A day after Donald Trump’s improbable comeback from political oblivion, let’s look at how he did it.

Two things:

First, was it really improbable? Second, did he do it all by himself or did the opposition party assist in handing Trump — perhaps the most polarizing figure in American political history — another term in the White House?

The answer to both questions seems like a hard “no,” especially when you consider some aspects of the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign.

The Democrats took the worst parts of their previous two presidential candidates, applied them to Harris and wound up with a result that was actually not altogether unexpected.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton approached the race against Trump as if it was a mere formality. She didn’t make much of a footprint in Rust Belt states like Ohio (perhaps already given up for red even eight years ago), Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

That’s a nice way of saying Clinton mostly ignored them on the way to what she and her team seemed to believe was a yearlong coronation tour. Some people saw disaster coming for the Democrats. A left-leaning friend actually emailed the Clinton campaign and told her handlers that they were going to lose those states if they didn’t wake up in time.

Well, they didn’t and Trump won the Electoral College 304-227 despite somehow losing the popular vote to one of the Democrats’ most widely disliked presidential candidates of my lifetime.

The Clinton campaign never realized how much of a disconnect there was between Hillary and roughly half the country. Democrats also didn’t recognize that Trump was connecting with a significant portion of the electorate. He told them what they wanted to hear. Clinton, meanwhile, said many Trump supporters fit snugly into the now-infamous “basket of deplorables.”

Fast forward four years to 2020. This time, the Trump team miscalculated how many voters he actually turned off with his rhetoric and never-ending drama during his first term and he wound up not getting a second one when Biden won despite spending most of the campaign in his basement.

It turns out the Democrats had to shield Biden from the voters and the bright lights of the campaign because he was already slowing down. That was clear by the middle of Biden’s presidency, despite the Democrats’ insistence that he was “sharp as a tack” and “fully engaged” in the daily business of running the country and being the leader, essentially, of the free world.

Biden’s dismal debate performance in June revealed otherwise. It also set in motion the political coup that ended with Biden dropping out and Harris being anointed as the Democrats’ new candidate.

Like Clinton and her team, Harris and her handlers approached the campaign as if all she had to do was show up to talk to some friendly interviewers every now and then and she’d be swept into the White House. Harris presented little in the way of a case for her to become America’s first female president and spent most of the last four-plus months talking about how Trump was a fascist, a would-be dictator and a modern-day Hitler.

She seemed unable or unwilling to answer policy questions when she did sit for interviews with real journalists, like Bill Whitaker of “60 Minutes” and others. Some of these interviewers gave Harris ample opportunities to distance herself from some of the worst aspects of the Biden presidency, but each time she was unable to come up with a single thing she would have done differently.

Clearly, based on what we saw at the local, state and federal levels Tuesday night, the status quo was not not what a majority of Americans were content to sign off on in this election. Change was on their agenda.

Locally, longtime office holders like Trumbull County Commissioner Mauro Cantalamessa, Sheriff Paul Monroe and Engineer Randy Smith were swept out of office in races against Republican challengers Tony Bernard, Mike Wilson and David DeChristofaro, respectively. It was much the same in Mahoning County, where Commissioner David Ditzler and Prosecutor Gina DeGenova lost to GOP challengers Geno DiFabio and Lynn Maro, respectively.

U,S, Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio mainstay seeking another term, was defeated by Republican Bernie Moreno as the GOP wrestled control of the Senate from Democrats.

You can say that these and other GOP candidates rode Trump’s coattails — or his long red tie — into office. But one way or another, the red wave that was predicted for years by conservatives finally happened.

It appears that the Democrats went to the familiar well one too many times for their own good. It started with the presidential campaign, perhaps the third in a row that Democrats could have handled better.

Why didn’t they see it coming? The blueprint was there in one significant statistic.

Multiple polls over the last few months showed that 71 percent of the American people believed the country was headed in the wrong direction. No incumbent administration has ever won reelection carrying around a number like that as a political albatross.

Two final questions:

Are the Democrats capable of the introspection necessary to learn from this landslide?

Will Republicans be able to navigate the next four years with the mandate and power they’ve been entrusted with by voters?

Ed Puskas is editor of the Tribune Chronicle and The Vindicator. He can be epuskas@tribtoday.com or 330-841-1786.

Tribune Chronicle/Vindicator Editor Ed Puskas…by R. Michael Semple