The president-elect of the United States, Republican Donald Trump, has said that his electoral victory gave him a “powerful and unprecedented” mandate to govern.
By beating her Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the seven key states on the electoral map, the so-called swing statesgained a decisive advantage.
Trump’s party also won both houses of Congress, giving the president – who returns to the White House – considerable power to implement his agenda.
He has broadened his appeal to nearly every voter group since his 2020 defeat. And in doing so, he achieved a comeback that no previously defeated president has ever achieved in modern history.
But the data suggests that it was a much closer contest than he and his allies suggest.
Its communications director, Steven Cheung, has called it a “landslide” victory. However, this week it emerged that his vote percentage has fallen below 50%, as counting continues.
“I think it’s grandiose that they call it a landslide,” said Chris Jackson, senior vice president of the U.S. team at the polling company Ipsos.
Trump’s language suggested landslide victories, Jackson noted, when in reality it was a few hundred thousand votes in key areas that propelled Trump back to Washington.
That’s thanks to the United States’ electoral college system, which amplifies relatively narrow victories in key states.
Here are three ways to see the extent of Trump’s victory:
Most voters chose someone other than Trump
With 76.9 million votes and counting, Trump won what is known as the popular vote, according to the latest count from the BBC’s US partner CBS News.
That means he got more votes than Harris (74.4 million) or any other candidate. No Republican has accomplished that feat since 2004..
But as vote counting continues in some parts of the United States, Trump has fallen a fraction of a percentage point below 50% in his vote share.
He is not expected to make up the gap as counting continues in places like Democratic-leaning California.
The same thing happened in 2016, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton and won the presidency despite losing the popular vote (having received only 46% of the total votes cast).
In 2024, Trump’s victory in both the popular vote and the presidency can be considered an improvement over his last victory eight years ago.
But Trump cannot say he won an absolute majority of the presidential votes cast in the election.
To do so, he would have to have won more than 50%, as all the winners have done in the last 20 years, except himself in 2016.
For this reason, his claim to have a historic mandate “may be exaggerated”said Chris Jackson of the polling firm Ipsos, who said the language from Trump and his supporters was a tactic used to “justify the radical actions they plan to take once they take control of the government.”
His victory in the electoral college was resounding
By a different metric, Trump’s victory over Harris in 2024 looks more comfortable. He won 312 votes in the US electoral college compared to Harris’ 226.
And this is the number that really matters. American elections are actually 50 state-by-state contests, rather than a single national contest.
The winner of a given state gets all of its electoral votes (for example, 19 in Pennsylvania, which is a swing state).
Both candidates hoped to reach the magic number of 270 electoral votes to obtain a majority in the electoral college.
Trump’s 312 are better than Joe Biden’s 306 and surpass George W. Bush’s two Republican victories, but they are very far from the 365 that Barack Obama achieved in 2008, the 332 that Obama obtained when he was re-elected or Ronald Reagan’s colossal 525 in 1984.
And it’s important to remember that the winner-take-all mechanics of the electoral college mean that relatively narrow victories in some critical areas can be amplified into what looks like a much more resounding victory.
Trump leads by just over 230,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the latest figures from CBS. The three states were the focus of intense bipartisan campaigning ahead of the Nov. 5 vote.
If just over 115,000 voters from that group had chosen Harris, she would have won those key Rust Belt states, giving her enough electoral college votes to win the presidency.
It may seem like a lot of people, but the number is a drop in the ocean of the more than 150 million votes that were cast throughout the country.
In other key states in the Sunbelt region – Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina – Trump’s margins of victory were much more comfortable.
But looking at the power Republicans wield more broadly, their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, the lower house of Congress, remains slim.
Second highest vote count, behind Biden in 2020
There is another measure by which Trump’s victory can be considered, which is to look at the number of votes he received, although this is a relative measure.
The 76.9 million it has amassed so far is the second-highest tally in U.S. history.
However, it is important to remember that the American population, and therefore the electorate, is constantly growing. The more than 150 million people who voted in the United States this year are more than double the 74 million who went to the polls in 1964.
That makes comparisons over time complicated. But it was only four years ago that the record was achieved.
Biden won 81.3 million votes on his way to the White House in 2020, a year of historic voter turnout when Trump was back in the race.
Although Republicans made significant gains in 2024, Democrats also failed to connect with voters, said Jackson, who attributed the trend to Americans’ desire to return to “2019 prices” after a years-long cost-of-living contraction.
“The real story is Harris’ inability to mobilize the people who voted for Biden in 2020,” the expert added.
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