While claiming victory on Election Night (this time, credibly), Donald Trump was unrestrained in his interpretation of what it all meant: “We had everybody and it was beautiful. It was a historic realignment, uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense.”

As Lee Corso likes to say on College Game Day when one of his colleagues makes a confident prediction about how a football game will turn out: “Not so fast.”

The more you look at the election returns — which are still evolving as millions of votes are counted in California — Trump’s accomplishment remains impressive, considering his chronic unpopularity and the long comeback he pursued after his 2020 defeat. But “historic realignment” isn’t the right word for a victory that could have been undone had Kamala Harris won a relatively small number of additional votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump’s steadily declining national popular vote margin will wind up, according to Nate Silver’s estimate, at around 1.4 percent (lower than Hillary Clinton’s 2.1 percent in 2016), with his total votes at less than a majority and 3 percent more than he won in 2020. Again, that’s good for someone with Trump’s spotty record, but pretty clearly attributable to being the “change” candidate when the electorate was in an especially sour mood and angry about short-term trends in the economy and immigration.

As I observed in an earlier piece, Trump’s much-ballyhooed gains among Democratic “base” groups were significant, but no better than those posted by George W. Bush........

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