Donald Trump has won the U.S. presidential election. What now? The results and next steps explained

What you need to know

Winners and losers

• Donald Trump will be the 47th U.S. president, Americans learned Wednesday after a GOP victory in Wisconsin tipped the balance. Mr. Trump also took Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, swing states where Kamala Harris and the Democrats had hoped to prevail.
• Republicans also won a majority in the U.S. Senate, previously held by the Democrats, by flipping three key races in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia. The makeup of the new House of Representatives is still in flux.
• Ms. Harris called for unity in her concession speech and said she would support Mr. Trump in a peaceful transition of power. President Joe Biden asked Americans to “bring down the temperature” after the campaign, and encouraged Democrats to focus on regrouping: “Setbacks are unavoidable. Giving up is unforgiveable.”

Go deeper

• Swing states tell only part of the story of Mr. Trump’s comeback: Gains among Black and Latino communities, women and an inflation-weary middle class helped undermine the bloc that voted for Mr. Biden in 2020. The Globe crunched the numbers.
• U.S. economic anxiety may have helped Mr. Trump win power, but now it’s Canada’s turn to be nervous. While the Trudeau government pledges to work with the new administration, steel and aluminum producers are girding for tariffs and economists are planning ahead for potential impacts on jobs, taxes and the energy market.

Commentary and analysis

• We are living in the time of Nero: The United States has willingly given power to a vengeful gangster, and the crisis ahead will be unlike any other in our lifetimes, Andrew Coyne writes.
• Re-electing Mr. Trump is an unmistakable cry of rebellion – and possibly the biggest political trick of the age, David Shribman writes.
• Canada can survive a second Trump administration, as it did the first, but it must act quickly to counter the threats he poses to the free world, The Globe’s editorial board says.

The results, state by state

To win the White House, a candidate needs more than 270 of the Electoral College votes that states use to pick the president. Most states are “red” or “blue,” meaning their loyalties to the Republicans or Democrats do not change. The rest – the purple, or swing, states – tipped the balance of the 2024 election in Mr. Trump’s favour.

• Pennsylvania: With more Electoral College votes than any other swing state, this was a sought-after prize for Republicans and Democrats, whose support largely splits on rural-urban lines. GOP gains in Philadelphia and suburban counties made the difference, Associated Press said in its analysis of why it called the state for Mr. Trump.
• Michigan: This state remained in flux until around 1 p.m. (ET) on Wednesday, when AP declared it for Mr. Trump. Eight years earlier, he had won this state by just over 10,000 votes, the first time a Republican had done so in nearly three decades. Joe Biden reversed that by a similarly narrow margin in 2020.
• Wisconsin: Mr. Trump and Joe Biden each won this Rust Belt state by only a few thousand votes in 2016 and 2020, respectively. Results were close this time too, but AP called it for Mr. Trump just after 5:30 a.m. (ET).
• Georgia: Recent Black migration to the South gave Democrats hope to keep this state, but it was not enough. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, made “microscopic but difference-making improvements” in rural Georgia, AP explains.
• North Carolina: This is Mr. Trump’s third victory in the red southern state, though since the last time was so close, the Democrats believed they had a chance here.
• Nevada: This state has a fickle track record in presidential elections over the decades, but had been blue since 2008 before Mr. Trump won it this year.
• Arizona: Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric has many adherents in this historically red border state, which Mr. Biden narrowly won in 2020. This was the last state AP called for Mr. Trump on Saturday.

The balance of Congress

In general elections, the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs, as are 34 spots in the Senate. Previously, those bodies had slim majorities for the Republicans and Democrats, respectively. The Senate is headed for a 52-seat GOP majority after the party flipped constituencies in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia. Meanwhile, the makeup of the new House is still contested and could take weeks to finalize.

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How the vote split by gender, race and other critical factors

While the national popular vote do not decide the presidency, it can be useful afterward in analyzing why candidates won or lost. Breaking it down by race, gender, income and education reveals some of the groups that switched allegiance to Mr. Trump. The Globe did this with data from AP VoteCast, which resembles (but isn’t quite) an exit poll: Whereas exit polls target people at polling places, AP uses a mix of online, phone and in-person surveys.

Some findings fit the pattern of past elections – younger and higher-income voters were more likely to vote Democrat, for instance – but this time, Mr. Trump made gains within blocs that had supported Mr. Biden in 2020: Black and Latino communities, rural and suburban counties and income brackets hit hardest by inflation over the past four years. Ms. Harris performed more poorly among women than Mr. Biden did, and the issues she emphasized – reproductive rights, Mr. Trump’s autocratic tendencies – were not the ones that female voters listed as their top priority: That was the economy.

Issues that voters considered most important in 2024

Votes by race: 2024 vs. 2020

Divided by gender, geography and income

What will Trump and the Republicans do now?

Mr. Trump’s election-night speech promised unity, healing and a “golden age for America,” which has not been the general tone of his campaign thus far. He’s spent months claiming, falsely, that he should have won in 2020, and threatening reprisals and imprisonment of his political adversaries. The policies he’s proposed would touch every aspect of American life, from immigration and crime to economics and foreign policy, and while he’s distanced himself from Project 2025 – a think tank’s proposal to cement Republican power for years to come – it remains to be seen how his plan would overlap with theirs. Here are some of the key issues at play.

• Immigration: Mass deportations of undocumented migrants would be one of the first tasks of a Trump presidency, according to the ex-president, who’s also doubled down on plans to wall off the U.S.-Mexico border. Canada is already preparing for the possibility that, as in the first Trump term, migrants might cross the Quebec border in larger numbers to avoid a U.S. crackdown.
• Justice: Mr. Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in a hush-money case earlier this year, but his victory has effectively halted other criminal cases against him over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. As president, Mr. Trump will not have the authority to shut those cases down, but he is seeking stronger presidential oversight of the Justice Department and law enforcement.
• Abortion: While Mr. Trump often takes credit for appointing the judges who overturned Roe v. Wade, he’s equivocated on what he might do in office. Currently, states decide whether and how to ban abortions, and several passed ballot initiatives on Tuesday that would enshrine reproductive rights in their constitutions.
• Trade and taxes: Mr. Trump is a protectionist who says “tariff” is his favourite word, and has mused about increases of 10 to 20 per cent on all imports to the United States, with even steeper penalties for Mexican cars and Chinese goods.
• Foreign policy: Ukraine, which is fighting to take back the lands Russia invaded in 2014 and 2022, stands to lose much under a Trump isolationist policy that, he says, would end the conflict through a negotiated settlement with Moscow.

To follow through on any of these policies, he will first need to assemble a cabinet and White House staff over the coming weeks. Mr. Trump had a highly changeable cabinet in his first term, when he was quick to fire officials who disappointed or appeared to defy him. Here’s a list of possible contenders for the secretaries of state, defence, treasury and other posts in a second Trump administration.

What will Canada do now?

The last time Mr. Trump was in the White House, he upended a decades-old North American trade pact whose replacement, USMCA, is coming up for renegotiation in 2026. Ottawa has spent years preparing for that, but Mr. Trump’s return makes the outcome harder to predict. Throughout the campaign, Mr. Trump did not specify whether allies such as Canada would be exempt from the tariffs he wants; if they’re not, the estimated costs to Canada’s economy could be in the tens of billions of dollars, with the fossil-fuel, steel, aluminum and auto sectors hit particularly hard.

Some form of U.S. protectionism was to be expected whether Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris won, David McNaughton, Canada’s ambassador to the United States from 2016 to 2019, told The Globe ahead of the election. The difference is in how Canada can find something to bargain with to uphold its interests. “Trump is very transactional,” he said. “... he needs to be seen to win. The fact of the matter is that the agreement that we have that’s in place [USMCA] was one that he and his team negotiated. So it’s hard for him to say it’s a terrible deal.”

Reaction from around the world

Even before Mr. Trump’s re-election was officially confirmed, right-wing allies such as Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Viktor Orban of Hungary were lining up on social media to support him. Other reactions were more measured: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky – once pressed by the Trump administration to investigate Mr. Biden’s son in exchange for military aid – responded like this:

Other statements from world leaders

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Next dates to watch

There are still a few more steps before Mr. Trump is confirmed as the president; until then, he is called the president-elect.

• November to early December: Each state has its own rules for contesting results, and when those contests must be settled in court. Expect things to get litigious: In 2020, Mr. Trump filed more than 60 lawsuits, all unsuccessful.
• Dec. 17: Electors in each state meet to cast their votes. In all but two states, it’s winner-take-all; when Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris won a state’s popular vote, they got all its Electoral College votes. Maine and Nebraska can split college votes between candidates based on how congressional races turned out.
• Jan. 6: The House and Senate get together to count the electoral votes. This is the stage of the process where, in 2021, Trump supporters raided the Capitol to stop lawmakers from finalizing a Biden victory. Recent bipartisan changes to the Electoral Count Act make it harder for losing candidates to meddle in the count, as Mr. Trump wanted vice-president Mike Pence to do.
• Jan. 20: At an inauguration in Washington, the president- and vice-president-elect are sworn in and begin their terms.

More U.S. election coverage

Video: Trump’s re-election in depth

The Decibel podcast

Commentary

Carlo Dade: Start reading policy papers from U.S. right-wing think tanks, Canada

Robyn Urback: Donald Trump, Mr. Invincible, has triumphed once again

Konrad Yakabuski: Trump’s comeback was fuelled by America’s angst

With reports from Associated Press, Reuters and Globe staff