After the presidential election victory of Donald Trump on Tuesday, many Democrats — including in Massachusetts, where residents favored Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris by a large margin — may be left scratching their heads as to how it could have gone so wrong.

As of Thursday, Trump had won or is leading in all of the seven swing states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada — that were expected to decide the 2024 election. His victory comes despite controversy over numerous remarks and behaviors by Trump during the campaign, something that has become a hallmark of the former real estate mogul’s political career, including refusing to accept that his 2020 presidential loss to Joe Biden was legitimate.

But Alexander Theodoridis, an associate professor of political science at UMass Amherst and co-director of the UMass Amherst Poll, noted the election results were far from a landslide victory. Current data shows that Trump’s margin of victory in four of the swing states does not exceed 2%, a result not much different than Biden’s 2020 victory in many of the same states.

“I would say that this is a consistent, but relatively narrow victory,” he said in an interview. “By historical standards, it’s still a pretty close race.”

While Massachusetts is known nationwide as a deep blue state, Trump and the Republican Party put a dent in that notion on Tuesday, as 36.5% of voters statewide went for Trump. Additionally, more than 80 communities swung Trump’s way, including about 20 in western Massachusetts. Among those are three towns in Hampshire County, Granby, Huntington and Ware; and two towns in Franklin County, Orange and Monroe.

The deciding factor that swung voters to Trump this time around, Theodoridis said, was likely concerns over material matters, such as the economy and inflation, over more abstract concerns such as backsliding on democracy, women’s rights and political norms.

“Inflation is a particularly challenging economic thing for an incumbent party to deal with,” he said. “We can explain all we want that inflation was what we accepted in order to have a soft landing from the pandemic. But it just doesn’t matter to people who have seen their spending power decrease substantially.”

Raymond La Raja, who co-directs the UMass Amherst Poll with Theodoridis, said concerns over the economy and a low approval rating for Biden meant that Republicans already had a slight advantage going into this election making it difficult to tell if having Trump as the candidate as opposed to a more mainstream politician would have led to a better or worse result. But he also said Trump had the ability to attract voters who otherwise would not have turned out on Election Day.

“He got what we call low-propensity voters to show up — that really boosted him in these battleground states,” La Raja said. “Working-class men, people who are non-college-educated ... his strategy of going after the ‘bro vote’ appears to have paid off.”

As for Harris, La Raja said she ran “as good of a campaign as she could” given the circumstances of being a sudden replacement for Biden in the middle of the election, but that she faced numerous hurdles to defeating Trump.

“I think any Democratic candidate would have struggled,” he said. “The fact that she was a woman and that she was a candidate of color, that may have hurt her more, although we don’t have the data to prove that yet.”

How to deal with second Trump presidency

For Democratic politicians, the challenge that comes next is how to deal with an incoming Trump presidency and how to win back support from swing voters in future elections.

In a statement Wednesday, U.S. Rep Jim McGovern, who won reelection Tuesday in the 2nd Congressional District, called the outcome of the election “painful and disappointing.”

“Like so many of you, I’m worried. Worried about what this means for the future. Worried for the most vulnerable among us. Worried for our democracy,” McGovern said. “But I’m asking — please don’t give in to despair. We cannot go back, only forward — and the hard work of protecting America from the most devastating impacts of a second Donald Trump presidency begins today.”

Meanwhile, state Sen. John Velis, a Democrat whose district includes municipalities that voted for Trump (Westfield and Montgomery) and for Harris (including Easthampton, which voted more than 70% for Harris), said the election was a warning that Democrats need to return to being a “big-tent” party and move away from polarizing issues such as defunding police and rhetoric over the war in Gaza.

“I can’t tell you how many Democrats, people I know to be Democrats, have told me they were with Trump this time,” Velis said. “There’s this notion that the Democratic Party has become the party that is very vocal and very strident about a lot of issues that just don’t deal and don’t accept and don’t acknowledge the real-world struggles of the middle-class and working-class people.”

Velis said that those voters he’s talked with found statements made by Trump to be “morally reprehensible and unconscionable,” but that divisive rhetoric on both sides of political extremes were not reflective of the overall majority of the country.

“My main battle cry is that we have to move back to the center. If we want to be competitive as a party, we need to do that,” Velis said. “The party is hemorrhaging working-class people.”

But Theodoridis said political polarization is unlikely to abate in the country, calling such partisan divisions an “existential threat to democracy.”

“We’ve had [polarization] many times before in our history, and when it’s not demarcated by party lines it’s troubling but not necessarily going to undermine democracy,” he said. “But when you have partisan polarization, which is what we have right now, the parties have every incentive if it benefits their side to undermine democratic institutions. The most striking example is what Donald Trump did last time, which is to try and stay in power after losing an election.”