In the early hours of Nov. 6, Donald J. Trump won the presidential election against Kamala Harris. Trump swept all swing states with 312-226 electoral votes.
Trump started and ended strong on Election Night, winning North Carolina and Georgia from the get-go. His win was all but assured after he won the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania in the late hours of the night as his campaign preemptively declared victory with 267 electoral votes, just three shy of the 270 required to win.
Octavio Hoglund ’25 commented, “I’m surprised at how fast the votes were tabulated, how fast everything went. It’s crazy how much information you can get in just one night. It took us roughly five days in 2020, but now we have the results in less than 24 hours.”
While Harris and Trump polled neck and neck in swing states leading up to Election Day, Trump overwhelmingly won the Electoral College. He also won the popular vote by more than 4 million, which is the first time the Republican party has won the popular vote in over 20 years.
Greyson Simmons ’27 said, “I’m pretty happy actually…I’ve always thought that basing your moral beliefs [and] putting [them] into politics, they don’t fuse. I think that if you separate that and focus on policies, kind of like separating art from the artist, it works out in our favor.”
Trump has made history as being the first United States president with felony convictions–not just one, which already makes history in itself, but 34. He is also only the second president to win a second term after a previous failed re-election campaign, as well as the oldest president in history at 78 years old.
Trump’s win is widely attributed to voters’ anger with inflation as well as Biden’s unpopular presidency. During Harris’ last-minute campaign, she frequently struggled to break herself away from her predecessor’s low approval ratings.
The fact that she didn’t win the primary, and was instead nominated by Biden after he dropped out when the primary was over, has hurt her chances and drawn criticism.
Additionally, her history of “flip flopping” on certain issues by backing away from her previously progressive stances–such as banning fracking and decriminalizing border crossings–have drawn fire from critics and decreased trust in voters.
Although current inflation is a worldwide trend felt by all countries due to sudden price spikes after Covid, and the US economy is robust against the state of other nations’, Trump’s campaign seized voter discontent and effectively tied Harris to the country’s current economic woes.
While Harris made fundamental freedoms a central theme of her campaign–calling him a fascist and emphasizing that even his own aides have warned of his authoritarian, dictatorial tendencies–kitchen table issues ultimately outweighed the supposed fate of American democracy.
Eric Dean ’25 stated, “I feel very concerned. If you’re any type of minority living in this country, you are at risk…It’s something that we know is coming because they’ve outlined it in places such as Project 2025 and multiple other key high ranking officials have claimed similar viewpoints.”
As Trump made gains in the Electoral College, Republicans also secured the Senate with a 53-46 majority as of press time. Republicans won control of the House. The red victory in the House means conservatives have control of all three branches of America’s government.
This would allow Trump to enact his agenda with significantly less guardrails and speed bumps than his first term. A Republican Congress is likely to pass almost any law Trump desires, and a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court–three of whom were appointed by Trump himself–is expected to provide an icy reception to any progressive legal challenges.
Potential implications range from nationwide restricted abortion access; mass deportations of undocumented immigrants; drastic tariffs (taxes) on imported goods; slashing of the federal bureaucracy; an isolationist approach to international relations; rollback of climate change and environmental regulations; a laissez-faire approach to Russia and Israel, and more.
Democrats lost key voting blocs that historically were considered reliable blue voters–African Americans, Latinos, and union workers–despite Trump’s increasingly inflammatory rhetoric. The 2024 election also saw a historic gender gap, where young women moved to the left while young men moved significantly to the right.
Harris gave her concession speech at her alma mater of Howard University after calling to congratulate Trump on his win. Her response is a marked departure from Trump’s 2020 tactic where he repeated the baseless claims that he won and the election was rigged.
Dean concluded, “We like to say that America [is the] land of the free, most powerful country. But…regardless of how accurate that statement may be, the people that we do have in office are going to not just affect our own country, but the status of the entire world.”
