Donald Trump again elected president

Published 7:30 am Wednesday, November 6, 2024

This combination of pictures created on Oct. 25 shows VP Kamala Harris in Houston and Former President Donald Trump in Austin. (Roberto Schmidt and Sergio Flores/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)

Former President Donald Trump has been voted back into the White House.

Trump took to the stage in Florida just before 1:30 a.m. central time to declare: “Look what happened! Is this great?”


He said he is going to “help our country heal … we made history tonight for a reason.”

“I will not rest until we have delivered a strong, prosperous America,” he added. “This is a magnificent victory.”

NewsNation, which used data from Decision Desk HQ, called the race for Trump at 12:22 a.m. CST after giving the Republican 19 electoral votes from Pennsylvania and three from Alaska. Fox News followed at 12:47 a.m. CST after awarding Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes to Trump.

“Harris was getting Joe Biden margins across all of Pennsylvania, but what Donald Trump was able to do was he was outpacing his margins from 2020 by anywhere from 4% to 6% especially in key counties like Bucks,” Scott Tranter, director of data science for Decision Desk HQ, told NewsNation anchor Chris Cuomo. “So in other words, VP Harris did what she needed to do, but Donald Trump just got a few more votes where he needed to and that made the call basically pretty clear right around 1 a.m. this morning.”

ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN, which use Edison Research for their data, were still at 266 electoral votes for Trump when he made his victory speech. They called the race for Trump around three hours later. Fox News partners with the Associated Press and NORC.

Decision Desk HQ, which provided data and vote analysis for a number of news platforms, was the first to call the election for President Joe Biden in 2020, a full day before the networks did. The company supplied data to Vox and Business Insider in that campaign cycle.

Trump becomes the first president since Grover Cleveland to get elected to nonconsecutive terms — a surprising turn of events after early indications that the vote counting might last several days.

If he serves a full term, Trump, who is 78, will become the oldest U.S. president in history, eclipsing Biden, 81, who dropped out of the race this summer amid concerns about his age and electability following his disastrous debate performance against Trump.