US election: How big a win was this for Donald Trump?
Donald Trump said he built "the biggest, the broadest, the most unified coalition in all of American history". The Sky News data team assess whether he's right.
Monday 20 January 2025 15:18, UK
"America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate. It was a historic realignment. Uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense."
Never knowingly understated, those were some of the words of Donald Trump as he proclaimed victory in the morning after the election on Tuesday 5 November 2024.
Unlike some of his claims following the 2020 election, much of the statement above is supported by data.
President-elect Trump increased his vote share in 90% of US counties, compared with 2020, and became just the second Republican since 1988 to win the popular vote.
He also increased his vote significantly among many demographic groups which had been least likely to back him in the past.
As he prepares to become president for the second time, where does his victory rank in history, and how much of a mandate does he really have from the American people?
How big was the win?
Kamala Harris would have won if she had persuaded 229,766 people in the right proportions in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan to vote for her instead of Trump.
That sounds like a big number, but it's less than 0.15% of the 155 million-plus people that cast votes in the election, and less than 1.5% of the voters in those three key states.
Presidential elections often tend to be even closer than this, however. Trump's win this year is the clearest one this century other than Obama's 2008 landslide.
What has Trump claimed?
At his pre-inauguration speech in Washington DC on Sunday, Donald Trump made all sorts of claims about the size of his election victory. We’re going to go through them one by one and see which of them are legitimate.
"We won all the swing states and we won them by historic margins."
The states that are categorised as swing states change from election to election, depending on what is deemed to be closest by pollsters.
This time around they were Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada.
Trump did indeed win all seven and was the first president in recent history to do so. The "winning by historic margins" is a bit of a stretch, however.
His biggest margin of victory in a swing state was 5.5 points in Arizona. That was higher than all of Biden's margins, but smaller than some of his own in 2016, and eight of Obama's in either 2008 or 2012.
"We won the great state of Florida by 13 points, and nobody's done that ever."
This is demonstrably untrue. Trump's margin of victory in Florida was impressive, and the biggest in terms of raw votes in history.
But all three Republican wins in the 1980s were larger in terms of vote share.
"All 50 states shifted towards the Republican party and nobody's done that ever."
Trump is indeed the first Republican to do this, but not the first person. Jimmy Carter achieved the feat of swinging all 50 states, plus Washington DC, in his direction for his 1976 victory.
That came in the aftermath of Republican President Richard Nixon having resigned, following the Watergate scandal, after his 1972 landslide victory.
Carter’s popularity didn't last long though. Ronald Reagan won a historic victory in 1980, where he achieved a positive swing in 49 states plus DC, only missing out on Vermont.
"We won the largest number of African American voters in Republican party history."
We can't say this for sure, because we don't know the number of voters from different races that voted for each candidate.
Examining what the exit poll tells us, and taking into account population rises, this probably is right in terms of the raw numbers of votes, however, but not in terms of vote share.
Trump slightly narrowed the still significant vote margin for black voters at this election, from favouring Democrats by 75 points to 73, but that's not the best figure that a Republican has ever achieved.
Reagan did better in 1980, when 14% of black voters backed him compared with 83% who voted for the Democrats. And George HW Bush had a similar share to Trump in 1992, despite losing the election. In each case, however, the Democrats were still favoured by a significant majority of the black population.
"We won more Hispanic American votes than any Republican has ever gotten before, by a lot, and we won Latino men and women…”
This one is closer to being completely true. Trump's vote share among Hispanics was higher than any Republican on record and he secured a majority among Hispanic men.
Democrats still preferred Harris overall, however, thanks to their lead of almost 20 points among Hispanic women.
"We also took back the US Senate, and the House Republicans won their largest popular vote majority in a presidential year since 1928."
The Republicans did indeed win their largest popular vote majority in a presidential year for almost 100 years. They don't have too many to choose from in that time, though.
After that 1928 victory, the Democrats won the popular vote (not always the most seats) in the House at every general election for 72 years.
The Republicans have won the popular vote just four times out of 24 since then, including in 2016 coinciding with Trump's first campaign.
"Republicans have never won the youth vote. We win a lot of votes but we never won the youth vote. We won the youth vote by 36 points, so I like TikTok. Romney lost it by 40 points, that's a very big spread."
With this particular statistic, it's difficult to even work out what Trump is referring to, because of how far it is from reality.
The exit poll shows that, while Trump improved significantly among younger voters, Harris was still preferred overall by a majority of 18-29 year olds (and indeed 30-44 year olds).
The vote was evenly split among white voters aged 18-29 and Trump held a one-point lead among men aged 18-29, but there's no sign of a 36-point lead among any group that would normally be categorised as the "youth vote".
How big were the gains?
Trump made improvements almost everywhere, receiving 3m more votes than he did in 2020, but despite the warnings of what was at stake at this election, the final number of people to cast a ballot was lower than in 2020.
The Democrat vote is down around 6 million, while Trump's vote was up 3m.
In terms of share of the vote, however, he increased his in more counties than any other candidate since at least 2004, and he recorded the highest Republican vote share this century in more than two-thirds of counties across America.
Most of those improvements weren't by much, however. Just 120 out of the 2,800 counties recorded an improvement of more than five points - the lowest number by a winning president this century other than Joe Biden.
That's reflected if you look at the number of counties he flipped from being majority Democrat to majority Republican - 95 counties in total. That number was also the lowest this century, other than that achieved by Biden and less than half of what Trump flipped in 2016, perhaps a sign of the recent partisanship in US politics.
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What about the type of people backing him?
This tells a similar story.
President-elect Trump gained ground among most voter groups. The biggest increase in support was among Latinos (up from around a third to just under half) and younger voters (up from around a third to two-fifths) who were key to securing his win.
A smaller increase of eight points was enough for him to win majority support among people earning less than $50,000, who had backed every Democrat since Bill Clinton. And crucially, he narrowly took back the suburbs, where American elections are so often won or lost.
Those marginal gains across different groups helped Trump to win the key battlegrounds and go some way to broadening his coalition of voters, making it more representative of the average American.
The youngest voters, oldest voters, lowest-earning voters and Latinos all voted significantly closer to the US average than they have done in other recent elections. So, while they might not necessarily be "for" the president-elect as a whole, they were willing to vote for him.
While black voters and voters who didn't go to college also moved further towards Trump, these two groups still differ significantly from the average in this election. There also remains a clear education divide with college-educated people much more likely to vote Democrat.
The Democratic decline
While much of the story so far is about a small but united shift in support, there were also some really historic and surprising results, particularly in the big cities.
In New York, Chicago, Detroit and Las Vegas, Trump earned a higher vote share than any other Republican since George HW Bush in 1988.
He still lost overall in the counties that include those cities, but once more it was a story of progress, whether it was down to who turned out or increased support.
But there were previous Democratic strongholds that did turn Republican, including parts of Florida like the formerly true-blue Miami-Dade, which has the second-largest Latino voting age population in America and backed Hillary Clinton by a margin of almost 2:1 in 2016.
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Its one million-plus voters backed a Republican for the first time since 1988, and president-elect Trump got the highest Republican vote share there since Ronald Reagan's 1984 landslide.
He also returned Pinellas to the Republican column and made significant gains in other big population centres like Broward and Palm Beach Counties.
The turnaround of US politics since Trump shook it all up in 2016 means there are now only two counties, out of more than 3,000, that have voted for the winning candidate at every election since 2000.
Those are Blaine County, Montana, an agricultural area up on the Canadian border, and Essex County, a mountainous part of upstate New York, bordering Vermont.
Essex-man was a key part of some of Tony Blair's big electoral wins at the turn of the millennium. Perhaps a different Essex-man rises again, this time to define America, as it moves towards the next period of its history.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.