Tuesday, November 5, 2024
Year : 2, Issue: 10
Fox News projected that Republican Donald Trump has won the US presidency, defeating Democrat Kamala Harris and capping a stunning political comeback four years after he left the White House. Other media outlets have yet to call the race.
In West Palm Beach, Florida, where Trump was expected to speak to his supporters at a convention center, the crowd cheered and chanted, “USA! USA! USA!” when Fox News declared him the winner.
Trump has already won the swing states of North Carolina and Georgia and holds leads in several others, according to Edison Research.
The former president was showing strength across broad swaths of the country, improving on his 2020 performance everywhere from rural areas to urban centers.
Republicans won a US Senate majority after flipping Democratic seats in West Virginia and Ohio. Neither party appeared to have an edge in the fight for control of the House of Representatives where Republicans currently hold a narrow majority.
Trump went into Election Day with a 50-50 chance of reclaiming the White House, a remarkable turnaround from 6 January 2021, when many pundits pronounced his political career to be over. That day, a mob of his supporters stormed Congress in a violent attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Trump picked up more support from Hispanics, traditionally Democratic voters, and among lower-income households that have keenly felt the sting of price rises since the last presidential election in 2020, according to exit polls from Edison.
Trump won 45 per cent of Hispanic voters nationwide, trailing Harris with 53 per cent but up 13 percentage points from 2020.
About 31 per cent of voters said the economy was their top issue, and they voted for Trump by a 79 per cent-to-20 per cent margin, according to exit polls. Some 45 per cent of voters across the country said their family’s financial situation was worse off today than four years ago, and they favored Trump 80 per cent to 17 per cent.
Global investors were increasingly pricing in a Trump win late on Tuesday. US stock futures and the dollar pushed higher, while Treasury yields climbed and bitcoin rose – all flagged by analysts and investors as trades that favor a Trump victory.
At Howard University, where a large watch party was being held for Harris, supporters were leaving in droves, anticipating that the vice president would not address the crowd on Tuesday night.
Cedric Richmond, a co-chair of the Harris campaign, briefly addressed the crowd and said Harris would not speak. “We still have votes to count,” he said. “We still have states that haven’t been called yet.”
Trump Outperforms 2020
Trump was earning a bigger share of the vote than he did four years ago in nearly every corner of the country.
By 12:30 a.m. ET, officials had nearly completed their count of ballots in more than 1,600 counties – about half the country – and Trump’s share was up about 2 percentage points compared to 2020, reflecting a broad if not especially deep shift in Americans’ support for the president they ousted four years ago.
Trump employed increasingly apocalyptic rhetoric while stoking unfounded fears that the election system cannot be trusted. Harris warned that a second Trump term would threaten the underpinnings of American democracy
He improved his numbers in suburban counties, rural regions and even some large cities that are historically bastions of Democratic support; in high-income counties and low-income ones; and in places where unemployment was comparatively high and in places where it is now at record lows.
Harris had banked on big margins among urban and suburban voters, but her support in those places was running well behind President Joe Biden’s in the 2020 election.
Nearly three-quarters of voters said American democracy is under threat, according to the exit polls, underscoring the depth of polarization in a nation where divisions have only grown starker during a fiercely competitive race.
Trump employed increasingly apocalyptic rhetoric while stoking unfounded fears that the election system cannot be trusted. Harris warned that a second Trump term would threaten the underpinnings of American democracy.
Hours before polls closed, Trump claimed on his Truth Social site without evidence that there was “a lot of talk about massive CHEATING” in Philadelphia, echoing his false claims in 2020 that fraud had occurred in large, Democratic-dominated cities. In a subsequent post, he also asserted there was fraud in Detroit.
“I don’t respond to nonsense,” Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey told Reuters.
A Philadelphia city commissioner, Seth Bluestein, replied on X, “There is absolutely no truth to this allegation.”
Dizzying Campaign
Trump voted earlier near his home in Palm Beach, Florida.
“If I lose an election, if it’s a fair election, I’m gonna be the first one to acknowledge it,” Trump told reporters.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a prominent Trump backer, watched the results at Mar-a-Lago with Trump.
Millions of Americans waited in orderly lines to cast ballots, with only sporadic disruptions reported across a handful of states, including several non-credible bomb threats that the FBI said appeared to originate from Russian email domains.
Tuesday’s vote capped a dizzying race churned by unprecedented events, including two assassination attempts against Trump, Biden’s surprise withdrawal and Harris’ rapid rise.
No matter who wins, history will be made.
Harris, 60, the first female vice president, would become the first woman, Black woman and South Asian American to win the presidency. Trump, 78, the only president to be impeached twice and the first former president to be criminally convicted, would also become the first president to win non-consecutive terms in more than a century.
