In 2016, Donald Trump shocked the world by defeating Hillary Clinton to win the presidency.

Some called it a fluke.

But now, eight years later, Trump is back stronger than ever, despite a failed re-election bid in 2020, a second impeachment after his supporters stormed the US Capitol and a conviction on 34 felony charges that made the first former president found guilty. of a crime.

As votes continue to be counted, Trump was projected as the winner in the early hours of November 6. He captured six of seven swing states (ABC News has not yet projected Arizona, where Trump also leads in the vote count); it outperformed in blue states like Virginia and New York; and he could be the first Republican candidate to win the popular vote since George W. Bush did so during wartime.

It is a cornerstone of his singular stamp on American politics, one that has been defined by relentless defiance of institutional norms.

What many Americans now expect from a president has changed dramatically. And by winning them, some experts argue, Trump has changed America.

A new coalition

Trump won in part by building an unprecedented multiracial coalition within the Republican Party. Working-class white men, as they did in 2016, fueled his success, but Trump also appealed to black and Latino voters — two demographics that traditionally vote Democratic.

First-time voters also rallied to Trump 54-45 percent — a reversal from 2020, when the group overwhelmingly went for President Joe Biden.

“It’s hard to imagine another Republican doing this well, but Trump managed to capture that feeling from people who felt like they weren’t getting ahead despite working hard and following the rules,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, presidential historian and professor at the University of Houston.

“There’s a difference in politics between being looked at and being seen,” Rottinghaus said. “And the Trump campaign made people feel they were being seen.”

Trump, when declaring victory, claimed he had received a “strong mandate”.

“This is a movement like no one has ever seen before, and frankly, this was, I think, the greatest political movement of all time,” he said.

How Trump flipped the script

Trump was shunned by much of his own party after he put democracy to the test with the denial of the election, which culminated in his supporters violently attacking the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Then, when an anticipated “red wave” never materialized in the 2022 election, as many of Trump’s handpicked candidates lost, his influence on the party was seriously questioned. When he announced his third campaign for president that same year, it was a relatively low-key affair that prompted a tepid response from GOP leaders like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

A turning point, according to Republican strategist Mark Weaver, was the criminal investigations and indictments against Trump in 2023.

“So many Republicans were disheartened by the alignment of the legal system against one person that their anger sparked the rise of Trump, not quite from the ashes, but close,” Weaver said.

At his first campaign rally in Waco, Texas, Trump’s message to supporters was that the “deep state” was coming after them and their way of life. He said it would be their “revenge”.

That theme remained the campaign’s mainstay, even as Trump focused heavily on immigration and the economy. He painted Democrats as out of touch with cultural issues like transgender rights. America was broken on all fronts, he said, and only he could “fix it.”

In the process, he has leaned into authoritarian rhetoric to a degree that has alarmed critics and even some of his former staff, including a retired general who said he believed Trump fit the description of a fascist.

Both President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spent much of their campaigns bashing Trump as a threat to democracy. They pounced on his suggestions to expand executive power, gut the civil service, use the military to go after American citizens and more policies that violate the Constitution’s railings.

But it seems most voters either didn’t think he would take such extremes into office, voted for him despite that, or even liked the idea of ​​Trump’s “strongman” style in the White House.

ABC News poll results showed that among candidate qualities, voters rated “has the ability to lead” as most important. A close second was whether the candidate “can bring about the necessary change.”

Trump beat Harris in both categories. Among those who cited leadership as the candidate’s top attribute, Trump beat Harris by 33 points. With the change, the gap widened to 50 points.

And even though democracy ranked first as an issue of importance to voters, with a large majority (73%) seeing democracy as threatened, that did not automatically translate to success for Harris, as some believed it would.

“Democracy polls well, but the threat to democracy is in the eye of the beholder,” said Weaver, who said Trump’s projection that Democrats are the real danger (accusing them of weaponizing government and censorship) must have resonated.

“They think, ‘He’s mad like me.’

For all the debate about democracy or abortion rights or Trump’s dark and incendiary rhetoric, the economy was the issue of the day for the electorate.

More than two-thirds of voters, according to preliminary ABC News polls, said the economy is in bad shape. Forty-five percent said their own financial situation is worse now than it was four years ago, surpassing the level of those who said the same during the “Great Recession” of 2008. Much of the discontent was attributed to Biden and, by association, to Harris.

The key to Trump’s political power, strategists on both sides of the aisle said, is how he has managed to refocus the GOP’s image from “Country Club Republicans” to the party of the working class, despite being a billionaire himself and in despite some of his proposals. , like tariffs, being discouraged by economists.

“He has completely remade the party and remade its appeal so that now non-collegiate, multiracial voters are far more likely to consider voting Republican than they ever have in the past,” said the longtime Republican pollster Whit Ayres weather.

Democrats, among pointing with finger who is to blame for the loss, it comes down to how these voters got it out of their hands. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders eviscerated the party, saying it had “abandoned” those Americans. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, responding, suggested they spent too much time on cultural issues rather than alleviating economic anxieties caused by high prices.

Elaine Kamarck, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution who served in the Clinton administration, said the economic gap between Americans with four-year degrees and those without is one of the biggest forces in modern politics, with the latter increasingly feeling what are you leaving behind?

“It’s a very difficult public policy issue, which is why Trump probably won’t solve the problem either, but at least he’s talking to them in a way that they understand and feel like he understands their lives,” she said.

“He’s an angry man, and they think, ‘He’s angry like me,'” Kamarck said.

That anger, experts said, doesn’t just apply to the economy. Trump has tapped into a greater sense of discontent among Americans who are hyper-polarized and disillusioned with the political establishment.

“It’s become clear that our country has split into two completely separate Americas, and neither of those Americans understand much about the other or seem to have much interest in learning about the other if Trump or Harris won this week,” he said. Daniel Schnur, political analyst at the University of California, Berkeley.

Trump’s ascension to the White House in 2016 was seen as a symptom of a resentful and distrustful country, Schnur said. Those divisions have intensified since then, in large part because Trump fanned the flames.

“We have eight more years to build them up and let them get sick,” Schnur said.

The ABC News poll showed Trump winning by a wide margin among so-called “double haters” — a small voting bloc but one that has an unfavorable opinion of both candidates.

“What strikes me is that the issues, the candidates, the ideology were perhaps less important than just people’s overall unhappiness with the current state of American politics,” Rottinghaus said.

“You can call it economics. You can call it immigration or the border. There are a lot of reasons why you could attribute this election to a particular issue, but the underlying nature of people’s preferences led them to reject the status quo and join Donald Trump.”