By
This is an adapted excerpt from MSNBC's special coverage Wednesday.
Across the country, people are still making sense of what happened Tuesday. It’s fair to say many Americans, myself included, feel it was a bad outcome for the country. But I think it’s very important to be as clear-eyed as possible about not just what happened, but sldo why it happened.
Donald Trump won a majority of votes in the Electoral College and for the first time in his three presidential runs, he appears poised to win the national popular vote. But if you look at why he won, I think it's clear it was a rejection of the status quo in a period in which many voters feel alienated from their leaders and squeezed by high prices.
It’s very important to be as clear-eyed as possible about not just what happened, but also why it happened.
They feel that way across the Western world, where incumbent parties left, right and center have met the same electoral fate post-Covid. This was an election defined by a rejection of a status quo that big majorities did not like.
Trump and Republicans have a vested interest in interpreting this result as a mandate for their worst governing impulses — all the Stephen Miller-style Project 2025 dark fantasies of smashing the “administrative state.”
But those ideas were never popular. Trump tried to distance himself from them when they polled terribly. So that was not the source of this victory.
You can see it all over America in Tuesday’s results. You can see it in what happened down-ballot. In North Carolina, voters picked Trump by a slight margin. At the same time, they elected Democrats as governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and school superintendent. And they may have flipped enough legislative seats to take away the Republican supermajority and veto power.
You can see it in referenda around the country. In seven states, including the Trump states of Arizona, Missouri and Montana, voters approved measures enshrining abortion rights. Voters in deep-red Missouri and Alaska also approved raises in the minimum wage and joined Nebraska in mandating paid sick leave for workers.
Just to add to all that, New Jersey elected its first Asian American U.S. senator. Maryland elected its first Black female U.S. senator. So did Delaware, meaning two Black female senators will serve together for the first time in American history. Delaware has also given Congress its first openly trans member.
This is not a nation that has signed on wholesale to the far-right agenda of Trump and his Republican Party. But we know they are going to interpret this election as a mandate for full MAGAism.
And we know they have a plan, a destructive plan for the American Constitution, American democracy and, most importantly, for so many of our fellow Americans, immigrant families, trans folks, women and working-class voters, who will take it on the chin from tariffs and gutting labor law.
We also know Trump is an aspiring authoritarian. He does not have a democratic bone in his body. He tried to overthrow the constitutional order with violence. He has celebrated it and talked about using political violence repeatedly in his campaign.
Because of all of that, we know they are going to try to do things to subvert and alter the constitutional order. But the most important thing for those of us who are committed to stopping them is to remember that their success is not foreordained in any way.
Yes, they are going to try and there will be a lot of people who try to stop them but the outcome of that is as yet undetermined.
I am not saying this from some place of airy hope. I’ve been covering Trump since 2015. I’ve covered his first term. He tried to do lots of bad things and failed to do so because he is completely distractible and inconstant, because he is a vortex of chaos and because he cannot be stopped from doing stupid self-destructive things.
None of that changed because he won an election. Are Republicans better prepared this time? Are they more loyal? Is the judiciary more in their favor? Yes.
But, again, that doesn't mean the outcome is foreordained. The reason I say that is that mass opinion is not a fixed thing. It's a real force and it changes and flows and reacts to events.
Even Trump has backed down when he found himself on the wrong side of it. He has tried to move away from his most extreme anti-abortion position because he understands it's unpopular and there was mobilization against it.
But the most important thing for those of us who are committed to stopping them is to remember that their success is not foreordained in any way.
One of the most monstrous things he did in his first term, as documented in my colleague Jacob Soboroff’s incredible documentary and book, “Separated,” was to separate migrant children from their families. As the press reported this, and as the courts reviewed it, it became clear it was cruel and it was illegal.
While it was a federal judge that first blocked it, the thing that ended child separation was just a full rejection by the democratic polity. Thanks to organizing, mobilization and protests, Americans rightly came to see it was monstrous and rejected it loudly
In the end, Trump signed an executive order ending the practice and even tried to take credit for getting rid of the heinous policy he had implemented. They had to abandon it because it was so unpopular.
That is just one example and in his second term, there will likely be things he does not abandon. But in the face of that, it's really important not to concede in advance that these things don’t matter. They do.
Public opinion still matters. Politics did not go away in America because 3 out of 100 people switched their presidential votes. Politics depends on the work of organizing, mobilizing and persuading our fellow Americans.
None of those tools have gone anywhere. In fact, all of them are even more important this time around. We have to pick them up and we can’t let anyone pry them from our hands.