What Trump's comeback reveals about American voters: ANALYSIS

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 has come back stronger than ever despite a failed reelection bid in 2020, a second impeachment after his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol and a conviction on 34 felony counts that made him the first former president to be found guilty of a crime.

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

It is a capstone to his singular stamp on American politics, one that's been defined by his relentless defiance of institutional norms.

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

A new coalition

Trump won, in part, by building an unprecedented multiracial coalition within the Republican Party. White working-class men, as they did in 2016, fueled his success but Trump also drew in Black and Latino voters -- two demographics that traditionally vote for Democrats.

First-time voters also flocked to Trump 54-45% -- a reversal from 2020 when the group overwhelmingly went for President Joe Biden.

"It's hard to imagine another Republican doing that well, but Trump was able to capture this sentiment from people who felt they weren't getting ahead despite having worked hard and played by the rules," said Brandon Rottinghaus, a 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 like they were seen."

Trump, when he declared victory, argued he had received a "powerful mandate."

"This is a movement like nobody's ever seen before and, frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time," he said.

How Trump flipped the script

Trump was shunned by much of his party after putting democracy to the test with his election denialism, which culminated in his supporters violently attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

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

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

"So many Republicans were put off by the weaponization of the legal system against one person that their anger sparked the rise of Trump, not quite from the ashes, but close to it," Weaver said.

At his first campaign rally, held in Waco, Texas, Trump's message to supporters was that the "deep state" was also coming after them and their way of life. He said he would be their "retribution."

That theme remained the undercurrent of the campaign even as Trump turned to focus heavily on immigration and the economy. He painted Democrats as out of touch on cultural issues like transgender rights. America was broken on all fronts, he said, and only he could "fix" it.

In the process, he leaned into authoritarian rhetoric at a level that alarmed critics and even some of his former staff, including a retired general who said in his view Trump fit the description of a fascist.

Both President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spent a large portion of their campaigns hitting 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 U.S. citizens and more policies that flout the guardrails of the Constitution.

But it appears most voters either didn't believe he would carry out such extremes in office, voted for him in spite of it or even liked the idea of Trump's "strongman" style in the White House.

ABC News exit poll results showed among candidate qualities, voters rated "has the ability to lead" as most important. A close second was whether the candidate "can bring needed change."

Trump trounced Harris in both categories. Among those who cited leadership ability as the top candidate attribute, Trump beat Harris by a whopping 33 points. On bringing about change, the gap widened to 50 points.

And even though democracy ranked high as an issue of importance to voters, with a vast majority (73%) viewing democracy as threatened, it didn't automatically translate into success for Harris as some thought it would.

"Democracy polls well, but the threat to democracy is in the eye of the beholder," said Weaver, who asserted Trump's projection that Democrats were the actual danger (accusing them of weaponizing the government and censorship) must have resonated.

'They think, 'He's angry like I am''

For all the debate around democracy or abortion rights or Trump's dark and inflammatory rhetoric, the economy was the issue of the day for the electorate.

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

Key to Trump's political staying power, strategists on both sides of the aisle said, is the way he's managed to reorient the GOP's image from "Country Club Republicans" to the party of the working class despite being a billionaire himself and despite some of his proposals, like tariffs, being frowned upon by economists.

"He has completely remade the party and remade its appeal so that now non-college voters of multiple races are much more likely to consider voting Republican than they ever have in the past," said longtime Republican pollster Whit Ayres.

Democrats, amid finger-pointing over who is to blame for the loss, is reckoning with how these voters slipped from their grasp. Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders eviscerated the party, saying it "abandoned" those Americans. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, hitting back, suggested they spent too much time on cultural issues rather than easing economic anxieties caused by high prices.

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

"It's a very difficult public policy problem, which is why Trump will probably not solve the problem either, but at least he talks to them in a way that they understand and they feel he understands their lives," she said.

"He's an angry man and they think, 'He's angry like I am,'" Kamarck said.

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

"It's become clear that our country has divided itself into two completely separate Americas, and neither one of those Americans understands much about the other or seems to have much interest in learning about the other, whether Trump or Harris had won this week," said Daniel Schnur, a political analyst at the University of California Berkeley.

Trump's ascension to the White House in 2016 was considered a symptom of a resentful and distrustful country, Schnur said. Those divisions have only intensified since then, in no small part because of Trump stoking the flames.

"We've had eight more years to reinforce them and to let them fester," Schnur said.

ABC News exit poll results found Trump prevailed 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 was perhaps less important than just people's flat-out unhappiness with the present state of American politics," said Rottinghaus.

"You can call it the economy. You can call it immigration or the border. There's a lot of reasons that you could tab this election to a particular issue, but the underlying nature of people's preferences led them to reject the status quo and side with Donald Trump."