In the end, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s victory in last week’s 2024 national election for a new four-year presidential term in the White House was sweeping.
Ahead of the Nov. 5 election, national polling showed Vice President Kamala Harris with a slight edge over Trump, maybe a percentage point or two, depending on the survey.
Harris, the Democratic candidate, and Trump, a Republican, were virtually deadlocked, the surveys indicated, in seven political battleground states that election analysts viewed as critical to the election outcome.
Trump, however, captured all seven states, leading to his lopsided edge in the state-by-state vote count in the Electoral College, 312 to 226, which determines the outcome of U.S. presidential elections. The number needed to clinch the presidency is 270. He won the seven battleground states by a range of just under 1% in Wisconsin to more than 6% in Arizona.
On January 20, 2025, the 78-year-old Trump will take office as the country’s 47th president and the first president to win two nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland in the 1890s. He is the oldest elected president in U.S. history.
Trump also won the popular vote, the first Republican candidate to do so since former President George W. Bush in 2004.
While the last ballots are still being counted, Trump already is the clear winner, capturing nearly 75 million votes so far to just under 71 million for Harris, a 50.5% to 47.9% edge for Trump.
Trump’s 2024 vote tally was about the same as the 74 million he received in losing the 2020 election to Democratic President Joe Biden, but the vote for Harris was about 10 million fewer than Biden received.
U.S. pollsters often like to say their surveys are just a snapshot in time, and not necessarily predictive.
But over Trump’s three runs for the presidency since 2016, his level of support has consistently been underestimated in polling, no matter how many times pollsters have tried to adjust their published results to account for a hidden Trump vote from people unwilling to tell even anonymous surveyors that, yes, when they went to polling centers or cast mail-in ballots, he was their choice.
Exit polls showed that women voters favored Harris and men Trump. More educated voters went for Harris, while those without college degrees voted for Trump, but nearly two-thirds of Americans do not have a college degree.
In amassing his majority vote, Trump cut into two traditional Democratic constituencies, Black and Latino voters.
According to The Associated Press’ VoteCast survey of voters, 16% of Black voters supported Trump in 2024, double that from his 2020 campaign. In comparison, 83% of Black voters supported Kamala Harris, down from the 91% who supported Biden in 2020.
Democrats also lost ground among Latino voters, with 56% voting for Harris in 2024 compared to 63% for Biden in 2020. Trump’s support grew from 35% four years ago to 42% this year.
