Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States on Wednesday, fulfilling his promise to shatter America’s political status quo after he refused to accept his loss to President Joe Biden four years ago and inspired a mob of supporters to violently storm the U.S. Capitol.
The Republican president-elect’s victory over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris— after an extraordinary campaign in which he was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts — was decisive: Trump trounced Harris in all the key “blue wall” and southern battleground states and maintained leads in Arizona and Nevada, prompting a torrent of anguish among Democrats.
As Trump secured 295 electoral votes to Harris’ 226, Democrats could not take comfort in winning the popular vote, as they did when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. With more than 139 million ballots counted, Trump had 4.8 million more votes than Harris.
“This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country,” Trump told a crowd at around 2:30 a.m. Wednesday from a stage adorned with star-spangled banners at his campaign headquarters in West Palm Beach, Fla.
Trump, who won by appealing to Americans’ anxieties about the economy and immigration and slamming Democrats as excessively “woke” and out of touch, said the election represented a “massive victory for democracy and for freedom.”
“The people who voted for us, they came from all quarters — union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Arab American, Muslim American,” Trump said. “We had everybody, and it was beautiful. It was a historic realignment, uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense.”
Harris conceded to Trump on Wednesday in a phone call before she addressed the American people. A senior Harris aide said the vice president congratulated Trump on his victory. A Trump official said Trump, in turn, acknowledged Harris’ “strength, professionalism, and tenacity.”
The two candidates who for months lobbed insults at each other — Harris called Trump “unhinged” and a “fascist” while Trump dubbed Harris “crazy Kamala” and “a low IQ individual” — apparently agreed on the importance of uniting the nation.
“The outcome of this is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for,” Harris said Wednesday afternoon as she addressed her supporters and the nation at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington. “But hear me when I say: the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”
Four years after Trump contested his loss to Biden, Harris told her supporters that she would accept her opponent’s victory.
“While I concede this election,” Harris said, “I do not concede the fight that fuels this campaign, the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people: a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation.”
Harris’s team sought to win over voters in battleground states — amping up their base while also appealing to moderate Republicans and suburban women — by focusing on abortion and democracy. But in the end, Trump won by promoting himself as a plain-speaking candidate and appealing to Americans who were weary of liberal elites and the status quo.
He promised to secure the southern border and deport millions of people living in the country illegally, impose tariffs that would revive the economy and restore American manufacturing, and withdraw the nation from the international stage.
Throughout his campaign, Trump drew criticism for spreading falsehoods. He claimed, without evidence, that immigrants were “eating the dogs” in Springfield, Ohio, and that crime had gone “through the roof” when violent crime rates fell sharply under Biden.
The GOP candidate’s closing campaign slogan — “Kamala Broke It. Trump Will Fix It” — emphasized Harris’ role in the Biden administration and aimed to position him as the candidate of change.
Some worried that the president-elect would turn off critical demographics of Latinos and women after he held an incendiary rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, featuring speakers who called Harris “the Antichrist,” referred to “her pimp handlers” and dubbed Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.”
But after months of polling showing the candidates neck and neck, Trump’s victory was swift, defying pundits’ expectations of a protracted vote count.
Trump flipped Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — states Democrats won in 2020 — winning by clear margins of several percentage points. He kept hold of North Carolina. On Wednesday afternoon, he was ahead by about 5 percentage points in Arizona and Nevada.
CNN exit polls showed a significant gender gap in the results, with the majority of women backing Harris and the majority of men backing Trump.
Trump made significant gains with Latino men, winning their vote by 8 percentage points four years after he lost them by 23 points. He also won over Black men in battlegrounds, more than doubling his 2020 support from that cohort in North Carolina. The only bright spot for Harris was college-educated women.
Trump’s win represents a bitter defeat for Harris, who sought to make history not only as the first female president but also as the first Black and Asian American female president. Instead, she became the second female candidate in eight years to become the Democrats’ presidential nominee, only to fail to secure enough votes to win.
Throughout her campaign, Harris painted her opponent as a “petty tyrant,” an “unhinged” and “racist and divisive” figure who would destroy democratic norms and roll back years of hard-won civil rights.
“We’re not going back!” she and her supporters chanted at rallies.
When asked last month if she believed Trump was a fascist, Harris replied: “Yes, I do.”
The GOP’s victory extended beyond Trump. Republicans also secured control of the Senate after Tim Sheehy in Montana, Deb Fischer in Nebraska, Bernie Moreno in Ohio and Jim Justice in West Virginia secured a number of contested seats.
The House remained up for grabs as election officials continued to count votes. Republicans hoped to hold their House majority. Early Wednesday, the Associated Press reported that Rep. Mike Lawler, who holds a suburban New York seat, managed to eke out a second term.
On abortion — a key issue after Trump appointed Supreme Court justices who in 2022 helped overturn the landmark 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision — there were some bright spots for Democrats. Seven of 10 states passed measures to protect abortion rights, according to the Associated Press. Abortion restrictions will remain in place in Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota.
Early Wednesday, morning cable TV shows and social media offered dueling interpretations of Trump’s victory: Liberals — including many in California — argued the American people had delivered a death blow to democracy while conservatives celebrated Trump’s victory as the people’s revolt against technocratic elites.
“California will fight to protect our democracy, our freedoms & the basic dignity of all people,” Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said on X. “California won’t roll over for fascism.”
Hakeem Jefferson, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, described Trump’s win as “a dark and scary moment” for American democracy.
A few moderate Democrats were quick to critique the Democratic Party and the Harris campaign.
Democratic strategist Josh Lafazan, a former New York legislator, said his party’s failure to hold an open primary opened Harris up to GOP criticism that the process was undemocratic and that Harris had not won a single primary vote.
But Lafazan went further, arguing Harris wasn’t a strong Democratic candidate and failed to make a robust case that the Biden-Harris administration had delivered important policy wins, such as passing the Inflation Reduction Act that had created hundreds of thousands of jobs.
When asked by a major network what she would do differently from Biden, Lafazan noted, Harris had no answer.
“That was political malpractice,” Lafazan said.
On “Fox & Friends,” there was much gloating as commentators argued the liberal establishment — a group that they say includes not just politicians, but news outlets — had misread the will of the American people.
“This is the end of the legacy media,” said Ainsley Earhardt, one of the show’s hosts.
Nancy Northup, president and chief executive of the Center for Reproductive Rights, called Trump’s win “a deadly threat to the democratic values of liberty and equality, the rule of law, and reproductive health, rights and justice in the United States and around the globe.”
The second Trump administration, Northup warned, would probably work to stop the provision of medication abortion by mail, push a national abortion ban, and embolden conservative states, to lead more prosecutions and investigations against providers and patients who sought to cross state lines.
“The Center for Reproductive Rights is ready for this next fight,” she said. “We will vigorously oppose any and all attempts to roll back progress.”
Conservatives pushed back against liberal commentators and activists’ narrative of a dark, vengeful Trump presidency.
Scott Jennings, a conservative political strategist, said on CNN he saw the results as a “revenge of just the regular old working-class American, the anonymous American who has been crushed, insulted, condescended.”
The American political and media class, Jennings argued, had ignored the fundamentals of inflation and “people feeling like they were barely able to tread water.”
“The Democrats thought there were enough people who hated Trump or were willing to fear him to win the race,” Jennings said. “And it turns out, there’s more to being president than simply not being Donald Trump, in the eyes of the American people.”
Some political observers urged Democrats to examine closely the failure of Harris’ campaign.
“It’s time for the Democrats to take a good, long hard look at how this happened,” said Joe Scarborough, the host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” as he opened up the show. “And if they just say ‘Trump bad, Democrats virtuous,’ they’re going to keep losing.”
