How to Understand the Election Returns So Far

For the third consecutive election, the nation remains divided almost exactly in half around the polarizing presence of Donald Trump.

Early on Wednesday morning, the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris appears likely to again come down to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the same states that decided Trump’s 2016 and 2020 races by razor-thin margins. Trump held a narrow but clear advantage in all of them as of midnight yesterday.

In 2016, those three Rustbelt battlegrounds made Trump president when he dislodged them, from the “blue wall” of states Democrats had won in all six presidential races from 1992 to 2012, by a combined margin of about 80,000 votes; four years later, they made Joe Biden president when he wrested them back from Trump by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes. Now, with Trump regaining an upper hand across Sunbelt battlegrounds where Biden had made inroads in 2020, the three Rustbelt behemoths appeared likely to decide the winner once more.

The results as of midnight suggested those three states were tipping slightly to Trump; the patterns of returns in them looked more like 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in them, than in 2020, when Biden beat him. Given that Trump appeared highly likely to also win the Southeast battlegrounds of North Carolina and Georgia, and has a strong hand in Arizona, Trump will likely win the presidency again if he captures any of the three Blue Wall states. He would become only the second man, after Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s, to win the presidency, lose it, and then regain it again on a third try.