WASHINGTON, N.C. — Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States on Wednesday, an extraordinary comeback for the former president who defeated Vice President Kamala Harris handily in his bid to recapture the White House.
With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency.
“We’ve been through so much together, and today you showed up in record numbers to deliver a victory,” Trump told throngs of his cheering supporters in Florida. “This was something special, and we’re going to pay you back.”
The results cap a historically tumultuous and competitive election season that included two assassination attempts targeting Trump and a shift to a new Democratic nominee just a month before the party’s convention. Trump will inherit a range of challenges when he assumes office on Jan. 20, including heightened political polarization and global crises that are testing America’s influence abroad.
His win against Harris, the first woman of color to lead a major party ticket, marks the second time he has defeated a female rival in a general election. Harris, the current vice president, rose to the top of the ticket after President Joe Biden exited the race amid alarm about his advanced age. Despite an initial surge of energy around her campaign, she struggled during a compressed timeline to convince disillusioned voters that she represented a break from an unpopular administration.
Trump is the first former president to return to power since Grover Cleveland regained the White House in the 1892 election. At 78, Trump is the oldest person elected to the office, and his vice president, 40-year-old Ohio Sen. JD Vance, will become the highest-ranking member of the millennial generation in the U.S. government.
Trump won North Carolina for the third time as a presidential candidate, even as statewide races were closely contested. Trump won 50.95% to Harris’ 47.56%, while Democrats Josh Stein, Rachel Hunt and Jeff Jackson all won key Council of State elections on the same ballot. As of Wednesday morning, Trump held a nearly 5 million advantage in the popular vote, which would be the largest margin of victory for a Republican presidential candidate since George H. W. Bush in 1988.
The election will be viewed as a resounding success for the GOP, which was led by two North Carolinians: former NCGOP chairman Michael Whatley and Lara Trump, the former and future president’s daughter-in-law.
Republicans also reclaimed control of the Senate and were inching toward holding onto control of the U.S. House, giving Trump a mandate as he enters his second, and what he says will be his final, term in office.
While Harris focused much of her initial message around themes of joy, Trump channeled a powerful sense of anger and resentment among voters.
He seized on frustrations over high prices and fears about crime and migrants who illegally entered the country on Biden’s watch. He also highlighted wars in the Middle East and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to cast Democrats as presiding over — and encouraging — a world in chaos.
It was a formula Trump perfected in 2016 when he cast himself as the only person who could fix the country’s problems.
This campaign’s defining moment came in July when a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. A bullet grazed Trump’s ear and killed one of his supporters. His face streaked with blood, Trump stood and raised his fist in the air, shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Weeks later, a second assassination attempt was thwarted after a Secret Service agent spotted the barrel of a gun poking through the greenery while Trump was playing golf.
As he prepares to return to the White House, Trump has vowed to launch the largest deportation effort in the nation’s history, to use the Justice Department to punish his enemies, to dramatically expand the use of tariffs and to again pursue a zero-sum approach to foreign.
North State Journal contributed to this report.
