Former Republican President Donald Trump won the seven undecided states, considered key to ensuring victory in the US presidential elections.
In the end, the victory of former US president Donald Trump in the elections for a new four-year presidential term in the White House was overwhelming.
Before the Nov. 5 election, national polls showed Vice President Kamala Harris with a slight lead over Trump, perhaps a percentage point or two.
According to the polls, Harris, the Democratic candidate, and Republican Trump were practically tied in seven battleground states that election analysts considered crucial to the outcome of the election.
However, Trump won all seven territories, giving him a wide lead in the state-by-state vote count in the Electoral College, 312 to 226, which determines the outcome of the US presidential election.
The number needed to win the presidency is 270. The now president-elect won all seven states in dispute by a range from just under 1% in Wisconsin to more than 6% in Arizona.
On January 20, 2025, Trump, 78, will take office as the country's 47th president and the first to win two non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland in the 1890s. He is the oldest elected president in history of the United States.
Trump also won the popular vote, the first Republican candidate to do so since former President George W. Bush in 2004.
While the final votes are still being counted, Trump is already the clear winner, with nearly 75 million votes so far to just under 71 million for Harris, a lead of 50.5% to 47.9%.
Trump's vote count in 2024 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.
American pollsters like to say that their polls are just a snapshot in time, and not necessarily predictive.
But in Trump's three campaigns for president since 2016, his level of support has consistently been underestimated in polls, no matter how many times pollsters have tried to adjust their published results to account for a hidden vote for Trump from people who They are not willing to tell them, not even the anonymous pollsters, that they chose the former president when they went to the voting centers or cast their vote by mail.
Exit polls showed that women voters favored Harris and men favored Trump. Voters with more education voted for Harris, while those without college degrees voted for Trump, but nearly two-thirds of Americans do not have a college degree.
By gathering his majority of votes, Trump made gains in two traditional sectors of the Democratic electorate: black and Latino voters.
According to The Associated Press VoteCast voter survey, 16% of Black voters supported Trump in 2024, double the number in his 2020 campaign. By comparison, 83% of Black voters supported Kamala Harris, compared to 91% who supported Biden in 2020.
Democrats also lost ground among Latino voters: 56% voted for Harris in 2024, compared to 63% who voted for Biden in 2020. Support for Trump increased from 35% four years ago to 42% this year.