In the early hours of Wednesday, November 6, Donald Trump proclaimed his victory as next president of the United States. While the final count has not concluded, Trump has already won the over 270 electoral college votes he needed to win the election after securing victories in Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. He is projected to win in Arizona and Nevada, and Michigan.
Current projections also show that Trump will win the popular vote by over five million votes, the first time a Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004, at the height of post-9/11 popularity for the Republican Party. However, numbers indicate that it is not that Trump received a new surge of voter support per say. In 2020, Trump received 74,223,975 votes. In 2024, he received 71,660,413 votes at the time of this reporting. The notable difference is the drastic dip in support for the Democratic candidate, with Biden receiving 81,283,501 votes in 2020 and Harris receiving 66,836,874 votes thus far in 2024.
In his victory speech given from his campaign headquarters in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump proclaimed, “This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country.”
Kamala Harris canceled a scheduled address to supporters at her alma mater Howard University late on Tuesday night. Neither Harris nor the Democratic Party have (at the time of writing this article) publicly conceded their defeat.
When campaigning started over a year ago, the candidate for the Democratic Party was sitting president Joe Biden. In an unprecedented move, Biden withdrew his candidacy on July 21, 2024, after an unequivocally disastrous performance in a televised debate against Trump.
In the subsequent days and weeks, Biden faced an enormous pressure campaign with calls to step down coming in from large sections of his own party, editorial boards of mainstream media outlets including The New York Times, and even an unofficial fundraising boycott. His vice presidential candidate and current VP, Kamala Harris, then took over the ticket and attempted to breathe life into the campaign with just three months remaining.
Despite breaking fundraising records, raising one billion dollars in one quarter, amid the campaign’s failure to address the key issues raised by the Democratic Party base such as the rising cost of living and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Harris drastically underperformed in areas that were key to Biden’s 2020 victory.
As the sitting President, Biden reached historic levels of unpopularity as compared with previous presidents, having overseen one of the worst inflationary crises in recent memory that has yet to fully cool. Working people still struggle under rising food prices and skyrocketing housing costs.
The Biden-Harris administration also staunchly refused to end its unconditional support and funding to Israel. Without such US weapons aid, Israel would be unable to commit genocide in Gaza and atrocities in Lebanon. Ending US aid to Israel became a firm line in the sand for Muslim and Arab voters in key swing states such as Michigan, communities which came out in droves to get Biden into the White House in 2020. In Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest Arab-American population, Biden won by 74.2% of the vote in 2020. As of last night, Harris only has 27.8% of the vote, with 46.8% going to Trump and 22% going to third party candidate Jill Stein, who has stood firmly for an arms embargo against Israel.
Abandon Harris, an organization that was working to specifically have Arab, Muslim, and broadly anti-genocide voters reject Harris at the polls over her support for Israel, squarely blamed Democratic Party policy for Trump’s win. “A Trump presidency didn’t have to be inevitable,” the organization wrote in a post-election statement. “Democrats had every opportunity to win this election with ease. But instead, they chose to betray their base, to abandon the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and to align themselves with some of the darkest figures in American history—like Dick Cheney. The Democrats made their choice, and they alone are responsible for what happened last night and the consequences it will bring to this country.”
The Republican Party also secured majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, which will make it far easier for Trump to push through a far-right agenda, through legislation or by appointing federal judges. This includes the promise to implement mass deportations of 15 to 20 million people, which could result in family separations affecting as many as one in three Latinos in the US. The majority in the Senate will make it easier for Trump to push through federal judge and Supreme Court justice appointments. Trump had previously managed to add three ultra-conservative Supreme Court justices in his short four years in office, perhaps the most consequential legacy of his administration as this precipitated the defeat of nationwide abortion rights, racial justice in education, and student debt relief.
In the coming days and weeks, more will be revealed about Trump’s program and the composition of his cabinet. While he has distanced himself from the ultra-right wing program of Project 2025, it is unclear whether this victory will embolden Trump and his allies to swing even more to the right.
