Donald Trump wins 2024 presidential election, Harris looks to the future in concession speech

Donald Trump wins 2024 presidential election, Harris looks to the future in concession speech

Donald Trump wins 2024 presidential election, Harris looks to the future in concession speech

Former President Donald Trump has won the 2024 presidential race, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in a frenzied contest to stage an improbable historic comeback.

ABC News reports Harris called Trump to congratulate him on his win. She held a concession speech at Howard University, which can be viewed in the video player below.

Trump ended up with at least 294 electoral votes after clinching wins in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin. Harris has won at least 223 votes. The race was marked by literal history, including two assassination attempts and 34 felony convictions against Trump, already having been impeached twice and faulted for mismanaging the COVID-19 pandemic response.

Maybe even more memorable was President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race after a ruinous June debate in which he struggled at times to form sentences.

“I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president,” Trump said in his victory speech, which lasted nearly 25 minutes. He was joined by supporters and family members at a victory party in a West Palm Beach ballroom early Wednesday.

His running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, will become the highest-ranking millennial in government at the age of 40.

He went on to say the country lost something special over the last four years, and promised to make America great again, while also promising to make America healthy again, alluding to his promise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. having a “big role” in health care for his administration.

“You know we’re the party of common sense. We want to have border. We want to have security, we want to have things be good, safe. We want great education. We want a strong and powerful military and ideally, we don’t have to use it,” said Trump.

While he didn’t spend a lot of time discussing policy on Wednesday morning, he did touch on illegal immigration, which has been one of the focal points of his campaign.

“We’re going to have to seal up those borders. And we’re going to have to let people come into our country. We want people to come back in. But we have to let them come back in, but they have to come in legally,” Trump said.

Trump’s campaign was able to score wins in multiple battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Georgia, where democrats won in 2020. He also won in North Carolina.

Minnesota was called for Vice President Kamala Harris around 2 a.m. Wednesday, where she received 51% of the vote, while Trump received 47% – a closer margin than many expected.

Anoka County was one of the last in the state to report early election results, and county officials posted on social media early Wednesday that a very large number of absentee ballots were dropped off on Tuesday night, which caused a delay in reporting.

However, the numbers are now in for all 87 counties. A previous KSTP/SurveyUSA poll showed Harris with an eight-point lead just days before the elections, which didn’t play out during the election. 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS was at Minnesota’s DFL headquarters as results came in and heard from some as they reacted to Harris falling behind in the vote count.

“I’m very worried,” said one attendee “I really, really, really don’t understand voters in this country who don’t realize the democratic party has their back.”

Meanwhile, in battleground Wisconsin, the state was called for Trump around 4:30 a.m. on Wednesday, with a difference of about 30,000 votes between him and Harris.

Trump’s victory underscores just how deep voters’ frustrations were surrounding inflation and immigration, Republicans’ two top issues this election cycle as polls consistently showed Americans’ unhappiness with how Biden handled them.

His return to the White House also suggests that Democrats were not motivated enough by the prospect of electing the first female president and that its base’s fury over the Supreme Court’s revocation of constitutional abortion protections has waned since 2022.

For Trump personally, the win offers both political vindication and legal protection. Since his win, he and his brand were soundly rejected in 2018, 2020 and 2022. And once in office, he’d be able to undermine criminal cases against him surrounding his handling of classified documents while out of office and efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

CLICK HERE for the latest election results, which are unofficial until canvassed.

ABC News contributed to this report.

ABC News projects Donald Trump as winner of 2024 presidential election

ABC News projects Donald Trump as winner of 2024 presidential election