United States presidential election of 2024
- Date:
- November 5, 2024
- Location:
- United States
News •
United States presidential election of 2024, American election, held on November 5, 2024, in which former Republican president Donald Trump (2017–21) defeated the Democratic nominee, Vice Pres. Kamala Harris. Trump, who lost his bid for reelection in 2020 to Democrat Joe Biden, is the first U.S. president to be elected to two nonconsecutive terms since Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president of the United States (1885–89 and 1893–97). Having been convicted of a felony crime in May 2024, Trump also became the first convicted felon to be elected president upon his sentencing without punishment in January 2025 (see below Background: Trump’s indictments and trials). At age 78, Trump is the oldest person to win the office. Trump won the popular vote by a relatively small margin but earned a sizeable majority of electors, or members of the Electoral College, whose vote in December confirmed his election. Trump’s victory marks one of the most stunning political comebacks in U.S. history.
In June 2024, while campaigning for his own second term, Pres. Biden performed poorly in a nationally televised debate with Trump. Under intense pressure from prominent Democrats who feared he would lose the election, Biden withdrew his candidacy and endorsed Harris as his replacement. In early August, Harris was officially named the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee following her victory in a virtual vote of party delegates.
Background: Trump’s indictments and trials
Soon after the U.S. congressional midterm elections in November 2022, Trump announced his candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and he subsequently remained by far the most popular presidential candidate among Republican voters. In 2023 Trump was indicted on multiple state and federal criminal charges, including acts of business fraud designed to conceal a hush-money payment to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels; Trump’s removal and concealment of classified documents from the White House upon leaving office; and his various efforts to overturn the presidential election of 2020.
Trump’s attempts to prevent or reverse Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, according to federal and state indictments, included his participation in a conspiracy to create fraudulent slates of pro-Trump electors in certain swing states, his pressuring of Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to belatedly declare Trump the victor in that state’s election, and his pressuring of Vice Pres. Mike Pence, who presided over Congress’s ceremonial counting of electoral votes on January 6, 2021, to alter the official electoral vote count.) In addition, Trump and his private conglomerate, the Trump Organization, were found liable on civil charges of business fraud in a suit filed by the New York attorney general’s office, and Trump himself was found liable on civil charges of sexual abuse and defamation in two suits filed by the writer E. Jean Carroll. In February 2024, the judge in the business fraud suit ordered Trump to pay more than $350 million in penalties and barred him from serving as an officer or director of any company in New York state, including the Trump Organization, for three years.
The ensuing trials in Trump’s three criminal cases were originally scheduled to begin in March and May 2024, at the height of the primary season, making it likely at the time that Trump would need to limit or at least coordinate his campaign events to accommodate his appearances in court. In each case, however, Trump’s legal team continuously filed motions and appeals designed to delay the trial’s starting date or dismiss the charges altogether.
In January 2024 the federal criminal case concerning Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, whose trial date had been scheduled for March 4, was indefinitely delayed after Trump appealed the district court’s ruling rejecting his contention that he should be immune from prosecution for acts he committed while serving as president. In February a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with the district court that Trump did not possess absolute, or permanent, immunity and thus could be prosecuted as a private citizen for his criminal acts as president. Trump then asked the U.S. Supreme Court to put the panel’s ruling on hold while he filed a petition for review by the full appeals court. The Supreme Court instead chose to hear the case itself, scheduling oral arguments for April 2024. The Court’s response officially extended the delay of Trump’s criminal trial until after “the sending down of the judgment of this Court,” which did not take place until the end of the Court’s 2023–24 term in July. (See indictments of Donald Trump.).
The Court’s decision in the case, Trump v. United States, held that former presidents are entitled to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions that involve the exercise of their “core constitutional powers” and to “presumptive immunity” for all other official acts. (Citing the 1982 Supreme Court decision in Nixon v. Fitzgerald, the Court explained that an official act for which the president is presumptively immune can be prosecuted only if “the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no ‘dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.’”) The Court did not provide a specific definition of an official presidential act but instead offered a set of principles and observations for use by the district court, to which it remanded the case to determine which of the acts for which Trump was being prosecuted qualified as official. The Court did conclude, however, that Trump should be “absolutely immune from prosecution” for allegedly pressuring the Justice Department to support his claims of voter fraud, because any president’s interaction with members of the Justice Department would constitute an official act. The remanding of the case to the district court further delayed Trump’s trial, virtually ensuring that it would extend beyond the presidential election in November 2024.
In August 2024 special counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment of Trump on charges related to the 2020 election. In keeping with Trump v. United States, the new indictment dropped specific counts related to Trump’s pressuring of the Justice Department but preserved the original indictment’s general charges of obstruction of an official proceeding and three counts of conspiracy: to obstruct an official proceeding, to defraud the United States, and to impede the free exercise of the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted. In November, following Trump’s victory in the presidential election of 2024, Smith requested that the election-related charges against Trump be dropped “without prejudice,” meaning that they could be revived at a later date. Smith’s decision reflected a Justice Department policy prohibiting the criminal prosecution of sitting presidents.
In March 2024 the state criminal case involving the hush-money payment to Daniels, which had been scheduled for trial beginning on March 25, was postponed to April 15 following a request by the Manhattan district attorney’s office to allow Trump’s legal team to review a set of records from an earlier federal investigation focusing on the role of Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal attorney. The judge in the case rejected Trump’s motion for dismissal, disputing his claim that prosecutors had improperly withheld federal records from Trump’s attorneys. As the starting date of the trial drew closer, Trump’s legal team again resorted to delaying tactics, including a second request that the judge recuse himself because his daughter had worked as a political consultant for Democratic candidates (the judge had declined the first recusal request in 2023); a civil suit against the judge for issuing and then expanding a gag order preventing Trump from verbally attacking witnesses, jurors, and the families of the judge and the Manhattan district attorney, among others; and two requests to New York appellate judges—one to move the trial to a location outside Manhattan and the other to delay the trial while Trump pursued his civil suit against the judge who issued the gag order. Both of those requests were denied.
On May 30, 2024, the jury in the hush-money case found Trump guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal his reimbursement of Cohen for the latter’s payment to Daniels. Trump thus became the first former president to be convicted of a crime.
Following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States, Trump’s attorneys in the hush-money case requested that his sentencing be delayed to allow the judge, Juan M. Merchan, to consider overturning Trump’s conviction on the basis of the Court’s finding that presidents are presumptively immune from prosecution for acts determined to be official. Merchan agreed to postpone the sentencing to September 18. Early that month, however, following another request from Trump’s attorneys, Merchan agreed to delay the sentencing again, this time to November 26, well after the 2024 presidential election. Meanwhile, Merchan had also scheduled for November 12 a ruling on whether to erase Trump’s conviction altogether. Following Trump’s victory, his legal team requested another postponement of that decision while they prepared arguments based on Trump’s election as president. Merchan granted the team another week. On November 22, Merchan delayed Trump’s sentencing yet again to allow both sides more time to prepare arguments for or against overturning his conviction. On December 16, Merchan finally rejected Trump’s effort to have his conviction overturned on the basis of the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.
On January 3, 2025, Merchan formally scheduled Trump’s sentencing for January 10, dismissing the Trump team’s contentions that as a president-elect Trump is entitled to the same immunity from prosecution as a sitting president and that Trump’s sentencing would severely disrupt the presidential transition process. Merchan also indicated in his decision that he would sentence Trump to an “unconditional discharge,” meaning that Trump would not face prison, probation, or a fine, though he would officially become a convicted felon. Merchan’s decision was then affirmed by a state appeals court judge and by the state’s highest court, the New York Court of Appeals. In a last-ditch effort, Trump’s team filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court. In an unsigned order issued on January 9, one day before Trump’s scheduled sentencing, the Court rejected Trump’s request by a vote of 5 to 4.
In December 2023 the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s name should not appear on the state’s Republican primary ballot because Trump had disqualified himself from holding the office of president of the United States under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868). That section prohibits any person from “hold[ing] any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state” if that person has “previously taken an oath…to support the Constitution of the United States” and subsequently “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Trump quickly appealed the Colorado court’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in the case, Trump v. Anderson, on February 8, 2024. On March 4, one day before Colorado’s primary elections on Super Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Colorado court’s decision, ruling that Section 3 could be enforced against federal candidates and officeholders only through congressional legislation.
In July 2024 the judge in the classified documents case, Aileen Cannon, dismissed Trump’s indictment on the basis of her finding that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of special counsel Smith, who was responsible for Trump’s indictment, was illegitimate under the appointments clause of the U.S. Constitution. The clause (Article II, Section 2) states in part that the president
shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States…but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
While accepting for the sake of argument that a special counsel qualifies an “inferior officer” under the Constitution, Cannon contended that Smith, who had been serving as an officer of the International Criminal Court, was not properly appointed, because no existing federal statute authorizes U.S. attorneys general to appoint as a special counsel “an attorney from outside the United States government.” Smith appealed Cannon’s ruling to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. However, on the same day that he requested the dismissal of Trump’s election-related case, he also asked the appeals court to remove Trump from the group of codefendants in the classified documents case, again citing Trump’s upcoming second term.
Trump’s conviction in the hush-money case will not prevent him from taking office or force him to leave office after his inauguration in January 2025. If Trump begins his second term before the completion of his trial in the 2020-election case—which is likely—he will presumably direct the Justice Department to dismiss the charges against him. The question of whether Trump could be inaugurated while serving a prison sentence, and whether he could be imprisoned after being inaugurated, is less clear. It is also uncertain whether Trump, as president, would have the power to pardon himself. (Even if the answer to the last question is yes, Trump would be unable to erase his conviction in the hush-money case, because his pardoning power will apply only to convictions on federal charges.)
At a glance: the election of 2024
Candidates and campaigns
Biden and Trump
Biden announced his bid for reelection in April 2023. His campaign emphasized his administration’s success in restoring economic growth and significantly reducing unemployment from the high levels reached during the recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as Democrats’ legislative achievements in the American Rescue Plan Act (2021), the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021), and the Inflation Reduction Act (2022). The last legislation, notwithstanding its official name, was wide-ranging, including provisions designed to lower prescription drug prices, to secure a minimum corporate tax rate of 15 percent, and to promote the development of clean-energy technologies. Representing the largest government investment in climate-change prevention in U.S. history, the Inflation Reduction Act was projected to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent (from 2005) by 2030.
In his primary campaign appearances Biden accused Republicans of planning to drastically cut Social Security and Medicare, condemned restrictions on voting rights adopted in Republican-controlled states (see voter suppression), criticized efforts by Republican state governments to limit the rights of members of the LGBTQ community, and vowed to codify the right to abortion in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade (1973) in 2022 (see Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization).
Largely because of the economic damage resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, including the breakdown of global supply chains, the United States and many other countries experienced high rates of inflation in the early 2020s. Although the U.S. economy grew at a fast pace during the first years of Biden’s presidency (in 2021 the gross domestic product [GDP] grew by 5.7 percent, the highest annual rate in 37 years), inflation—including increases in food and gas prices—remained a persistent problem, eventually leading the Federal Reserve to impose an extended series of interest-rate increases. After reaching a high point of 9.1 percent in June 2022, inflation gradually declined to 2.4 percent by September 2024, and the Federal Reserve began to reverse its earlier rate increases. Despite the economy’s general improvement, the public continued to worry about inflation, thus contributing to a general perception that Biden was mismanaging the economy, which in turn kept his public approval rating unusually low—less than 50 percent—during most of his presidency.
Trump, for his part, repeatedly exaggerated the high prices of gasoline and food while accusing Biden of having destroyed the U.S. economy. He also condemned the Biden administration’s efforts to develop clean-energy technologies, instead vowing to increase coal, oil, and natural gas production and to eliminate Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations limiting air and water pollution from fossil fuels. In keeping with his rejection of clean energy, he repeatedly dismissed the existence of climate change as a “hoax.”
Another major theme of Trump’s campaign was his promise to deport all undocumented immigrants living in the United States (some 11 million people) by conducting raids on immigrant communities and employers and sending immigrants to military-controlled deportation camps. Trump’s anti-immigrant stance was based on numerous falsehoods—including that immigrants (by which he usually meant nonwhite people from non-European countries) were criminals and rapists—and on blatantly racist slurs, including that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Trump also indicated his support for a number of policies and government structural changes articulated in Project 2025, a set of recommendations promoted by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank whose members and leadership includes many Trump allies and former Trump administration officials. Trump emphasized in particular his intention to replace tens of thousands of career civil servants in policy-related positions with political loyalists who would eagerly do his bidding. Trump had attempted such a change near the end of his administration under Schedule F, a controversial effort to strip civil servants of job protections that prevented them from being fired “without cause.” Trump’s stated targets in Schedule F’s revival included the Justice Department and its principal investigative agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), whose officers were responsible for his criminal indictments in the 2020-election and classified documents cases. Democrats and even some Republicans strongly objected to Trump’s plan on the ground that it would hugely expand his authority, enabling him to exact revenge on prosecutors and political enemies and to effectively prevent other federal employees and elected officials, including members of Congress, from pursuing policies he opposes.
On July 13, 2024, while speaking at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Trump was injured in an assassination attempt by a young man who fired a semiautomatic rifle. After being hit in the ear, Trump was whisked to safety by U.S. Secret Service agents. Although his injury was minor, a person attending the rally and the shooter himself were killed. The attempt took place just two days before the scheduled start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at which Trump officially became his party’s presidential nominee. On the opening day of the convention, Trump selected Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, author of the 2016 best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, as his vice-presidential running mate.
On September 15, 2024, the FBI announced that it was investigating an apparent attempted assassination of Trump earlier that day while he was golfing with a friend at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump was not injured, and the suspect, the presumed owner of a semiautomatic rifle abandoned at the golf course, was soon apprehended.
Other primary candidates
Shortly before Biden formally declared his candidacy, two challengers announced their own bids for the Democratic nomination: Marianne Williamson, a social activist and self-help author who had been a fringe candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2020, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an environmental activist and lawyer and the son of Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. attorney general and U.S. senator from Massachusetts who was assassinated during his campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1968. Despite Biden’s low level of support among Democrats, neither alternative candidate was viewed as a serious threat to his nomination in 2024. Although Kennedy’s candidacy received national attention—and even some support from Republican donors—Kennedy himself was dismissed by many Democratic Party officials for his promotion of vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. (For example, Kennedy had falsely contended that vaccines cause autism and that the coronavirus might have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.) In October 2023 Kennedy announced his entry into the 2024 presidential election as an independent candidate. In February 2024 Williamson ended her presidential campaign after receiving very few votes in early Democratic primaries in New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. By the summer of 2024 Kennedy’s nationwide support among Democratic and Republican voters had declined significantly—from 15 percent to about 5 percent, according to one poll. In August Kennedy suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.
Trump faced far more challengers to his nomination than Biden did to his: by June 2023 nearly a dozen Republicans other than Trump had declared their candidacy. They included Nikki Haley, who had served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump (2017–18) and as governor of South Carolina (2011–17); Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida (2019– ); former U.S. vice president (2017–21) Mike Pence; and former New Jersey governor (2010–18) and 2016 Republican presidential primary contender Chris Christie. As more than 50 percent of Republican voters supported Trump (and approximately 40 percent identified themselves as members of Trump’s nativist MAGA movement), most of his primary challengers avoided criticizing him directly or forcefully. They instead presented themselves as reliable conservatives who did not face any of the serious legal challenges that threatened to eliminate support for Trump among independent voters. As Trump’s indictments were handed down, however, his popularity among Republicans did not decline significantly, as his challengers had expected. Indeed, many polls showed that his support had increased or solidified.
During the remainder of 2023 Trump continued to dominate his primary rivals, despite his refusal to participate in debates sponsored by the Republican National Committee and the steady progress of the legal cases against him. A significant proportion of Republican voters accepted Trump’s oft-repeated (but unsupported) claims that the criminal and civil charges against him were false and politically motivated, and many reacted positively to Trump’s vow to seek retribution for the prosecutions if he were elected president. By the end of the year most other Republican presidential candidates, including Pence and Christie, had abandoned their campaigns.
After Trump easily won the Republican Iowa caucus in January 2024, DeSantis, who had long been the second most-popular Republican candidate, also dropped out of the race, leaving only one other Trump challenger, Nikki Haley. Haley continued her campaign through January and February, despite suffering losses to Trump in subsequent Republican primaries and caucuses in New Hampshire, Nevada, the Virgin Islands, Michigan, and her home state of South Carolina. After Trump defeated her in 14 of the 16 Republican presidential primaries held on Super Tuesday, Haley finally suspended her campaign, though she initially declined to endorse Trump’s candidacy. Meanwhile, Biden had been victorious in all but one Democratic primary, held on Super Tuesday in American Samoa.
By March 12, following their victories in primary elections held in Georgia, Mississippi, and Washington state, both Biden and Trump had accumulated enough delegates to win their parties’ presidential nominations. At the Republican National Convention in July 2024, Trump officially became his party’s presidential nominee.
Biden’s withdrawal and Harris’s nomination
Despite Trump’s conviction in the criminal hush-money case, the vast majority of Republicans, as well as some independent and swing voters, continued to support him. Indeed, from late 2023 Trump maintained a slight lead over Biden in several nationwide presidential election polls, while Biden’s average approval rating remained low as compared to other recent first-term presidents—a fact that analysts had attributed to the country’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, to the widespread perception that Biden was mismanaging the economy, and to the belief of many Americans (including some Democrats) that Biden was simply too old to competently serve as president. In June 2024, the last concern was reinforced by Biden’s poor performance in a nationally televised debate with Trump. Although Trump himself did not debate well—repeating many falsehoods and consistently failing to answer moderators’ questions—Biden’s stumbling, meandering, and raspy-voiced responses made him seem much weaker, both physically and mentally, than his opponent. After the debate, some prominent Democrats and several Democratic-leaning journalists, commentators, and news organizations, including the New York Times, called upon Biden to withdraw from the race.
Brian DuignanBiden initially was defiant, delivering speeches and holding press conferences to try to reverse the damage done by his debate performance. But over the course of a month, the drumbeat of calls for him to step down grew louder. On July 21, he announced his withdrawal from the race and declared his support for Harris. In doing so Biden became the first president not to seek reelection since Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968.
In an address to the nation, he explained his decision without naming his opponent.
I revere this office, but I love my country more. It’s been the honor of my life to serve as your president. But in the defense of democracy, which is at stake, I think it’s more important than any title. I draw strength and find joy in working for the American people. But this sacred task of perfecting our union is not about me, it’s about you. Your families, your futures. It’s about ‘we the people.’
Shortly after Biden’s announcement, the Democratic National Committee approved a plan to officially nominate its presidential and vice-presidential candidates by a virtual vote of delegates in early August, well before the start of the party’s convention in Chicago later that month. The new nomination mechanism, which rendered the in-person roll call of convention delegates purely ceremonial, had been deemed necessary to ensure that Biden’s name would appear on the ballot in Ohio, which required that candidates be certified to state authorities by August 7. By the close of the virtual roll call on August 5, Harris had secured her presidential nomination with 99 percent of the votes of participating delegates. On August 6, her nomination was officially certified by the Democratic National Committee. She thus became the first Black woman and the first Asian American in U.S. history to win the presidential nomination of a major party.
On the same day, Harris announced that she had selected Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, as her vice-presidential running mate. Harris had vetted and interviewed various potential candidates, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, during the preceding two weeks. Her time-pressured consideration exposed some divisions between moderate and progressive interest groups and activists in the Democratic Party, who publicly or privately lobbied for or against different vice-presidential contenders.
Harris’s nomination was greeted with joy by many Democrats, who were impressed and inspired by her youth and dedication to traditional liberal causes. By September 2024, Harris had raised more than $1 billion in contributions from enthusiastic supporters and some Trump opponents, and her national and swing-state approval ratings soon rivaled those of Trump. Despite the general optimism she inspired among liberal voters, some Democrats and independents remained dissatisfied with her apparent lack of detailed plans for the country’s political and economic future, while others believed that she had no realistic strategy for ending the ongoing Israel-Hamas War. And many Democrats, like most Americans, remained concerned about inflation, despite its steep decline since 2022. Trump, for his part, shifted his personal insults from Biden to Harris while continuing to emphasize the anti-Democratic themes of his earlier campaign.
Numerous polls conducted shortly before the November election indicated that Harris and Trump were neck and neck both nationally and in swing states. When vote counting began on election day (November 5, 2024), however, most of the polls proved to be inaccurate: Trump won both the national popular vote and the projected Electoral College vote, capturing all seven swing states.
Tracy Grant Brian Duignan
