Democrats are, unsurprisingly, reeling in the wake of the worst electoral performance by their party in decades, allowing President Trump to return to the White House with not only a popular mandate, but likely Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, as well. While the party will strategize how to dig themselves out of this, for now the blame game is dominating. 

“There is no sugarcoating it: this is a bitterly disappointing outcome,” wrote Congresswoman Susan Wild, a Democrat in a Pennsylvania swing district who lost reelection on Tuesday. “In a moment, I am going to talk about how our fight — for reproductive rights, for affordable health care, for equality, for a clean and safe planet — can and must endure.

Some of the blame has already fallen on President Biden — a deeply unpopular, 81-year-old incumbent who has presided over a mood of pessimism that has washed across the country in recent years. His decision to stay in the race after the Democrats’ better-than-expected 2022 midterm results already has his own supporters pointing fingers squarely at him. 

“Joe Biden should have stepped aside in January, not July, and then given whoever emerged as the nominee permission to talk about him however they wanted,” said businessman Andrew Yang, who ran against Mr. Biden in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. 

“You undermine your message that character matters when you and your team are pridefully defying the obvious effects of age and then scolding voters and reporters who raised the most obvious of questions,” wrote David French, the conservative New York Times opinion columnist who supported the vice president on Tuesday. “I praised Biden when he dropped out because it was necessary and (finally) selfless, but the selfishness before that moment might have fatally undermined Harris’s candidacy and permanently marred his legacy.”

Trump’s strength not only in the battleground states but across the nation has Democrats stunned. The former and future president’s victory on Tuesday marks the largest national popular vote win for the GOP since 1988, and makes Trump the only Republican since President Reagan to win a second term with more than 51 percent of the national vote. 

In deep blue states, Vice President Harris dramatically underperformed Mr. Biden’s 2020 vote totals. Democrats went from winning Illinois by 17 four years ago to winning it by only eight points on Tuesday. In 2020, Mr. Biden won New Jersey by 16 points, though Ms. Harris ended up only winning the state by about 5.5 percent this time. In New York, Ms. Harris’s margin of victory sunk to just about 11 points, compared to Mr. Biden who won the state by 23 points four years ago. 

Across critical demographic groups that drove Democratic successes in 2018, 2020, and 2022, Trump improved nearly across the board. The president-elect won men under the age of 30, making him the first Republican to do so since the invention of modern polling. Trump increased his share of the Black male vote to 30 percent from 23 percent. In Starr County, Texas — the  most heavily Hispanic county in America with 97 percent of residents being Latino — flipped to Trump, making him the first Republican to win the area in more than 100 years. 

The only demographic group in which Ms. Harris made gains over Mr. Biden was with college-educated women. 

One of the major headwinds faced by Democrats in this election was the economy, with just about 25 percent of voters saying — according to the CBS News exit poll — that the economy was in good or fair shape. Across the world, incumbent parties have been punished relentlessly at the ballot box by voters who are still reeling from the cost of living crises that have plagued most major western democracies. 

In the United Kingdom, the Tories were defeated in a rout; in France, President Macron’s party saw its support crater in this year’s legislative elections; in Japan, the reigning Liberal Democratic Party lost its governing majority in an upset; and in Canada, Prime Minister Trudeau is staring down what will likely be a landslide electoral defeat whenever the next elections are called.