Team of bitter rivals

Donald Trump during his campaign rally in North Carolina

(Image credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

published 12 November 2024

Donald Trump won the White House with perhaps the most unlikely coalition of supporters ever assembled in American politics. There was the usual male MAGA crowd, who lapped up his macho talk of taking back America from the feminized Left. But exit polls show he also won a higher share of women this year than in 2020 and lost voters who support abortion rights by a mere 4 percentage points — even though he nominated the three Supreme Court justices who were crucial to toppling Roe v. Wade. He won with white people who approve of his plan to deport millions of immigrants, but also did 16 points better with Latino voters this time around. He won with oil and gas workers who want to "drill, baby, drill," and also with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supporters who want to ban hydrocarbon-derived fertilizers and plastics. And he boosted his vote share in both deep-red rural counties and deep-blue cities such as New York and Chicago — though he once likened the latter to war-torn Afghanistan — partly by nudging up his numbers with Black men. Trump's diverse coalition, in other words, looks a lot like America.

The question now is whether he can keep this unusual alliance together. Will he shed support among Latinos if, as promised, he sends the National Guard into communities to round up undocumented migrants and tear apart families in mass deportation raids? Will Trump lose women voters if, as his backers on the Christian right have requested, his administration curtails access to abortion pills or dials back reproductive rights? Can he balance the demands of a conspiracy theorist like RFK Jr. — whom Trump has promised to let "go wild on health" — with the interests of food and pharmaceutical companies, as well as those of countless Republican and Democratic parents who want their kids to be vaccinated against polio and other deadly diseases? Can he keep Tesla CEO Elon Musk on side while also slapping 60% tariffs on products from China, Tesla's biggest market outside the U.S.? I don't know the answer to any of these questions and neither, I suspect, does Trump.