Donald Trump officially flipped the state of Arizona on Saturday to sweep all seven swing states in the 2024 presidential election.
In addition to a remarkable win to take back the White House, Tuesday’s election also saw Republicans take the Senate and the party is well on the way to retaining its majority in the House.
With 87 % of the votes counted in Arizona, the AP had Trump at 52.6 percent of the votes counted with Kamala Harris on 46.4 percent. The state had previously been won by now-President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
The nationwide results will hand Trump virtually unchecked power when he takes his oath of office in January. The Supreme Court, which includes an unprecedented three appointees from Trump, maintains a nine to three conservative majority.
After months of neck-and-neck polling with Vice President Kamala Harris in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Michigan, Trump won every single battleground state.
With 312 Electoral College votes, Trump’s shocking and decisive win saw him earning the largest margin of victory since the 1988 election for President George H. W. Bush.
In 2016, six of the seven 2024 swing states went red for Trump with the exception of Nevada. Then in the 2020 cycle, all of the states flipped blue except for right-leaning North Carolina.
This year, Trump took all 93 Electoral College votes across the major battlegrounds and turned Nevada red for the first time in a decade.
When the Associated Press finally called the presidential election results in the final swing state, Trump already had the numbers needed to take back the White House.
Trump delivered a victory speech in West Palm Beach, Florida just a few hours before the AP called the nationwide race in his favor in the early hours of Wednesday morning – and after some networks, including Fox News, had declared him the winner.
The first battleground to call the race for Trump on Tuesday evening was North Carolina, where Harris’ team hoped the black electorate would help deliver a win in the state.
Trump has a 3.4 percent edge in North Carolina – a similar margin of victory he had in the state in the 2016 election.
A Democrat presidential candidate has not claimed victory in the Tar Heel State since Barack Obama in 2008. Trump has now won it in three straight elections.
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were also called over night from Tuesday to Wednesday, securing Trump two vital swing states that sent him soaring towards victory. And with both those states under his belt, the Associated Press called the 2024 election for the former president.
Michigan wasn’t called until Wednesday morning, but oncethe results there filtered it secured Trump the coveted ‘blue wall’ states, which also includes Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
The three rust belt states were essential to clinching a victory, and Democrats were relying on holding them to deliver Harris a win.
Trump, however, absolutely obliterated the Midwest ‘blue wall.’
According to calls made by the Associated Press, Trump won Pennsylvania by 2.2 percent, Wisconsin by 0.9 percent and Michigan by 1.4 percent.
The former president won Nevada 50.7 per cent of the vote to Harris’ 47.4 per cent.
It marks the first time a Republican presidential candidate has won the Battle Born State since the 2004 election for George W. Bush.
Trump officially declared victory in the early hours of Wednesday morning – before the Associated Press called the election for him – telling supporters in West Palm Beach, Florida, that it was the ‘greatest political comeback’ in history.
Early voting in rural areas of Nevada showed days before the election that Republicans held an advantage this year as this electorate showing up by a much larger percentage than in years prior.
And images rolled in through the night of Republicans in Nevada cheering on Trump’s win, while it was a sad scene at Democrats election night watch party on the Las Vegas Strip as it became increasingly clear that Vice President Kamala Harris would not be the first female U.S. president.
Nevada is consistently one of the last states to call a winner in presidential races – both due to the nature of it being on the west coast time and because of the volume of mail-in and absentee voting in the state.
But even though the state couldn’t be called on Tuesday, Trump didn’t need Nevada’s Electoral College votes to clinch a victory against Harris.
A court ruling recently upheld that ballots can continue to be processed and counted up to the third day after Election Day on November 5, which already caused worries about delays.
Additionally, concerns emerged Tuesday morning over the high number of ballots being rejected in Nevada’s most populated counties.
Nevada’s Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said the biggest issue is that signatures of many younger voters don’t match the signatures on their driver’s license. Many of the discrepancies are due to an absence of a signature in the database.
As of Monday night, more than 11,300 ballots were reported as needing signature curing in Clark County, home of Las Vegas, and 1,800 in Washoe County, home of Reno and Tahoe.
It’s expected that with mail-in ballot processing Tuesday evening, the number of rejected ballots will only continue to grow.
If ballots are rejected due to signature matching issues, voters in the Battle Born State can fix it through November 12.
This means if the election is close – as it’s expected to be – the rejected ballots could end up determining the outcome up to a week after Election Day.
Ever since Harris entered the race in late July, polling between her and Trump have tied or fallen within the margin of error in nearly every single survey.
Just two days before polls opened for the 2024 election, Trump was ahead by just 0.5 percent in the FiveThirtyEight average in Nevada.
Nevada voted against Trump in 2016 and 2020.
Hillary Clinton won in the state by 2.5 percent in 2016 and four years later Joe Biden bested Trump by nearly the same margin at 2.4 percent.
Both Harris and Trump spent a considerable amount of time in Nevada this election cycle, along with the six other swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Both candidates ended their 2024 campaigning with respective rallies in the western state the Thursday before Election Day to try and win over voters and take the six Electoral College votes.
Criticism emerged over handling of mail-in ballot counting in the Silver State after the seven members of the Nevada Supreme Court ruled last month to uphold a lower court decision that un-postmarked ballots received three days after Election Day would be counted towards the final results.
This means that while results might be called or presumed Tuesday evening, it’s possible that if the margin is slim enough, it could change as more ballots come in.
But this phenomenon is what Trump and his allies have used as fodder to claim Democrats are rigging the U.S. election system in their favor by ‘cheating’ with mail-in voting.