President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive victory is, to say the least, a turning point in the American story.

For Trump and his 74 million supporters, it’s a dramatic comeback – a rebuke of an establishment many of them detest, and an affirmation of his agenda, which includes the mass deportations of undocumented migrants; sweeping tariffs; and deregulating federal agencies, as favored by campaign benefactors like Elon Musk.

But for those who backed Vice President Kamala Harris, it is a crushing loss to a man who attempted to overturn the 2020 election.

In her concession speech, Harris said, “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results …. At the same time, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States.”

This week, President Joe Biden and Trump are scheduled to meet in the Oval Office.

“It’s a pivotal moment to see Trump return to office,” said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College. “The simplest story we have right now – which may be the correct one – is that there was a kind of incumbent backlash against the Biden administration and against the Democratic Party. And Kamala Harris couldn’t separate herself from it.”

Nyhan says Trump’s victory is part of a broader trend – a rejection of incumbents: “Around the world, the parties that have held power during COVID performed very poorly at the polls. It may just be very difficult to hold power after a bout of inflation. Everyone feels inflation. It’s not the same as unemployment, where it’s only a subset of folks who are directly affected.

“What’s striking, though, about this situation is that by many, not all, objective measures, the American economy has recovered quite well, in some ways better than many of our counterparts,” Nyhan said.

Of course, the election was about more than the economy. According to professor Dianne Pinderhughes, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, race, gender, and class were all factors in this election.

She notes Trump’s gains among Black and Latino men, but also the challenges faced by female candidates, especially women of color. “We have a society that is quite ambivalent about women as political candidates, as presidential candidates,” Pinderhughes said. “In a discussion with my class yesterday, one of the students said, ‘Trump was not beaten by a white woman or a Black woman, but he was by a white man.'” 

After Harris entered the race this summer for a dash to the finish, Democrats were hopeful she could finally break that glass ceiling.

Is that promise of a female president still there? “I think a lot of people feel that it’s not there,” Pinderhughes said, “that we have a long way to go, given the contest between two candidates where one is a convicted felon.

“The fact that people that look at those two candidates and see a credible possibility of Donald Trump being president again was just hard to process,” she said.

For now, Trump is working to staff his cabinet and inner circle. A top campaign advisor, Susie Wiles, will become the first female White House chief of staff. And, unlike in 2016, when he was an outsider, Trump returns as leader of a party that has remade itself in his image.

Nyhan said, “He has transformed the Republican Party permanently. And I think the people who hoped that they could just go back to the way things were will finally and fully have to admit defeat.

“People vote on policy; people vote on party; and they vote on the state of the country,” Nyhan said. “In some ways, that’s good. But it means we’re vulnerable when conditions are unfavorable. And that’s brought Donald Trump back from the political dead.”

      
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Story produced by Ed Forgotson and Michelle Kessel. Editor: George Pozderec. 

Robert Costa

Robert Costa is the Chief Election & Campaign correspondent for CBS News, where he covers national politics and American democracy.