Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris to win 2024 presidential election

President-elect Donald Trump is pictured. Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris to retake the Oval Office beginning in Jan. 2025. (Courtesy of Executive Office of the President of the United States/Wikimedia Commons)

By Alexandra Crosnoe
Nov. 6, 2024 2:36 a.m.
Former President Donald Trump will retake the Oval Office, according to the Associated Press.
Trump’s victory over Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris comes after a tumultuous election cycle, including a Manhattan, New York, jury convicting Trump of 34 felony counts of fraud in May and President Joe Biden exiting the race in July. Polls before the election indicated that the election would be among the closest in American history, with nearly deadlocked races in key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
[Related: President Joe Biden ends his reelection campaign, endorses Kamala Harris]
However, Election Day results favored Trump, who is projected to win four out of seven swing states and the popular vote.
Trump addressed a campaign party in Florida around 11:30 p.m. to express appreciation for his supporters, especially those in battleground states.
“This was the greatest political movement of all time – there’s never been anything like this in this country,” he said in the speech. “We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything in our country.”
This election saw a higher voter turnout relative to past elections, said Sonni Waknin, the program manager of the UCLA Law Voting Rights Project. However, she added that several voting centers across the country received threats of violence, including bomb threats at centers in Arizona and Georgia.
“To me, that’s just a sign of how not normal our election season and cycles have become,” she said. “It seems like there’s this type of voting-motivated violence that is definitely different than it was 10 years ago.”
Trump, who held office from 2017 to 2021 and unsuccessfully ran for reelection against Biden in 2020, chose United States Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as his running mate. Together, they campaigned on promises of lowering inflation and undocumented border crossings that occurred during the Biden-Harris administration.
“I had no inflation, virtually no inflation,” Trump said during the presidential debate against Harris on Sept. 10. “The people of our country are absolutely dying with what they’ve (Biden and Harris have) done. They’ve destroyed the economy.”
Democrats, including Harris, have repeatedly labeled Trump a fascist after his false claim that he won the 2020 election and subsequent incitement of the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol, which left multiple people dead. In addition to his conviction in May, Trump has also been indicted for federal election interference because of his incitement of the riot, election interference in Georgia and withholding of classified documents.
Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate and attempted to target Trump’s criminal indictments, past impeachments and use of offensive rhetoric against women and marginalized communities – labeling him as a divisive candidate who is antithetical to American democracy.
The Harris-Walz campaign also targeted Trump for his role in appointing three U.S. Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion. Harris ran several advertisements highlighting women who were adversely affected by the reversal of Roe, including survivors of rape and incest and those who were unable to access care for miscarriages because of restrictive laws.
“I have talked with women around our country. You want to talk about, ‘This is what people wanted?’” Harris said during the presidential debate against Trump. “Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that.”
Known for his strict immigration proposals, Trump has promised to enact several extreme policies during his tenure – including mass deportations of people without legal status, in what he called the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
He also promised to expand workplace raids to identify undocumented immigrants and reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy he enacted in his first term, which requires migrants who requested asylum to return to Mexico while their cases are heard.
“We’re going to have to seal up those borders,” Trump said during his election night speech. “They (immigrants) have to come in legally.”
Trump failed to follow through on several of his policies in 2016, said Norma Mendoza-Denton, a professor of anthropology at UCLA and an expert on Trump’s rhetoric. However, if Republicans gain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate, Americans could expect to see more of his policies enacted, including mass deportations, she added.
AP projected that Republicans flipped the Senate on Tuesday night after flipping key seats in Ohio and West Virginia, while the House of Representatives remained too close to call. In his speech in Florida, Trump said his campaign had garnered support for these seats, allowing Republicans to take control of the Senate.
“If they do have the trifecta of Republicans all the way through the House, Congress, the executive branch and the governors, I think that it’s much more likely that it (Trump’s policies) will be imposed,” Mendoza-Denton said.
Trump also promised to enact conservative economic plans, including cutting the corporate tax rate and eliminating income taxes on social security benefits. He has also indicated he hopes to wage tariffs of 10% and 20% on foreign goods imported into the U.S. and place the Federal Reserve under partial presidential control.
“We’re going to lead the greatest economic comeback in American history under Donald Trump’s leadership,” Vance said during his election night speech.
Trump will take office following the presidential inauguration Jan. 20, 2025.
Contributing reports by Anna Dai-Liu, Daily Bruin senior staff.