Trump gets less than 50% in the popular vote, but it’s close: NPR

President-elect Donald Trump speaks during an election night rally at the West Palm Beach Convention Center in Florida on November 6.

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Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

President-elect Donald Trump came very close to winning a majority of the vote in this presidential election, but not quite. It’s not exactly that “unprecedented and powerful mandate“, Trump claimed on election night.

In fact, this year’s popular vote margin is the second closest since 1968 and is still narrowing. It shows how deeply divided the country is politically, and that any shift to the right is marginal.

Republicans will likely have the same or slightly smaller majority in the House than they have now, and despite the GOP’s new control of the Senate, there is evidence that many Republicans voted for Trump in key states, but not necessarily for Republican Senate candidates.

With 96% of the vote, Trump has 49.97% to Vice President Harris’ 48.36%, or 76.9 million votes to 74.4 million, according to the Associated Press. (The US Election Atlas has a higher total number of votes and a slightly smaller margin, 49.78% to 48.23 or 77.1 million votes to 74.7 million.)

This is the highest percentage Trump has received in his three presidential elections. (He got just under 46% in 2016 and less than 47% in 2020.) Votes are still being counted, including provisional and foreign ballots across the country.

The 2000 election was decided by just 0.51 percentage points, with then-Vice President Al Gore winning the popular vote but losing to George W. Bush in the Electoral College. The margin in 2024 could well be a little closer, as provisional ballots have favored Harris and she comes from blue states like California, Oregon and New York.

Of course, US presidential elections are not decided by a popular vote; they are decided by the electoral college. And in that regard, Trump had a pretty wide margin of victory in the Electoral College, 312 votes to 226, the largest since 2012.

In 2016, Trump also won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote by 3 million to Democrat Hillary Clinton. One reason for Trump’s vote increases this time is that Harris’ vote totals in blue states were well below President Biden’s 2020 vote totals.

In New York and California alone, Harris was nearly 3 million votes behind Biden’s total. And most of it wasn’t a vote. In New York, Harris trailed by about 900,000 votes, but Trump only gained about 200,000 votes in 2020. In California, Harris received around 1.9 million fewer votes than Biden, but Trump only received around 60,000 more.

Voter turnout is often lower outside of the states that receive the most political attention. In this election, the most political advertising money was spent in the smallest district of the states. Overall, voter turnout in this election was only slightly lower than in 2020, at about 63.8%, the second highest in 100 years.

This year, three of the states with the highest voter turnout were the former blue wall states Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Minnesota, Virginia and New Hampshire were also within 5 points and were are considered potentially competitive states.

The lowest turnout rates were in Hawaii, Oklahoma, Arkansas, West Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, New York, Indiana and Alabama – all non-competitive states, either very red or very blue.