PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) —Four years after leaving the White House, Republican Donald Trump declared on Thursday that he won the 2024 presidential election after Fox News forecasted that he defeated Democrat Kamala Harris.
He addressed a raucous crowd of thousands of fans inside the Palm Beach County Convention Center in the early hours of Wednesday, saying, “America has given us an unparalleled and powerful mandate.”
Edison Research said Trump was poised to win after taking the battleground states of Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania and remaining ahead in the other four. Other news sites hadn’t declared the election for him yet.
She made no attempt to speak to her fans on the campus of Howard University, her alma mater. Later, after midnight, campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond spoke briefly to the crowd and announced that Harris will make an appearance at the public stage on Wednesday.
“There are still votes to count,” he declared.
Republicans took over Democratic seats in Ohio and West Virginia to secure a majority in the U.S. Senate. In the battle for control of the House of Representatives, where Republicans hold a narrow majority now, neither party seemed to have an advantage.
Trump had a 50-50 chance of winning White House on election day-the dramatic turn of events against January 6, 2021, when many analysts have said that his political career was done. On this day, his followers violently try to change the results of the 2020 elections by storming Congress.
Edison exit polls report that Trump won a greater share of lower-income families who have been hurt particularly by price increases since the last presidential election in 2020 and a greater share of Hispanic voters, who are generally Democrats.
Trump won 45% of the nation’s Hispanic voters, 13 percentage points higher than in 2020, but still behind Harris at 53%.
According to exit polls, voters chose Trump 79% to 20%, with 31% naming the economy as the biggest issue facing the country. About 45% of voters nationwide supported Trump 80% to 17% and said their family’s financial situation was worse now than it was four years ago.
Late Tuesday markets around the world began pricing in a Trump win. Treasury rates jumped, bitcoin jumped, and US futures and the dollar were rising, all the measures analysts and investors point to as signs of supporting a Trump win.
In anticipation that the vice president would not speak to the crowd on Tuesday night, fans were flooding out of Howard University, where a large watch party was being held for Harris.
In a brief speech to the crowd, Harris campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond said Harris would not say anything. “There are still votes to count,” he said. “States that haven’t been called yet still exist.”
TRUMP DOBBLE OVER 2020
In virtually every region of the nation, Trump was out-polling the share he did four years ago.
As of 12:30 a.m. ET, officials had nearly tabulated ballots in more than 1,600 of the nation’s counties-a little more than half-since Election Day. But Trump’s percentage was climbing by about 2 points from 2020. That suggests a broad-but not particularly significant-shift among voters who chose to abandon the president they elected just four years ago.
In counties with high and low incomes, in areas where unemployment was quite high, and in areas where it is currently at record lows, he increased his numbers in suburban counties, rural areas, and even in big cities that had previously been Democratic strongholds.
Harris had been looking to garner significant percentages of votes in the suburbs and cities, but in the 2020 contest, she lagged far behind President Joe Biden in such places.
According to exit polls, more than three-quarters of voters think that American democracy is in danger, with extreme polarization in a country whose divisions have only been more defined throughout a very close contest.
Trump repeated the claims in 2020, writing on his Truth Social website hours before votes closed that day that there was “a lot of talk about massive CHEATING” going on in Philadelphia. In another post, he claimed fraud was occurring in Detroit.
Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey told reporters, “I don’t respond to nonsense.”
Philadelphia municipal commissioner Seth Bluestein responded on X: “There is absolutely no truth to this allegation.”
CRAZY CAMPAIGN
Trump voted earlier in the day in Palm Beach, Florida, near his Mar-a-Lago estate.
“I’m going to be the first to acknowledge if I lose an election, if it’s a fair election,” Trump told reporters.
Prominent Trump supporter Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, was among those who spent the evening at Mar-a-Lago with Trump to watch returns.
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This year, except in a very few states where the election was briefly disrupted by several suspicious bomb threats the FBI said seemed to originate from Russian email addresses, millions of Americans stood in line to vote.
This is a frenzied contest marred by extraordinary happenings, like two attempted assassinations on Trump, Biden’s sudden resignation, and Harris’ meteoric rise, but which concluded its vote Tuesday.
At 60, Harris would be the first South Asian American woman and the first Black woman and woman to win the presidency. Trump, then 78 years old, would be the first president in nearly a century to win non-consecutive terms; the only president to have been impeached twice; and the first former president to be convicted of a crime.
Summary:
- Donald Trump addresses frenzied supporters in Florida following a declaration of his win in the US election.
- “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” he says as he applauds spectators.
- The battleground states of Georgia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania have been taken by the Republican, leaving little room for a Kamala Harris victory.
- Fox News just declared that Trump won a moment before he began his speech; other US television networks have not declared yet.
- It would be an historic comeback if Trump returns to the White House after he lost to Joe Biden during the 2020 polls.
