How big was Donald Trump’s election victory?

Republican President-elect Donald Trump said his election victory gave him an “unprecedented and powerful” mandate to govern.

He beat Democratic challenger Kamala Harris in all seven at-large districts, giving him a decisive lead overall.

Trump’s party also won both chambers of Congress, giving the returning president more power to shape his agenda.

He has expanded his appeal to almost every voter group since losing in 2020. And in doing so he pulled off a comeback unmatched by any losing president in modern history.

But the data suggests it was a much closer contest than he and his teammates suggested.

His communications director Steven Cheung called it a “stonewalling” victory. However, this week it was revealed that his share of the votes fell below 50%, as counting continued.

“It saddens me that they’re calling it a landslide,” said Chris Jackson, senior vice president of the U.S. group at polling firm Ipsos.

Trump’s language suggested a big victory, Jackson said, when in fact it was a few hundred thousand votes in key precincts that put Trump back in the White House.

That’s because of America’s electoral college system, which maximizes narrow victories in swing states.

Here are three ways to look at his victory.

With 76.9 million votes and counting, Trump won what is known as the popular vote, according to the latest figures from the BBC’s US partner, CBS News.

That means he got more votes than Harris (74.4 million), or any other candidate. No Republican has held that since 2004.

But as the vote counting continues in other parts of the US, he is now less than half a point below 50% of his vote share. He is not expected to close the gap as it counts in places like Democratic-leaning California.

It was the same in 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton for the presidency despite losing the popular vote – receiving only 46% of the total vote.

In 2024, Trump’s victory in both the popular vote and the presidency could be seen as an improvement on his last victory eight years ago.

But Trump cannot claim to have won a majority of the presidential vote received in the general election.

To do that, he would have to win more than 50%, as all the winners have done in the last 20 years – except for Trump in 2016.

For this reason, his claim to historical authority “may be destroyed”, suggests Chris Jackson of the polling firm Ipsos, who said that the language of Trump and his supporters is a strategy used “to justify the big actions they plan to take when they are in power”.

On a separate metric, Trump’s victory over Harris in 2024 appears comfortable. He won 312 votes in the US electoral college compared to 226 for Harris.

And this is a really important number. US elections are actually 50 state and state races rather than a single national one.

The winner of any state wins all of its electoral votes – for example, 19 in the state of Pennsylvania. Both candidates were hoping to reach the magic number of 270 electoral votes to secure a majority in the college.

Trump’s 312 is better than Joe Biden’s 306 and beat both Republicans who won George W Bush. But it is shy of the 365 achieved by Barack Obama in 2008 or the 332 Obama won re-election, or the massive 525 by Ronald Reagan in 1984.

And it’s important to remember that the “winner takes all” mechanic of the electoral college means that very slim wins in some critical areas can be magnified into what looks like a resounding victory.

Trump leads by just over 230,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the latest CBS numbers. All three states have been the focus of both parties’ campaigns ahead of the November 5 vote.

If more than 115,000 voters in that group had chosen Harris, he would have won those Rust Belt swing states, giving him enough electoral college votes to win the presidency.

That may sound like a lot but the number is a drop in the ocean from the more than 150 million votes cast across the country.

In other swing states in the Sun Belt – namely Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina – the margins of Trump’s victory were very comfortable.

But if you look at the power that Republicans wield more broadly, their majority in the US House, the lower chamber of Congress, remains small.

There is another measure by which to look at Trump’s victory, which is to look at the number of votes he received, although this is an arbitrary measure.

The 76.9 million he has collected so far is the second largest in American history.

It is important to remember that the US population, and therefore the electorate, is constantly growing. More than 150 million people voted in the US this year, more than double the 74 million who went to the polls in 1964.

That makes comparisons over time difficult. But it was only four years before the record was achieved.

Biden won 81.3 million votes on his way to the White House in 2020 – a record turnout year when Trump is on the ticket again.

While Republicans made significant gains in 2024, Democrats also failed to connect with voters, said Jackson, who put the trend down to Americans’ desire to return to “2019 prices” after years of cost-of-living squeezes.

“The real issue is Harris’ inability to rally people to vote for Biden in 2020,” he said.

North American journalist Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the presidential election in his biweekly newsletter US Election Unspun. UK students can register here. Those outside the UK can register here.