Turnout: 64.10%
About this election
The 2024 United States presidential election, held on 5 November 2024, returned Donald Trump to the White House in one of the most remarkable comebacks in American history, making him only the second president ever elected to two non-consecutive terms. Trump, the Republican nominee, defeated the Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, the sitting vice-president, winning the Electoral College by 312 votes to 226 and, unlike in 2016, also carrying the national popular vote: 77,302,580 votes (49.80%) to Harris's 75,017,613 (48.33%). It was the first time a Republican presidential candidate had won the popular vote since 2004.
The campaign was without modern precedent. The incumbent president, Joe Biden, had launched a re-election bid, but a halting debate performance against Trump in June 2024 intensified concerns about his age and capacity; under mounting pressure from his party he withdrew from the race on 21 July 2024 — the first president to abandon a re-election campaign so late since the modern primary era began — and endorsed Harris, who consolidated the nomination within days. Trump, meanwhile, had swept the Republican primaries despite facing multiple criminal indictments, and survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. The compressed, turbulent contest unfolded against a backdrop of voter anxiety over inflation, immigration and the direction of the country.
The election was again decided by the Electoral College and its 270-vote threshold. As in 2020, the two states that split their electors did so: Maine awarded one vote to Trump from its second district, and Nebraska awarded one to Harris from its second district (Omaha). The 2024 vote was also the first conducted under the apportionment of electors drawn from the 2020 census, which shifted several electoral votes toward Sun Belt states.
Persistent inflation and the cost of living were the dominant concern, and exit polls showed most voters judged the economy negatively despite falling unemployment. Immigration and a record number of border crossings during Biden's term were the second great theme, central to Trump's campaign. Abortion, energised by the Supreme Court's 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, mobilised Democratic voters but proved insufficient to overcome economic discontent.
Trump won all seven of the principal battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the first time either party had swept them in the modern era. He improved on his 2020 performance almost everywhere, including in traditionally Democratic strongholds and among Latino, Black and young male voters, narrowing Democratic margins even in states he lost. The state-by-state map shows a broad, nationwide rightward shift rather than a regional one, with Harris holding the Pacific Coast, the Northeast, Illinois and a shrunken set of inland states plus the District of Columbia.
Trump's win came alongside Republican capture of the Senate and retention of the House, handing the party unified control of the federal government. Combined with a conservative Supreme Court majority, the result positioned the incoming administration to pursue an expansive agenda. Harris's defeat, after a campaign of barely more than a hundred days, prompted extensive debate within the Democratic Party over its message, its coalition and the decision-making that had kept Biden on the ticket so long.
Trump's victory completed a political arc unmatched in over a century: defeated in 2020, twice impeached, and facing criminal prosecution, he nonetheless won a clear national mandate four years later. By carrying the popular vote and expanding his coalition across racial and geographic lines, the 2024 result suggested a durable realignment of American politics around economic populism and cultural conservatism.
Federal Election Commission (FEC), official 2024 presidential general-election results — fec.gov.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.