The ballots have been counted in the 2024 election and the winners are known— but what else can we learn from the balloting that just wrapped up?
Here are 13 takeaways from the 2024 election:
1. Trump won, because Harris lost. But not in the way you’re thinking.
President-elect Donald Trump has amassed 75.5 million votes so far, about 50.2% nationally. Vice President Kamala Harris, by contrast, got 72.4 million votes nationwide, or 48.1%.
. In 2020, President Joe Biden was elected with 81.2 million votes— 8.8 million more than his vice president earned this time around. Trump did slightly better than he did four years ago with 74.2 million.
These numbers show that millions more people who voted for Biden in 2020 stayed home or voted for a candidate other than Harris this time around— a deficit that cost her the election.
It also means that Biden remains, for now at least, the highest vote-getting president of all time in terms of raw numbers.