NEW YORK – Former president Donald Trump came into election day with a fervent base of supporters and the experience of having already run for president twice. He also came with felony convictions and large numbers of voters who viewed him unfavourably.

       He was, in short, a candidate weighed down by extraordinary baggage. But Trump drove past that, presenting himself to an electorate that was eager for change and unhappy with the direction of the country under President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.

       Here’s what analysts will most likely be saying should he win.

       By a decisive margin, voters thought the country was heading in the wrong direction – 74 per cent said so, in an ABC/Ipsos poll released on Nov 3 morning. Since 1980, that one statistic – the number of voters who think the nation is heading in the wrong direction – has been a surefire predictor that the party in power would lose the White House.

       Should he win, Trump will have succeeded in saddling Ms Harris with Mr Biden’s record. And he will have appealed to voters’ unease with his dark talk about the state of the nation, and with his gauzy recollections of the supposedly better days when he was president.

       The economy – or rather public perceptions of the economy – show just how uneasy voters are. Prices climbed just 2.1 per cent in September more than a year earlier, and the economy grew a vigorous 2.8 per cent in the last quarter.

       But 75 per cent of voters said the economy was in bad shape in a New York Times/Siena College poll in October.

       And when the final pre-election day jobs report from the Labour Department showing anaemic growth in employment, largely because of hurricanes and a major labour strike, Trump pounced.

       “That brand-new jobs report proves decisively that Kamala Harris and Crooked Joe have driven our economy off the cliff,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan last week.

       Trump returned to the issue that has defined his political brand: the threat and disorder posed by illegal immigration.

       His advertisements included black-and-white images depicting immigrants racing across the border or marauding on city streets. He called for the death penalty for migrants who kill law enforcement officers. “The suburbs are under attack,” he said in Virginia on Nov 2.

       He seized on the large numbers of migrants who showed up in cities far from the southern border during the campaign, as well as on reports of crimes committed by migrants – often wildly distorting those reports – to exaggerate the sense that voters could soon find themselves besieged in their own communities.

       In the final New York Times/Siena College national poll of the campaign, 15 per cent of respondents said immigration was the most important issue in deciding their vote. The economy was the top issue, named by 27 per cent of respondents.

       A Trump victory would be testimony to the deep and intense affection that Trump enjoys among a large swath of the electorate. His campaign was anything but error-free.

       But as he has managed to do throughout his time in politics, he repeatedly survived the kind of setbacks – his debate thrashing by Ms Harris, for instance, and his Madison Square Garden rally in which a comedian denigrated Puerto Rico, black voters, Jews and Palestinians – that would have sunk almost any other candidate.

       He frequently claimed to be defying his own advisers, throwing away prepared speeches to talk about the “enemies within” or Ms Liz Cheney.

       If that frustrated his advisers, it clearly delighted – and entertained – his supporters. And if he wins, it will likely mean that it did not turn off swing voters.

       A Trump victory would be his second out of three bids for president. In both wins, he will have defeated a woman, suggesting again that many voters have trouble envisioning a woman in the Oval Office.

       It may be hard to prove that Ms Harris lost specifically because of sexism. But gender is playing a major role in how Americans vote in 2024.

       The final New York Times/Siena College poll, taken at the end of October, found Trump leading Ms Harris among men, 55 per cent to 41 per cent.

       Trump’s swaggering, uninhibited style, along with his promises of a booming economy, had particular resonance with black and Latino men. That helped him chip away at a vital part of the Democratic base.

       Trump has tapped into anger and grievance throughout his political career.

       That was particularly effective in 2024 amid the perception, even among many Democrats, that the party had gone too far to the left on some cultural issues. Chief among those was transgender rights.

       Trump often, and falsely, suggested that children were going off to school and returning home having had gender-altering surgery without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

       Once his campaign found video clips in which Ms Harris, as California’s attorney-general, took positions on what he presented as the woke side of these issues, he and his allies spent millions putting those statements in front of voters.

       A month before the election, Trump and Republican groups had spent US$65 million (S$86 million) on advertisement focusing on trans issues, according to a New York Times analysis of advertising data compiled by the media-tracking firm AdImpact. NYTIMES