There will not be the long, drawn-out ballot count in the battleground states that virtually everybody (including us) had predicted. North Carolina and Georgia fell to Donald J. Trump before midnight Tuesday, while blue counties in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan were showing smaller margins for Kamala Harris than for Joe Biden four years earlier and Trump’s margin in key red counties in most states grew from 2020.
Trump, 78, was leading the popular vote Wednesday morning for the first time in three elections, 71.39 million to 66.45 million, according to the AP.
The once and future president did not wait for the AP to call Wisconsin and leap past the 270 electoral vote threshold when he made his victory speech in West Palm Beach, Florida, about 2:30 am EST.
“Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” Trump told his crowd, referring to an assassination attempt last July in Butler, Pennsylvania, and another last September at Trump International Golf Club in Florida.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was the first foreign leader to hail Trump’s victory, The Guardian reports, writing on social media: “The biggest comeback in US political history! Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump on his enormous win. A much-needed victory for the world!”
It probably doesn’t need to be repeated that Orbán is the only European Union leader allied with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Trump’s “huge victory” a “powerful recommitment” to the US-Israeli alliance, according to Haaretz.
Prior to the market’s opening Wednesday morning, stocks rallied and bitcoin soared, “with investors piling into trades that align with a second Trump presidency,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “The dollar and Treasury yields both jumped, reflecting bets that Trump’s policies could widen the budget deficit and stoke inflation, while tariffs would strain trading partners.”
Meanwhile, myriad media outlets report that exit polls indicate male Latino support for Trump nearly reached 50%; Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, founder of We Are Más, cited the gender gap and told NPR’s Morning Edition the president-elect’s support was up 13 points among Latinos from 2020.
--Compiled and edited by Todd Lassa