What the Trump presidency means for the US, world

As we approached Election Day in the US, it felt like Republican Donald Trump was going to win the election over Democratic vice-president Kamala Harris, even if the polls weren't picking it up.

- Neelanjan Sircar

He is now slated to cross 310 electoral votes—higher than his first presidential election victory in 2016 and the most since Barack Obama was re-elected as president in 2012.

The US is a country in which very few votes are up for grabs. About two in three registered voters consider themselves as aligned to a political party according to the Pew Research Center, and the election is decided by a handful of swing states. In the 2020 presidential election, Trump lost the popular vote to Joe Biden by about 4 percentage points, and this time he is poised to win the popular vote by 1 to 2 percentage points over Harris. In other words, what seems like a major electoral shift can literally be caused by taking three percentage points from the Democrat column and adding it to the Republican column.

Popular analysis has characterized the 2024 presidential election as monumental, with an ugly campaign that took conspiratorial and racial overtones in which the candidates engaged in ad hominem attacks.

The differences in the focus of the campaigns are clear from exit poll data. According to the NBC News exit poll, 42% of voters named the economy and immigration as their top issues, and, among them, more than 80% voted for Trump and the Republicans. Another 35% named the state of democracy as their top issue, and, among them, more than 80% voted for Harris and the Democrats.

Economic performance