gains with Latinos. He improved his margin over his 2020 performance in every single county of the country. Harris couldn't flip a single county that Biden had lost in 2020. And even in blue states, you can see the shift to the right that Trump was driving - New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island - everywhere, Democrats' - Harris' margins went down. Even in Minnesota, the home state of Tim Walz, Trump cut his losing margin in half, to three points.
SUMMERS: It's pretty remarkable hearing you list it all out like that, Mara. But what does Trump's victory here tell us, if anything, about the American electorate more broadly?
LIASSON: Well, it tells us, first of all, that the economy and immigration were the two top issues, and he was seen as much better on both of those. But it also leaves us with a lot of questions that have to be answered. First, is this a real realignment, where Republicans are becoming a multiracial, working-class party that gives tax cuts to billionaires? Or is this something unique to Trump - that he has a special ability to appeal to Black and Hispanic men? Or is it something unique to Harris, where not enough Black and Hispanic men would vote for a woman?
And there are also the questions about Harris' campaign. Did she differentiate herself enough from Biden? Did Biden give her enough time to do that? One thing is clear - Trump is not an aberration. All over the world, right-wing populists are winning elections, and incumbents are being defeated everywhere because voters are sour. They're angry about prices being too high, and we know from history that inflation defeats presidents.
SUMMERS: Mara, anything else that we should be studying from last night's results?
LIASSON: Well, there are a couple other takeaways. Abortion didn't operate the way Democrats hoped it would. People turned out and voted in big numbers for abortion rights amendments, and then they turned around and voted for Donald Trump, who helped engineer the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe.
We also know that money didn't matter. Harris had tremendous amounts of money, more than Donald Trump. She used it to fund a very sophisticated, well-funded ground game, but that was outmatched by organic enthusiasm - organic grassroots enthusiasm on the part of Trump supporters.
So - and the third takeaway is, once again, it seems like Trump supporters were underpolled. Polls certainly missed the big surge for him at the end.
SUMMERS: Mara - last thing - we've got about 30 seconds left. The question of which candidate stood for change is one of the big fights in this selection. And it was pretty scrambled because both Trump and Harris were, arguably, incumbents in one way or another. So how is it that Trump wound up being seen as the change candidate?
LIASSON: Well, he said she broke it, and I'm going to fix it, and we know that voters want change. Every - 11 out of the last 13 elections have been, quote, "change elections," when one branch or more of government changes party hands.
SUMMERS: Right.
LIASSON: And voters keep on voting for change. They don't get the change they want, so they go and they do it again.
SUMMERS: NPR senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson - thanks, as always.
LIASSON: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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