Donald J. Trump’s projected victory over Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election marks a historic and improbable comeback for the former president, who left office in 2021 after failing to overturn the 2020 election results. Afterward, he became the first former president to be charged with either state or federal crimes, with four separate indictments, one of which resulted in conviction.
“We overcame obstacles that nobody ever thought we could,” he said on election night after a bitter, bruising campaign. He vowed to fight for every family and for their futures. “This will truly be the golden age of America,” he vowed.
CBS News projected Trump to have won the battleground states of North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. With a total of 291 votes, Trump exceeded the electoral vote threshold of 270 by 21 votes. Votes were still counted in the other battleground states of Nevada and Arizona. Exit polling shows Trump won overwhelmingly among White voters without a college education and made inroads with Black and Latino men.
Throughout his two-year campaign, Trump hammered President Biden, and later Harris, on inflation and the economy. It’s a message that resonated with voters, whose views on the economy are more negative now than they were in 2020, despite the pandemic that brought the economy to a halt during his presidency. Nationally and across the battleground states, on the question of whether voters are better off now than they were four years ago, more voters said they are financially worse off.
According to CBS News exit polls, independent voters in Georgia broke for Trump, 54% to 43%. This group backed Mr. Biden in 2020 by 9 points. The economy was their top issue. Harris and Trump attracted equal support from independents in North Carolina, but that meant the vice president was winning a smaller share than Mr. Biden did in 2020. Even with that edge, North Carolina was the lone battleground state Trump won that year.
Trump also ran hard on immigration — as he has for nearly a decade — and vowed at nearly every campaign event that he’d carry out mass deportations if he’s reelected. Exit polling showed that voters also believed Trump would do a better job of confronting illegal immigration at the southern border.
Trump has had an unshakeable base of voters, and in this election, he was able to attract new and undecided voters — low-propensity, young male voters — turned out for him.
Trump is the first convicted felon to win the presidency. Sentencing for his federal conviction in the New York “hush money” trial is set for Nov. 26 and raises questions about how a president-elect would be punished under the law. He also faces criminal charges in three other cases whose futures are now in doubt. At 78, Trump is the oldest person to be elected president — breaking the record held by President Biden, who withdrew from the 2024 presidential race in July amid questions about his age and competency. Mr. Biden was also 78 when he took office in 2021, but on Inauguration Day, Trump will be several months older than Mr. Biden was when he was sworn in.
On his path to the presidency, Trump also survived two assassination attempts, one during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, when a gunman’s bullet grazed his ear, and a separate incident at his West Palm Beach golf club on Sept. 15 when a suspect fled after the Secret Service opened fire.
Trump sweeps all 7 swing states
Shortly after Donald Trump was projected to win the presidency, his transition team initiated operations. The co-chairs of the transition have confirmed that selections for personnel to serve in his administration will be announced shortly.
Trump is also the projected winner in Arizona, a state the former president flipped after losing it to Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump’s projected win in the vital swing state marks a sweep of the battleground states.
How Kamala Harris — and Joe Biden — lost to Donald Trump and left Democrats in shambles
When President Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, he surrounded himself with an insular circle of longtime aides, often prompting complaints about his operation being a black box. He refused to meet with his pollsters, and many on his campaign saw ads at the same time the public did — when they first ran. When President Joe Biden was the Democratic nominee, he surrounded himself with an insular circle of longtime aides, often prompting complaints about his operation being a black box. He refused to meet with his pollsters, and many on his campaign saw ads at the same time the public did — when they first ran. Yet regardless of who was at the top of the ticket and who was running the show, it was the voter who got lost in the process. The American people had been crystal clear for months, as voters in other countries had in the face of post-covid inflation.
By a steep margin, Americans did not approve of Biden’s presidency. By an even steeper margin they thought the country was heading in the wrong direction. They were demanding a new direction that Democrats never figured out how to offer.
“The ‘Three U’s’ — no one in the campaign was able to remember it,” said one campaign aide. “How the hell is a voter supposed to remember it?”
A Harris campaign aide declined to comment on this portrait of her defeat.
Following Harris’s loss Tuesday — in which Trump made gains with nearly every single demographic group, leaving him poised to potentially win all seven battleground states and the popular vote — the Democratic Party now finds itself grappling with how it lost so definitively, and how it so thoroughly misunderstood the American electorate. Democrats expect the party, donors, and outside groups will eventually conduct autopsy reports to understand just how the race went awry. Donna Brazile, a Harris ally and former chair of the Democratic National Committee, said “The next step for the Democrats is deep introspection,” adding that there needs to be a process to figure out what went wrong before the party decides on the next steps and who should lead it.
Kamala Harris Fundraising Going Towards ‘Recount’
Donations to Kamala Harris‘ presidential campaign are now being partially redirected towards a vote recount effort.
When users go to donate to her campaign on Act Blue, the nonprofit fundraising platform, the fine print suggests that the vice president’s campaign might be launching a recount effort. It reads: “The first $41,300/$15,000 from a person/multicandidate committee (“PAC”) will be allocated to the DNC. The next $3,300/$5,000 from a person/PAC will be allocated to Harris for President’s Recount Account.”
There is little other information about what the recount account is and what it plans to do. Donald Trump won the election with 312 Electoral College votes, including all seven battleground states. Some of these states were won by narrow margins. In the closest race, in Wisconsin, Trump won by around 30,000 votes.
Harris conceded the election on Wednesday and said: “We must accept the results of this election.”
Newsweek contacted Act Blue and the Harris campaign for comment via email outside of regular working hours. It seems unlikely that Harris’ campaign would call for a recount, given that she has already conceded the election and that multiple states would need to flip to change the results of the election.
Some states have laws that enact an automatic recount if the margin between two candidates is close enough, such as if it is by 0.5 percent of the overall vote.
If the margin doesn’t fall within the threshold for an automatic recount, candidates can still request one if the results meet specific margin requirements. Each state has its own rules for initiating a recount, and requests must typically be made within a certain number of days after the election.
In 2020, several counties in battleground states such as Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin conducted ballot recounts after requests from the Trump campaign.
Harris’ website requests donations to ensure that all votes are counted in the still uncalled-close Congress races.
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