President-elect Donald Trump got very close to a majority of the vote in this presidential election, but not quite. It is not exactly the “unprecedented and powerful mandate” Trump claimed on election night.
In fact, this year’s popular-vote margin is the second-closest since 1968 and still tightening. It shows just how closely divided the country is politically, and that any shift to the right is marginal.
Republicans are likely to have the same or a slightly smaller House majority as they have now, and despite new GOP control of the Senate, there is evidence that many Republicans in key states voted for Trump but not necessarily for Republican Senate candidates.
With 96% of the vote in, Trump has, according to the Associated Press, 49.97% to Vice President Harris’ 48.36%, or 76.9 million votes to 74.4 million. (The U.S. Election Atlas has a higher raw vote total and a slightly narrower margin, 49.78% to 48.23, or 77.1 million votes to 74.7 million.)
It’s the highest percentage Trump has received in his three runs at the presidency. (He got just less than 46% in 2016 and less than 47% in 2020.) Votes are still being counted, including provisional and overseas ballots across the country.
The 2000 election was decided by just 0.51 percentage points with then-Vice President Al Gore winning the popular vote but losing in the Electoral College to George W. Bush. The 2024 margin may very well get slightly closer, as the provisional ballots have favored Harris and they are coming from blue states like California, Oregon and New York.
Of course, U.S. presidential elections are not decided by the popular vote; they are decided by the Electoral College. And on that score, Trump had a fairly wide 312 to 226 Electoral College victory, the widest since 2012.
In 2016, Trump also won in the Electoral College but lost the popular vote by 3 million to Democrat Hillary Clinton. A reason for Trump’s popular-vote gains this time is that Harris was well below President Biden’s 2020 vote totals in blue states.
Just in New York and California, Harris was off Biden’s totals by almost 3 million votes. And most of that was not vote-switching. In New York, Harris was off by about 900,000 votes, but Trump only gained about 200,000 from his 2020 total. In California, Harris got roughly 1.9 million fewer votes than Biden, but Trump only got about 60,000 more.
In this election, demographics did not determine how people voted
Often turnout is lower outside of the states that get most of the political attention. This election saw the most political advertising dollars in the smallest field of states. Overall in this election, turnout was just slightly lower than in 2020 at about 63.8%, the second highest in the last 100 years.
This year, three of the top turnout states were those formerly Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire were also within 5 points and had been considered potentially competitive states.
