Donald Trump will be the only US president since Grover Cleveland at the end of the 19th century to be re-elected for non-consecutive terms. His risky electoral strategy has clearly paid off, enabling him and the Republican party to achieve an historic political comeback.
The 47th US president-elect declared victory at the West Palm Beach convention center in Florida – a state that he won easily, taking its coveted 30 electoral college votes with over 6 million votes, or 56.1% of the votes cast.
In addition to winning traditional Republican stronghold states, Trump also won the battleground states of Georgia with 50.8% and Pennsylvania with 50.7% for a combined total of 37 electoral college votes.
This victory across both safe and battleground states was a far better performance than in 2020. Unlike in 2016 and 2020, he won the popular vote, with slightly fewer that 5 million votes more than his opponent, Kamala Harris.
In a contest with razor-thin margins and toss-up polls, the Trump campaign pursued a strategy that did not seek to expand support significantly beyond his traditional base. Instead it successfully energised and mobilised new voters within his core demographic – especially young male voters, who turned out in huge numbers.
He also made effective use of alternative channels of communication to reach deep into a group of voters, who support his strong – if somewhat unconventional – approach to politics.
Delivered in Trump’s characteristically strong and idiosyncratic language, his campaign ranged across social and economic issues, such as the cost of living and immigration, as well as pressing foreign policy issues, including the future of Nato, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and international trade – especially with China.
Key issues
Exit polls across the key states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin, showed that American voters are concerned about the state of democracy (35%), the economy (31%) and immigration (11%). The election result shows that the Trump campaign was successful in winning the argument across all three issues.
The Harris and Trump campaigns accused each other of being a threat to democracy. Harris campaigned on Trump’s plans to reshape the federal government, as embodied by what she portrayed as the Trump-backing Heritage Foundations’s “sinister” Project 2025 (something Trump himself denied knowledge of).
She said he would undermine the rule of law, and “terminate the constitution” and hammered at his repeated claims that the 2020 election had been stolen.
But two-thirds of Republicans continue to believe that the election was stolen. They voted in the belief that it would be Harris and the Democratic party who would “usurp power” if elected.
The Trump campaign also hammered the economy. It ignored the reality of the positive aggregate indicators presented by a buoyant stock market, high levels of employment and rates of GDP growth. Instead Trump and his surrogates and campaigners focused people’s minds on the day-to-day hardship wrought by many years of high inflation, which had eroded household incomes and purchasing power.
Trump also challenged Harris hard on immigration. He argued that she and Joe Biden had four years to address the increased flow of people coming across the US-Mexican border, but had failed to address the problem.
He ignored the fact he had directed Republicans in Congress to kill off the bipartisan Border Act 2024, which aimed to address the situation. Instead he echoed the rhetoric of his 2016 campaign that America is an “being invaded” and that immigrants are “poisioning the blood of our country”.
The migrants that Biden and Harris had allowed to flow across America’s southern border in their four years in power, he said, have been responsible for an increase in crime and have stolen jobs from “real Americans”.
A wildcard feature of this election was the concerted support Trump enjoyed from billionaire Elon Musk, who provided a huge number of followers through his control of the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). This helped the Trump campaign amplify and reinforce his message and deliver it directly to millions of followers.
Musk has since been tasked with leading incoming Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).
Trump II
Trump will take office with the experience and knowledge of his previous term. He knows more about how Washington works and what it’ll take for his new administration to carry out what it has promised. In his victory speech he claimed that this moment will “help this country heal”.
Now his work begins to deliver. He promised: “We have a country that needs help and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders and we’re going to fix everything about our country.”
For their part, Democrats will need a serious postmortem. The party leadership will need to engage in some serious soul-searching on how they failed to appeal to the electorate and how bread and butter issues ultimately propelled Trump back into power. Harris had 107 days to forge a campaign.
She raised more than a billion dollars, filled rallies across the country with energetic supporters, and received endorsements across the political – and celebrity – spectrum. In the event, it was too little too late.
The transition from the Biden administration to the Trump administration in January will usher in a new era politics that will have an impact on domestic and foreign policy with far-reaching consequences for America and the world. We must hope that, unlike four years ago, it’s a peaceful transition that will allow the healing to begin.
This article appeared in The Conversation UK on 6 November 2024 and now that the final vote tally has been compiled, Trump’s share of the popular vote finished 1.5% higher than that of Kamala Harris.