It's over. After months of campaigning, we finally know who the next President is.
The two candidates were the Democrat Vice President Harris and the Republican former President Trump.
Trump won the popular vote with nearly 75 million votes at the time of writing compared to Harris’ around 71 million at the time of writing, however in America this does not matter since they use a system called the Electoral College to elect a President.
However what this does show us is that Donald Trump won rather convincingly in the context of recent elections, especially since he is only the second Republican candidate to win the popular vote since 1998, and the first since 2004.
In the Electoral College system, each state gets a certain number of electoral college votes based on their population and candidates need to surpass 270 votes in total to win the election.
All but seven states were likely to go either way in this election; these are: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
These seven states in effect decide the election so both candidates heavily focused their resources on these states, staging rallies and large advertising campaigns among other methods.
When the first results came in at midnight EST from Dixville Notch New Hampshire, the election was tied at three votes for either party, reinforcing the idea that this election would be close, as shown by the polls.
However, as vote counting continued throughout the night, we saw the 43 states that were not believed to be competitive go their respective ways in addition to the results for the seven ‘swing states’ that came in.
Trump won all seven swing states, including the former ‘Blue Wall’ states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that he had lost in 2020 despite winning in 2016 (although Wisconsin only went to Trump this election by less than 1%).
This gave Trump a total of 312 electoral votes and Harris 226, with them carrying 31 and 19 (and Washington DC) states respectively.
Even the states that were meant to be ‘safe’ or ‘likely’ for Harris turned out to have large swings In Trump’s direction and may have been more competitive than everyone thought.
New Hampshire, where a Republican has not won since 2000 and went to Biden by over 7% in 2020, went to Harris by around 3% and Minnesota, where Harris’ VP pick, Tim Walz is Governor, and where a Republican has not won since 1972 and also went to Biden by around 7% went to Harris by around 4%.
Even New Jersey, which has not gone to a Republican since 1988 and went to Biden by 16% in 2020, being considered a ‘safe’ Democratic state rather than the ‘likely’ characterisation of Minnesota and New Hampshire only went to Harris by around 6% - just over 200,000 votes out of a state with a population of nearly 10,000,000.
Trump will be inaugurated on the 20th January 2025, replacing Joe Biden as President.
