With nearly every state’s vote count certified, Donald Trump captured about 77.3 million votes (49.81%) to Kamala Harris’ 75 million votes (48.33%) — a 1.48-point margin that’s less than half the 3.12-point margin Trump led by when we first launched our National Popular Vote Tracker two days after Election Day and the closest popular vote result since 2000.
The post-election “blue shift” has become a quadrennial fact of life as urban areas and blue states with more liberal voting laws take longer to count provisional and vote-by-mail ballots than rural areas and red states. But it does mean Trump’s triumph now looks like slightly less of a “mandate” than some pundits made it out to be in the immediate aftermath of Nov. 5.
In the end, the 2024 election was decided by 229,766 votes across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin out of about 155.2 million cast nationally, with Pennsylvania (a 1.7-point Trump margin) finishing as the “tipping point” state in the Electoral College. As narrow as it was, that’s about triple the 77,744-vote margin by which Trump won the Great Lakes
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The Cook Political Report is an independent, non-partisan newsletter that analyzes elections and campaigns for the US House of Representatives, US Senate, Governors and President as well as American political trends.
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