Former President Donald Trump came away victorious on Election Day, winning more than the 270 electoral votes needed to secure his second term.
He will be the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve non-consecutive terms in the Oval Office, as well as the first convicted on felony charges.
The former president ran a campaign with messages on mass deportation, higher tariffs and anti-transgender rhetoric that drew in swaths of voters from the coveted swing states needed to secure the win.
He also won the popular vote for the first time.
The red wave that propelled conservatives to pick up more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and shifted the balance in the U.S. Senate did not move the needle locally in Cook County or across the state as the Harris-Walz ticket saw victory in Illinois, as expected in the consistently Democratic stronghold.
How a Trump-Vance administration will affect Illinois residents is yet to be seen, but U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-Illinois) thinks the national influence would be a negative one based on the vitriolic language the president-elect uses.
“Words matter, and so I’m very concerned about the language that President Trump has used going into the election,” Jackson said. “I hope we can move beyond that rhetoric. I’m embarrassed that we’re even having to deal with it, but I have to hold him at his words … and these words of threat and intimidation, I pray that they go away, because as the president speaks, someone else manifests those words and that’s extremely dangerous.”
A major voting bloc that both candidates were vying for until the bitter end was Black voters, particularly Black male voters.
An NBC poll found that 92% of Black women voted for Harris, compared to 78% of Black men. Meanwhile, Trump took in 20% of the Black male vote — the smallest portion of all men who voted.
“Some of it had to do with the macho-ism of President Trump, who convinced men that there was something different about them and about the way that his leadership would be compared to what Vice President Harris’ leadership would be,” said U.S. Rep. Danny Davis (D-Illinois). “It means to me that we have a great deal of work to do, especially with African American males. It was amazing to me that 20% would have voted for President Trump knowing his policies, knowing his practices, knowing his comments, knowing what he had said.”
Both congressmen expressed worries over governing as a minority in a Republican-controlled House. For Jackson, he’s most interested in looking at the progress of foreign affairs and issues around climate change.
And Davis is anticipating having to keep his guard up with conservative counterparts.
“We keep hearing about cutting Social Security, cutting social welfare programs, reducing spending,” Davis said. “We’re going to be playing a tremendous amount of defense instead of playing offense. Trying to hold back the knives that President Trump and his colleagues have will be a big challenge.”
