Analyzing Donald Trump’s Election Triumph

Republican President-elect Donald Trump has asserted that his election victory granted him an “unprecedented and powerful” mandate to govern. He defeated Democratic challenger Kamala Harris in all seven closely monitored swing states, securing a decisive overall advantage. Trump’s party also gained control of both legislative chambers, affording the returning president substantial authority to implement his agenda. Since his 2020 defeat, he has broadened his appeal across nearly all voter demographics. In doing so, he achieved a comeback unmatched by any previously defeated president in modern history. However, the data indicates the contest was considerably closer than suggested by him and his allies. Steven Cheung, his communications director, characterized it as a “landslide” victory. Yet, it emerged this week that his share of the vote has dropped below 50% as ballot counting continues. “It feels grandiose to me that they’re calling it a landslide,” remarked Chris Jackson, senior vice-president in the US team of polling firm Ipsos. Jackson stated that Trump’s rhetoric implied overwhelming victories, when in reality, it was margins of a few hundred-thousand votes in key areas that propelled him back to the White House. This outcome is attributable to America’s electoral college system, which amplifies relatively narrow victories in swing states. Here are three ways to evaluate his win. With 76.9 million votes and counting, Trump won what is known as the popular vote, according to the latest tally from CBS News, the BBC’s US partner. This means he garnered more votes than Harris (74.4 million) or any other candidate. No Republican has accomplished this feat since 2004. Nevertheless, as vote tabulation proceeds in some parts of the US, his vote share has now slipped a fraction of a percentage point below 50%. He is not anticipated to close this gap as counting continues in areas such as Democratic-leaning California. This situation was also observed in 2016, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton for the presidency despite losing the popular vote, having secured only 46% of the total ballots cast. In 2024, Trump’s achievement of winning both the popular vote and the presidency can be viewed as an improvement over his previous victory eight years ago. However, Trump cannot claim to have won an outright majority of the presidential votes cast in the election overall. To do so, he would have needed to win more than 50%, a threshold met by all victors over the past 20 years, with the exception of Trump in 2016. For this reason, his assertion of a historic mandate “may be overwrought,” suggested Chris Jackson of polling firm Ipsos, who indicated that the language used by Trump and his supporters was a tactic to “justify the sweeping actions they’re planning to take once they have control of the government.” By a different metric, Trump’s victory over Harris in 2024 appears more comfortable. He secured 312 votes in the US electoral college compared with Harris’s 226. This is the number that truly matters. The US election is essentially 50 state-by-state contests rather than a single national race. The winner in any given state, apart from Maine and Nebraska, receives all of its electoral votes—for example, 19 in the swing state of Pennsylvania. Both candidates aimed to reach the critical number of 270 electoral votes to achieve a majority in the college. Trump’s 312 electoral votes are better than Joe Biden’s 306 and surpass both Republican wins by George W. Bush. However, this total is well short of the 365 achieved by Barack Obama in 2008 or the 332 Obama won during his re-election, or the colossal 525 by Ronald Reagan in 1984. It is also important to recall that the “winner takes all” mechanism of the electoral college means that relatively slender victories in some critical areas can be amplified into what appears to be a much more resounding triumph. Trump leads by just over 230,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, according to the latest figures from CBS. All three states were the focus of intensive campaigning by both parties prior to the 5 November vote. If just over 115,000 voters in that group had instead chosen Harris, she would have won those Rust Belt swing states, providing her with enough electoral college votes to secure the presidency. While this figure might seem substantial, it represents a mere fraction of the more-than-150 million votes cast nationwide. In other swing states located in the Sun Belt—namely Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina—Trump’s margins of victory were considerably more comfortable. However, when examining the broader power wielded by the Republicans, their majority in the US House, the lower chamber of Congress, remains slender. There is another measure by which to consider Trump’s win, which involves looking at the number of votes he received, although this is a relatively crude metric. The 76.9 million votes he has amassed so far represent the second-highest tally in American history. It is crucial to remember that the US population, and therefore the electorate, is constantly expanding. The more-than-150 million people who voted in the US this year is more than double the 74 million who went to the polls in 1964. This makes comparisons across time challenging. However, the record haul was achieved only four years ago. Biden won 81.3 million votes on his way to the White House in 2020—a year of historic voter turnout when Trump was again on the ticket. Although the Republicans made important breakthroughs in 2024, the Democrats also failed to connect with voters, stated Jackson, who attributed the trend to Americans’ desire to return to “2019 prices” after a years-long cost-of-living squeeze. He remarked, “The real story is Harris’s inability to mobilise people who voted for Biden in 2020.” Update 11 December 2024: This article was amended to clarify that Maine and Nebraska do not adhere to the “winner takes all” mechanism of the electoral college and can have split votes. North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher provides analysis of the presidential election in his twice weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here. Copyright 2024 BBC. All rights reserved. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. 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