How big was Donald Trump’s election victory?

Republican President-elect Donald Trump said his election victory gave him “unprecedented and powerful” authority to govern.

He defeated Democratic challenger Kamala Harris in all seven closely watched swing states, giving him a decisive advantage overall.

Trump’s party also won both houses of Congress, giving the president back significant power to enact his agenda.

He has broadened his appeal to most groups of voters since his 2020 defeat. And in doing so, he has staged a comeback unprecedented by any defeated president. previously in modern history.

But the data shows it’s a much closer contest than he and his allies suggest.

His communications director, Steven Cheung, called it a “terrifying” victory. However, this week it was reported that his vote share had dropped below 50% as vote counting continued.

“I find it monumental that they called it a landslide,” said Chris Jackson, senior vice president at U.S. exploration group Ipsos.

Jackson said Trump’s language suggested landslide victories when in reality only a few hundred thousand votes in key areas pushed Trump back to the White House.

That’s thanks to America’s electoral college system, which helps magnify relatively slim victories in swing states.

Here are three ways to look at his victory.

With 76.9 million votes and counting, Trump has won the popular vote, according to the latest vote tally by CBS News, the BBC’s partner in the US.

That means he won more votes than Harris (74.4 million) or any other candidate. No Republican has achieved that feat since 2004.

But as vote counting continues in some parts of the US, his vote share has now dropped below 50% one percent of his vote share. He is expected to be unable to make up the gap as vote counting is taking place in places like California that favor Democrats.

This also happened in 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton for the presidency despite losing the popular vote – winning only 46% of the total vote.

In 2024, Trump winning both the popular vote and the presidency could be seen as an improvement over his last victory eight years ago.

But Trump cannot say he won a majority of the presidential vote in the overall election.

To do so, he needs to win more than 50% approval, as all winners have done in the past 20 years – except Trump in 2016.

For this reason, his claim to a historic mandate “may be overwrought,” said Chris Jackson of polling firm Ipsos, who said the language of Trump and his supporters is a tactic used to “justify the far-reaching actions they intend to take”. lost once they had control of the government”.

By another measure, Trump’s victory over Harris in 2024 looks more comfortable. He won 312 votes in the US electoral college compared to Harris’ 226 votes.

And this is a really important number. The US election is actually 50 state-by-state races rather than a single national race.

The winner of any state wins all the electoral votes – for example, 19 votes in the swing state of Pennsylvania. Both candidates hope to reach the magic number of 270 electoral votes to win a majority in the field.

Trump’s 312 is better than Joe Biden’s 306 and beats both Republican victories over George W Bush. But it’s very poor compared to the 365 that Barack Obama achieved in 2008, or the 332 that Obama won when he was re-elected, or the whopping 525 that Ronald Reagan got in 1984.

And it’s important to remember that the “winner takes all” system of the electoral college means that relatively slim wins in some key areas can be amplified into 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. All three states are the focus of intense election campaigns by both parties ahead of the November 5 vote.

If more than 115,000 voters in that group choose Harris instead, she will win those Rust Belt swing states, giving her enough votes in the electoral college to win the presidency .

That may sound like a lot of people, but this number is just a drop in the ocean of more than 150 million votes cast nationwide.

In other swing states in the Sun Belt — specifically Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina — Trump’s margin of victory was much more comfortable.

But when looking at the power Republicans wield more broadly, their majority in the US House of Representatives, the lower house of Congress, remains slim.

There is another measure of Trump’s victory: the number of votes he received, although this is a relatively crude measure.

The $76.9 million he has accumulated so far is the second highest figure in American history.

It is important to remember that the US population, and therefore the number of voters, is constantly growing. More than 150 million people voted in the US this year, more than double the 74 million who voted in 1964.

That makes comparisons over time difficult. But only four years ago this record was achieved.

Biden won 81.3 million votes on his way to the White House in 2020 — a year of historic turnout when Trump was once again on the ticket.

Although the Republican Party made important breakthroughs in 2024, the Democratic Party also failed to connect with voters, said Jackson, who attributed this trend to Americans’ desire to turn returning to “2019 prices” after years of tightening the cost of living.

“The real story is Harris’s inability to mobilize the people who voted for Biden in 2020,” he said.

North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher covers the presidential election in his twice-weekly US Elections newsletter. Readers in the UK can Register here. Those outside the UK can Register here.