Donald J Trump is the 47th President of the United States. He made his way back to the White House by retaining the red states and breaking through critical battleground states. If North Carolina was the first to be called, Georgia and Pennsylvania followed with Wisconsin pushing him over the top.

Results are yet to be officially declared — and it might take a few days — but major media outlets including CNN have called the election in favour of the former President who will be the second only since Grover Cleveland in 1892 to win back a Presidency for a second non-consecutive term.

The swing states had always been billed as the most critical and they lived up to the call. The democratic challenger, Vice President Kamala Harris, retained the traditional strongholds and Trump the usual red states with Iowa being a momentary scare. On the penultimate day, Trump beat every odd that many thought would be against him: a twice impeached President with sentencing on 34 felonies around the corner and a person who was seen as a threat to democracy by virtue of having presided over a so-called insurrection on January 6, 2021 ending in a bloody siege to Capitol Hill.

The final word on the vote tally in Michigan, Nevada and Arizona is yet to be out at the time of writing, but it appears more of an academic exercise. Right through the final weeks of the campaign, Trump’s advisors were cringing at their man’s easy temptation to go beyond the script and wander into dangerous and sensitive areas like race and gender.

In spite of an outrageous closing rally at Madison Square Garden in New York where speakers railed against Harris and calling Puerto Rico as an Island of Garbage, the main Republican stayed with his twin message: economics and immigration, however crudely it may have been shaped.

The voting patterns in the battleground states appears to only reinforce the only long time dictum of American Presidential politics: voters are more concerned about their pockets.

Economics matters

At a time when political strategists and media commentators were talking about how all the loose and cheap talk on the campaign trail was going to hurt him, Trump seems to have convinced his voting bloc and more that what really mattered was economic issues and coming to terms with crime via a principal source: uncontrolled migration at the southern borders.

That border crossing has come down in the last several months hardly seemed to matter. The message on immigration from Trump stayed.

Harris’s campaign

Harris ran a principled campaign minus the Trump camp’s poison and vitriol. But in the end she could not fight one major disadvantage: the Biden baggage of four years that was craftily pinned on her.

Even exit polls showed 60 per cent or more feeling that the country was headed in the wrong direction. Painting Trump as a fascist or a threat to democracy were seen as lower priority, with economy, inflation, immigration and crime topping the charts. Harris, the argument went, had difficulty in explaining how she would have done things differently, or in distancing herself from weaknesses of the Biden administration.

In foreign policy Ukraine may not have hurt Harris; but Gaza and Lebanon would have given the thousands of Arab Americans in states like Michigan cause for complaint.

And in all that excitement of Tuesday evening over the Presidency, another important component of November 5 is yet to resonate fully: Republicans have taken control of the Senate, with the House of Representatives still remaining a toss-up.

The writer is a senior journalist who has reported from Washington DC on North America and United Nations

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