Donald Trump Defeats Kamala Harris in 2024 Presidential Election

11/06/2024 05:50 AM

The 78-year-old Republican overcame countless campaign controversies in his quest to serve a rare non-consecutive term as U.S. president, becoming the first convicted felon and oldest person to clinch the office

Donald Trump has defeated Vice President Kamala Harris to win the 2024 presidential election, per the Associated Press.

On Wednesday, Nov. 6, Wisconsin carried the former president over the finish line in the race to 277 Electoral College votes, making him the first convicted felon elected to the nation's highest office, and only the second commander in chief elected to serve two non-consecutive terms.

At 78 years old, the Republican will be the oldest person to take the oath of office at his inauguration on Jan. 20. His running mate, freshman Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, 40, will preside over the Senate as the country's first millennial vice president.

In defeating Harris, 60, Trump blocked her historic bid to become the nation's first female president, first Asian American president and second Black president.

Trump ran an antagonistic third White House campaign, positioning himself as a scorned ex-president whose fall from grace could only be explained by a vengeful "deep state."

During his two years in the race, Trump built on his longtime strategy of division. Sharing few details about his policy goals, he instead urged voters to throw out the standards by which presidential candidates have been scored for centuries.

He reframed his history-making conviction on 34 felonies as a courageous feat, dismissing mounds of evidence to spin a narrative that he was a heroic survivor of unfair persecution.

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First in the Republican primary race, then in the general, Trump launched a barrage of personal attacks against his opponents to secure the victory. His top GOP primary challenger, Nikki Haley, and Democratic nominee Harris are both women of Indian descent, and their identities and intelligence became frequent fodder for his attacks.

As Haley's popularity among Republican voters saw a spike in late 2023, Trump mimicked his birtherism conspiracies about Barack Obama's citizenship to spread false rumors that Haley was ineligible for the presidency. Nicknaming her "birdbrain," he often highlighted that her given name is Nimarata Nikki Randhawa, wrongly pronouncing it as "Nimraba" or "Nimrata."

When his attention shifted to Harris after securing the Republican nomination, Trump deployed similar tactics, offering various pronunciations of her first name, questioning her race and repeatedly attacking the former prosecutor's intelligence, including saying she's "dumb as a rock" and reportedly calling her the R-word behind closed doors.

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The 2024 presidential election was unlike any other since the United States' founding. What began as a match-up between the two oldest presidents in history — Trump and Joe Biden — quickly shifted over the summer, when a troubling debate performance sparked concerns among Democrats that Biden, 81, was too weak to serve four more years.

A pressure campaign in July from high-ranking Democrats and notable public figures led Biden to withdraw his reelection bid in an unprecedented moment for someone who had already been elected in the primaries. Within hours Harris had won over enough support from Biden's delegates to secure the party's nomination in his place.

Harris' unforeseen ascension to the top of the ticket gave Democrats an immediate surge in polling, putting Trump on defense for the first time in the campaign cycle and kicking off a nail-biting three months that offered little clarity about who was in a stronger position to win the Electoral College.

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Trump's campaign was one of the most turbulent and scandal-ridden in modern times, complete with an endless stream of damning headlines and four criminal cases relating to his handling of classified documents, falsifying of business records and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

He was involved in multiple civil lawsuits, which ultimately held him liable for business fraud, defamation and sexual abuse.

In May, Trump became the first U.S. president convicted of a crime, when he was found guilty of 34 felony charges for attempting to bury evidence of an illegal conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.

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On July 13, a sniper perched near Trump's campaign rally in Butler, Pa., opened fire toward the stage. The shooter killed one rallygoer, critically injured two others and struck the former president's ear. A second apparent assassination attempt was thwarted by Secret Service at Trump's Florida golf club in September before anyone got hurt.

Days after the first assassination attempt, Trump introduced Vance as his VP pick, pulling attention away from the rally shooting and sparking immediate trouble for the campaign as the senator started dominating headlines for his controversial comments. In one resurfaced interview that went viral, he said Harris and other women who have not given birth are "miserable," writing them off as "childless cat ladies." (Harris has two children through her marriage to second gentleman Doug Emhoff.)

Favorability polls quickly determined that Vance was the least-liked vice presidential nominee in recent decades, though his selection did not ultimately deter Trump's base.

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Trump and his allies spent the past two years claiming that Democrats would try to "steal" the 2024 presidential election, building off Trump's baseless lie that he actually won the 2020 election, not Biden, despite no evidence that fraud occurred.

The former president repeatedly hinted that he would refuse to accept defeat in the 2024 election, and Washington braced for his allies to attempt to overturn the results like they did in 2020 if Harris won. Even before ballots were counted, some Republicans suggested that voter fraud had already occurred.

"They are fighting so hard to steal this damn thing," Trump said at one of his final campaign events. "It's a damn shame, and I'm the only one that talks about it because everyone's afraid to damn talk about it, and then they accuse you of being a conspiracy theorist."

Harris, meanwhile, vowed to respect the outcome of the election. Throughout her 107-day presidential campaign, which she framed as a "new way forward" from Trump's longtime grip on American politics, the vice president sounded alarm bells over her opponent's increasingly threatening rhetoric about liberals, immigrants and those who have spoken out against him.