Donald Trump was projected to become the 47th president early Wednesday, completing the most incredible political comeback in American history.
Trump, 78, was on course for an Electoral College landslide over Vice President Kamala Harris after he reversed his 2020 losses in the crucial states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — running up big margins among his white rural and working class base while making significant inroads among ethnic minorities.
“There’s never been anything like this in this country, and maybe beyond,” the Republican nominee told a rapturous victory celebration at the Palm Beach County Convention Center not far from his Mar-a-Lago resort.
“We’re going to help our country heal,” Trump added, “and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders … fix everything about our country.”
The former president’s victory was the highlight of a big Election Night for Republicans, who were also projected to regain control of the Senate after four years in the minority.
The fate of the House of Representatives was too close to call early Wednesday, with the majority not likely to be determined for several days.
But most stunningly, as of early Wednesday, Trump was favored to win the popular vote and end a 20-year losing streak among Republican nominees in the raw vote total.
In an eerie repeat of the scenes on Election Night 2016, thousands of Harris supporters who gathered on the campus of the veep’s alma mater, Howard University, to watch the results come in were left shocked and in tears as it became clear their candidate could not win.
In the end, it was not Harris but her campaign co-chair, Cedric Richmond, who was left to inform the desolate crowd that the Democratic nominee would not be appearing.
“We still have votes to count … so you won’t hear from the vice president tonight,” said Richmond, a former Louisiana congressman and Biden White House official. “She will be back here tomorrow.”
“Go HU and go Harris.”
The 45th president had projected supreme confidence against Harris, 60, in the final days of the race, with heavy messaging aimed at male voters and a marathon schedule of rallies and media appearances — including a shift at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s.
Meanwhile, Harris downplayed both her potential to make history as the first female president and her racial identity as a child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants.
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Instead, she campaigned as a pro-small business warrior for the middle class, while seemingly disavowing a host of former left-wing stances she had espoused as San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general and a senator from the Golden State.
Trump’s victory makes him just the second president to be elected in non-consecutive cycles, joining Democrat Grover Cleveland — who was picked as the 22nd president in 1884 and the 24th president in 1892, with Republican Benjamin Harrison of Indiana serving four years in between.
The race was widely considered a toss-up right through Election Day, but the first sign that the odds were against Harris came with exit poll results that showed Americans were desperate for change and yearning for relief from economic strain and a massive influx of illegal immigration.
“I will fight for you, for your family and your future – every single day,” Trump vowed. “I will be fighting for you with every breath in my body. I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve and that you deserve.
“This will truly be the golden age of America.”
Both Trump and Harris had to face the American electorate as incumbents of a kind, given the 45th president’s rejection by voters after his first term in 2020 and Harris’ elevation to the Democratic nomination only after President Biden announced July 21 he would not seek a second term.
The race took a nasty turn in its final days that threatened to derail gains Trump had made throughout the last weeks before early voting opened.
On Oct. 27, a massive Trump rally at Madison Square Garden turned into a media feeding frenzy after comedian Tony Hinchcliffe delivered a joke that missed the mark by referring to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”
Two days later, Biden dampened Harris’ message of “joy” and bipartisanship by calling Trump’s supporters “garbage” — a comment that was quietly edited by White House press aides without the input of the executive mansion’s official stenographers.
The 81-year-old Biden at other times handicapped his former running mate by delivering more strident messaging that may have alienated some swing voters about the dangers of a second Trump administration.
“We gotta lock him up,” the president said at a Democratic campaign office in Concord, NH, two weeks before voters headed to the polls, before immediately course-correcting: “Politically, lock him up — lock him out, that’s what we’ve got to do.”
Biden also displayed odd behavior after abandoning his own 2024 run — including donning a red “TRUMP” cap at a Shanksville, Pa., fire station following a 9/11 memorial event.
Meanwhile, the 45th president was dogged by unprecedented criminal indictments out of New York, South Florida, Washington, DC, and Georgia — two of which alleged he had illegally conspired to overturn the 2020 election results.
In the most astonishing moments of the race, Trump cheated death twice after being sought out by would-be assassins at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13 and at his West Palm Beach golf course on Sept. 15.
Republicans roundly rebuked Democrats for potentially ginning up the gunmen with their rhetoric of Trump potentially ending American democracy and likening him to “fascist” dictators like Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Trump’s campaign also operated in the shadow of both espionage campaigns and potential death threats from Iran, leading to another foiled assassination attempt by a suspected agent of Tehran and the indictment of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hackers.
Harris clinched her party’s nomination in August on the heels of a palace coup by top congressional Democrats like House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and influential party donors like Hollywood movie star George Clooney to oust the oldest-ever president from the 2024 ballot.
That effort followed Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump on June 27 — the earliest such a showdown had been held in an election cycle — during which the president spoke haltingly and at times incoherently.
Biden campaign staff later said he had a cold and Harris continued to refer to the performance as merely a “bad night,” dodging pointed questions about when she first learned of her boss’ mental slippage on display that night to millions of viewers.
The VP went on to rake in record fundraising numbers in the short sprint from July to September, totaling more than $1 billion in contributions.
The funding purchased targeted ads that introduced Harris on the national stage as a former-career-prosecutor-turned-lawmaker pivoting to the middle on border enforcement and the economy.
Trump-driven fundraising received a massive infusion from Democrat defectors like hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who even launched a new PAC to spend $80 billion on the former president’s candidacy.
Harris backed off earlier commitments to ban fracking, pass Medicare for All and decriminalize border crossings — even as she was confronted with more radical proposals she had supported as a senator, like taxpayer-funded gender-reassignment surgeries for incarcerated migrants.
Trump campaigned on a commitment to shut down the border and halt the record number of illegal crossings during the Harris-Biden administration, reverse regulations throttling the domestic oil and gas industry and end the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
He also floated proposals to implement taxpayer-funded in vitro fertilization (IVF) for couples and eliminate taxes on tips for service workers — something that Harris borrowed as part of her own platform.
