The final electoral college count is Trump: 312, Harris: 226.
Just days after former President Donald Trump was projected to have won the presidency, Trump's transition team operation has begun, with transition co-chairs confirming that he will be selecting personnel to serve under his leadership in the coming days.
Trump is also the projected winner in Arizona, a state the former president flipped after losing it to Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump's projected win in the vital swing state marks a sweep of the battleground states.
Milwaukee County reported much of its remaining votes, most of which were absentee votes, and they went heavily enough for Democrats that Sen. Tammy Baldwin has taken a slender lead over Eric Hovde in the Senate race. Looking at the roughly 50,000 votes that we think may still be outstanding, she is probably a marginal favorite to hold on at this point, potentially saving a Senate seat for the Democrats.
And Trump keeps adding to his total: ABC News is projecting that he has won Alaska's three electoral votes. He now has 279 total.
Prognosticators will surely pick through the 2024 campaign in the coming weeks and months, but, as Dan wrote earlier today, incumbent governments around the world have struggled mightily at the ballot box this year. Trump's win showed that the U.S. is no exception to that trend. Rising inflation and lingering malaise from the COVID-19 pandemic have toppled decades-long majorities in all sorts of different countries, ranging from the United Kingdom, to Botswana, to Japan. While Harris had hoped to distance herself from voters' negative views of Biden's presidency, it proved to be too herculean a task.
We've seen four years of a Trump presidency already, so in some ways, we know what to expect. Trump's focus on immigration, for example, will surely have ramifications. If he pursues his protectionist economic approach, that too will have consequences. In foreign policy, his presidency will certainly influence the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. Trump's disdain for the country's small-d democratic norms could also alter how the country functions. However, how exactly this all plays out is impossible to really know, and Trump has an unpredictable side to him to a degree unlike really any public figure we've seen. The democratic process has played out, and Trump has four years ahead of him to try to reshape America as he and his supporters want.
