President Trump, again

Donald Trump has completed a stunning political comeback, and the United States has entered an uncertain new era.

Trump won a clear victory in the presidential election over Vice President Kamala Harris, likely including in all seven battleground states. After a defiant campaign filled with grim portrayals of the country’s condition, he is on course to become the first Republican to win the national popular vote in 20 years. The New York Times called the race for Trump shortly before 6 a.m. Eastern.

The result showed a country that had shifted to the political right, with voters unhappy about President Biden’s performance, especially on the economy and immigration.

Map showing election results. Each state is colored blue or red based on whether Harris or Trump won the state.

Four years after being impeached for his role in a violent attack on Congress, five months after being convicted of a felony in New York and three months after surviving an assassination attempt, Trump will begin preparing his return to the White House.

“We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing,” Trump said at a celebration overnight at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort he owns. “This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country.” He promised to close the border, “help our country heal” and “fix everything.”

Another sign of the breadth of Trump’s victory came in the races for the Senate. Republicans regained control by recapturing seats in Ohio, West Virginia and perhaps Montana. Races in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin remain close. It is unclear which party will control the House.

The Republican Party appeared to expand its electorate in meaningful ways, especially among Latino voters.

Map showing arrows that represent vote margin in this election compared with the 2020 presidential election by county.

Trump ran on an ambitious — and in many ways radical — agenda of across-the-board tariffs, mass deportations, oil drilling, regulatory rollbacks, tax cuts, foreign policy changes and more. He has also signaled that he will violate democratic traditions to accomplish his goals.

It remains unclear how far he will go, but he is in a stronger position now than he was eight years ago. His aides have spent months planning for a second term and vetting potential appointees to ensure that his administration is staffed with loyalists rather than the establishment Republicans who often stymied him in his first term. In Congress, few of the Trump-skeptical Republicans from 2017 will remain.

All of which leaves Democrats and Trump’s other critics in a weaker position than they were in eight years ago. Starting on Jan. 20, Democrats may control no branch of the federal government. If Democrats hope to slow Trump’s agenda, they will often need to persuade other Republicans to oppose him.

Harris’s defeat was a rejection of both Biden’s performance as president and her own brief campaign. She became the nominee after the primaries were over, and many voters said they didn’t know enough about her or worried she was too liberal.

But the outcome also fits a pattern in high-income countries: The U.S. has joined Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy and Japan as a country where the ruling party has recently lost power. In the U.S., the presidency is on the verge of changing hands for the third time in eight years, the biggest period of White House instability since the 1970s.

In the rest of today’s newsletter, we’ll have more on the election results. We encourage you to check back with The Times’s app or home page later today. There is sure to be more news.

More on the presidency

Trump, claiming victory, stood onstage with his family and promised economic prosperity in America. Even his supporters seemed shocked by his comeback.The mood was somber at Harris’s election watch party at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington, D.C. Harris did not address the crowd.Trump’s arc back to power is complete, an extraordinary reversal for a man who never especially changed, Matt Flegenheimer, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan write.“America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history,” Lisa Lerer writes.Stocks rose and the dollar improved against major currencies.

A Republican Senate

Two images: One of an older man with white hair, holding a microphone. The other a younger man giving a speech at a lectern.

Democratic Senate candidates received more support than Harris in the battleground states, but some still seemed likely to lose.

Republicans flipped at least two formerly Democratic seats: Bernie Moreno beat Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Gov. Jim Justice won a seat in West Virginia that is being vacated by Joe Manchin.In Montana, Tim Sheehy led Senator Jon Tester, the Democratic incumbent, by 10 percentage points with three quarters of the vote counted.Races in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all seats Democrats previously held — have not yet been called.Republicans held onto their Senate seats. Deb Fischer survived a challenge from an independent in Nebraska. Rick Scott of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas easily won re-election.For the first time, the Senate will have two Black women, both Democrats, serving simultaneously: Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware.Andy Kim, a Democrat, won in New Jersey. He is the first Korean American elected to the Senate.See the latest Senate results.

House of Representatives

Control of the House remains uncertain. It may come down to races in California, which could take days to call.Tom Barrett flipped a Michigan seat for the Republicans.Democrats flipped two neighboring districts in New York: Josh Riley unseated Marc Molinaro, and John Mannion unseated Brandon Williams.Sarah McBride, a Delaware Democrat, will become the House’s first openly transgender member.See the latest House results.

Ballot measures

Abortion rights fared well in most places, but their post-Roe undefeated streak ended. In Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota, measures to protect abortion rights failed. (The Florida measure received 57 percent support but needed 60 percent to win.) Measures succeeded in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana and New York.Nebraska approved medical marijuana, while a measure to legalize recreational marijuana in Florida failed.Missouri voted to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour. Two states voted to keep their tipped minimum wages — which apply to many restaurant workers — the same: Massachusetts rejected an increase, and Arizona rejected a decrease.Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and South Dakota rejected measures to establish ranked choice voting, and Missouri voted to ban the practice. Washington, D.C., approved it.Nebraska and Kentucky voted against allowing public funds to go to students in private or charter schools.California voters passed a measure that would charge some shoplifting and drug possession offenses as felonies instead of misdemeanors.Ohio rejected a measure to replace its legislature’s partisan redistricting system with an independent commission.

Governors’ races

A man with gray hair and a suit gives a speech at a lectern.

Josh Stein, a Democrat, beat Mark Robinson, a Republican, to become North Carolina’s next governor.Kelly Ayotte, a former Republican senator, won the New Hampshire governor’s race.Mike Braun, a Republican senator, won the Indiana governor’s race.

Voting

Most votes were cast without any issue.Bomb threats against polling places in several swing states, including Georgia and Michigan, led to minor disruptions. Officials said the threats, some of which appear to have come from Russia, were not credible.Despite a statewide shift to the right in North Carolina, several counties shifted to the left. Many were in areas that qualified for emergency assistance after Hurricane Helene ravaged the state in September.

Commentary

Nicholas Kristof, Times Opinion: “Democrats often have a knack for coming across as remarkably condescending to working-class voters. We liberals tend to come across too often as finger-wagging elites disdainful of the religious faith that is really important to millions of people.”Ezekiel Kweku, Times Opinion: “‘We’re not going back’ is pithy and sounds powerful, but it kind of backfires if the voters, in fact, do want to go back.”Tyler Austin Harper, Times Opinion: “Biden and his enablers disregarded the public’s belief that he was too old to serve another term. When he finally did step aside — only after a televised disaster that set his floundering campaign on fire — the Democratic Party circumvented democracy by simply crowning his replacement.”Mollie Hemingway, The Federalist: “This is the absolute end of the old Republican Party. New G.O.P. is more durable, more working class, with a brighter future.”S.E. Cupp, CNN: “Maybe telling voters the economy is ‘strong as hell’ when they tell you in every swing state that they couldn’t afford groceries and gas was a fatal strategy.”Ian Bremmer, The Eurasia Group: “Almost every major election in the world this year was a change election. Incumbents lost because voters believed their country was heading in the wrong direction.”