Donald Trump declared victory on Wednesday over Kamala Harris after clinching Pennsylvania and other battleground states that were deciding the next US president after the most dramatic election campaign in generations.
Addresssing jubilant supporters in Florida, the Republican former president said “we made history” and claimed “an unprecedented and powerful mandate” after he was projected to have won in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia.
It all but guaranteed him an improbable comeback four years after he was beaten by Joe Biden. Trump also claimed victory in 2020, falsely and prematurely. But this time, the numbers were with him.
US media were yet to project results in the four other swing states: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. But Vice President Harris faced a seemingly impossible path to reach the magic number of 270 votes in the Electoral College.
The Democrat’s campaign said she would not be speaking overnight at her own gathering at her alma mater, Howard University in Washington DC.
At 740am UK time, Trump was projected to have 267 Electoral College votes and his Democratic opponent was on 214.
Security was reinforced at counting centres across the nation, with extra police deployed and National Guard troops on standby, given the threat of violence from Trump’s extremist fans after his false claims that he won the 2020 election and that only fraud could stop him winning this time.
Before Trump and Harris holed up with their supporters to watch the results, tens of millions of Americans had added their ballots to the 84 million cast early as they chose between radically different visions for the country.
In a campaign defined by the economy, reproductive rights and immigration, exit polls showed women broke decisively for Harris, who is bidding to be America’s first female commander-in-chief and warned that a second Trump term would be defined by revenge from a would-be dictator against his opponents.
But male voters mirrored the gender split among women, backing Trump by the same margin of 54% to 44%, with the Republican vowing to bring “new heights of glory” to the United States with an isolationist foreign policy, tax cuts and mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
Overall, Harris appeared to be lagging President Biden’s performance against Trump in 2020.
Black voters were overwhelmingly in favour of the mixed-race Harris (86% to 12%), but that was a smaller margin than built by Biden in 2020 and Barack Obama in elections before that.
Her lead among Hispanic voters was far narrower (53% to 45%). In 2020, Biden won the Hispanic vote by 32 points.
The 81-year-old Biden’s shock withdrawal from this year’s race, after a series of gaffes culminating in a disastrous debate against Trump, upended the campaign when Harris, 60, stepped in to take up the Democratic mantle in July.
Before and after that, two assassination attempts against Trump, 78, elevated the former president to martyr status among his devoted supporters.
The Republicans were projected to have won back the Senate, which has the power to free up or block a president’s agenda, with Bernie Moreno defeating incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown in Ohio.
Trump’s party also expressed confidence that it would retain control of the House of Representatives, offering unalloyed power for the former president if he does return to the White House eight years after the property mogul’s surprise defeat of Hillary Clinton.