Five key takeaways as Donald Trump wins the White House

Five key takeaways as Donald Trump wins the White House

Donald Trump has been elected the 47th president of the US after securing the key battleground states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Polls had shown the former president and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in a historically tight race for weeks, with Trump securing the victory on Wednesday.

While there are still outstanding states that have yet to be called, here are some of the takeaways from the tumultuous election.

1. Trump overperformed in key battleground state Pennsylvania

Trump overperformed in key swing states, flipping Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Pennsylvania was considered a must-win for the Harris campaign but was always expected to be a close race. The current president, Joe Biden, won the state by just 81,000 votes in 2020.

The state had previously gone for Democrats between 1992 and 2012.

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In rural Republican-leaning counties, Trump overperformed in the state and looked likely to flip Erie County in the north-eastern part of the state, a county Biden won with a slim margin in 2020.

Harris appeared to underperform in left-leaning cities such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh compared to Biden’s 2020 election.

2. Demographic shift in favour of Trump influences election result

According to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters, Black and Latino voters appeared less likely to support Harris than they were to support Biden in the 2020 election.

Trump notably won Miami-Dade County in Florida, where around 68% of voters are Latino. The county was previously a Democratic stronghold.

The AP VoteCast survey also found that Trump performed better among young voters than he did in the 2020 election.

“It used to be conventional wisdom that greater ethnic and racial variance … naturally advantaged Democrats, and you can kind of see how that would happen as a legacy from the 1960s when the Democrats supported civil rights,” James McCann, a political science professor at Purdue University in the US, told Euronews ahead of the vote.

“At least since Nixon, the Republicans have tried to tack towards dominant white majorities and so on and being opposed to civil rights … but what we see now is that those old divides, there might be some change,” he said, adding that polling showed Trump performing better compared to predecessors among Black male voters.

3. Republicans take the Senate, but control of the House is still up in the air

Republicans won control of the Senate by flipping three seats in Montana, West Virginia, and Ohio.

In West Virginia, a state that typically votes Republican, voters were filling the seat of Joe Manchin, a former Democrat who later became an independent.

The state’s Republican governor Jim Justice won the seat in favour of Republicans.

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, also lost his seat to Republican Bernie Moreno, who arrived in the US at the age of five from Colombia and previously owned a group of car dealerships.

In the Mountain state of Montana, Republican Tim Sheehy beat the incumbent Democratic Senator Jon Tester.

It is not yet known who will win the House of Representatives, where Democrats only needed a few seats to flip the chamber. Republicans won control of the House in 2022.

If Democrats can win the House, it will be a similar situation to the current Congress where there is split control or divided government. While not unusual in US politics, it means lawmakers may need to compromise more often on legislation.

4. Trump’s win could reverberate for European defence and trade

Analysts told Euronews ahead of the election that Trump’s “America first” agenda could impact defence, security, and trade with European countries.

Trump said at a rally in February that he would not protect members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) if members did not increase their defence spending. “You gotta pay your bills,” he said.

As Trump won the election, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte was quick to comment, stating he had congratulated the former president.

“His leadership will again be key to keeping our Alliance strong. I look forward to working with him again to advance peace through strength through NATO,” Rutte said.

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Another concern is whether or not Trump will continue to support Ukraine.

Asked whether the EU was ready to boost aid to Ukraine in response to Trump’s win, a European Commission spokesperson warned not to jump ahead.

Eric Mamer, the chief Commission spokesperson, added that “there are strong Commission positions on peace in Ukraine and therefore we are going to continue implementing our policies, our priorities when it comes to Ukraine”.

5. European right-wing hails Trump win as ‘a wake-up call’

Right-wing and far-right politicians across Europe welcomed Trump’s win, with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán the first to congratulate the incoming president, calling it a “much-needed victory”.

Trump has previously praised Orbán as “a strong leader” and “fantastic”, and has signaled an openness to working with other right-wing leaders, such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, who said Trump’s win would strengthen ties between the countries.

“Patriots are winning elections all over the world,” Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders said in a social media post, saying that people want “freedom and their own nation first, their own people first and most of all no more illegal immigration”.

Jordan Bardella, an MEP and leader of France’s National Rally party called the win a “wake-up call”.

“This is an opportunity to rethink our relationship with power and strategic autonomy. Since Donald Trump encourages us to defend ourselves, let's take him at his word,” he said.