US election: How big a win was this for Donald Trump?
“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate. It was a historic realignment. Uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense.”
Never knowingly understated, those were some of the words of Donald Trump as he proclaimed victory early on Wednesday morning.
Unlike some of his claims following the 2020 election, much of the statement above is supported by data.
President-elect Trump increased his vote share in 90% of US counties, compared with 2020, and became just the second Republican since 1988 to win the popular vote.
He also increased his vote significantly among many demographic groups which had been least likely to back him in the past.
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There’s still counting to do, not least in battleground Arizona, but now the result is clear, where does his victory rank in history, and how much of a mandate does he really have from the American people?
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How big was the win?
Kamala Harris would have won if she had persuaded 123,750 people in the right proportions in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan to vote for her instead of Trump.
That sounds like a big number, but it’s less than 0.1% of the 140 million-plus people that cast votes in the election, and less than 1% of the voters in those three key states.
Presidential elections often tend to be even closer than this, however. Trump’s win this year is the clearest one this century that wasn’t achieved by president Barack Obama.
How big were the gains?
Trump made improvements almost everywhere, but he may still end up on fewer total votes than he won last time.
Despite the warnings of what was at stake at this election, it looks like the final number of people to cast a ballot will be lower than in 2020.
The Democrat vote is down around 10 million, while Trump’s vote appears relatively similar to last time, despite a growing population.
In terms of share of the vote, however, he increased his in more counties than any other candidate since at least 2004, and he recorded the highest Republican vote share this century in more than two-thirds of counties across America.
Most of those improvements weren’t by much, however. Just 120 out of the 2,800 counties recorded an improvement of more than five points – the lowest number by a winning president this century other than Joe Biden.
That’s reflected if you look at the number of counties he flipped from being majority Democrat to majority Republican – 95 counties so far. That number was also the lowest this century, other than that achieved by Biden and less than half of what Trump flipped in 2016, perhaps a sign of the recent partisanship in US politics.
What about the type of people backing him?
This tells a similar story.
President-elect Trump gained ground among most voter groups. The biggest increase in support was among Latinos (up from around a third to just under half) and younger voters (up from around a third to two-fifths) who were key to securing his win.
A smaller increase of eight points was enough for him to win majority support among people earning less than $50,000, who had backed every Democrat since Bill Clinton. And crucially, he narrowly took back the suburbs, where American elections are so often won or lost.
Those marginal gains across different groups helped Trump to win the key battlegrounds and go some way to broadening his coalition of voters, making it more representative of the average American.
The youngest voters, oldest voters, lowest-earning voters and Latinos all voted significantly closer to the US average than they have done in other recent elections. So, while they might not necessarily be “for” the president-elect as a whole, they were willing to vote for him.
While black voters and voters who didn’t go to college also moved further towards Trump, these two groups still differ significantly from the average in this election. There also remains a clear education divide with college-educated people much more likely to vote Democrat.
The Democratic decline
While much of the story so far is about a small but united shift in support, there were also some really historic and surprising results, particularly in the big cities.
In New York, Chicago, Detroit and Las Vegas, Trump earned a higher vote share than any other Republican since George HW Bush in 1988.
He still lost overall in the counties that include those cities, but once more it was a story of progress, whether it was down to who turned out or increased support.
But there were previous Democratic strongholds that did turn Republican, including parts of Florida like the formerly true-blue Miami-Dade, which has the second-largest Latino voting age population in America and backed Hillary Clinton by a margin of almost 2:1 in 2016.
Its one million-plus voters backed a Republican for the first time since 1988, and president-elect Trump got the highest Republican vote share there since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide.
He also returned Pinellas to the Republican column and made significant gains in other big population centres like Broward and Palm Beach Counties.
The turnaround of US politics since Trump shook it all up in 2016 means there are now only two counties, out of more than 3,000, that have voted for the winning candidate at every election since 2000.
Those are Blaine County, Montana, an agricultural area up on the Canadian border, and Essex County, a mountainous part of upstate New York, bordering Vermont.
Essex-man was a key part of some of Tony Blair’s big electoral wins at the turn of the millennium. Perhaps a different Essex-man rises again, this time to define America, as it moves towards the next period of its history.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
Two people have been killed after a suspect shot at firefighters responding to a fire in the US state of Idaho, authorities have said.
Police were still “taking sniper fire” near the city of Coeur d’Alene on Sunday afternoon, the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office said.
Crews were responding to a fire at Canfield Mountain around 1.30pm and gunshots were reported around half an hour later, the force said.
Pic: Reuters
Sheriff Bob Norris said officials believe the two killed were firefighters, and he did not know if anyone else was shot.
“We don’t know how many suspects are up there, and we don’t know how many casualties there are,” he said. “We are actively taking fire sniper as we speak.”
Mr Norris said the sniper appeared to be hiding in the rugged terrain and using a high-powered rifle, adding he had instructed his deputies to fire back.
“I’m hoping that somebody has a clear shot and is able to neutralise, because they’re not at this point in time showing any evidence of wanting to surrender,” the sheriff said.
Pic: Reuters
Governor Brad Little said “multiple” firefighters were attacked.
“This is a heinous direct assault on our brave firefighters,” he said on X. “I ask all Idahoans to pray for them and their families as we wait to learn more.”
The president of the International Association of Firefighters said a third firefighter was in surgery.
In a statement on social media Edward Kelly said the firefighters “were ambushed in a heinous act of violence”. He added: “Two of our brothers were killed by a sniper, and a third brother remains in surgery.”
The sheriff’s office in neighbouring Shoshone County said authorities were “dealing with an active shooter situation where the shooter is still at large”.
Smoke billows into the air after several firefighters were attacked while responding to a fire. Pic: Reuters
The fire was still raging, Mr Norris said.
“It’s going to keep burning,” he added. “Can’t put any resources on it right now.”
The FBI was sending technical teams and tactical support to the scene, its deputy director Dan Bongino said.
“It remains an active, and very dangerous scene,” he said on X.
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Canfield Mountain is a popular hiking and biking spot on the outskirts of Coeur d’Alene, a city of around 55,000 people in northern Idaho.
Donald Trump has said the US government has found a buyer for TikTok that he will reveal “in about two weeks”.
The president told Fox News “it’s a group of very wealthy people”, adding: “I think I’ll probably need China approval, I think President Xi will probably do it.”
TikTok was ordered last year to find a new owner for its US operation – or face a ban – after politicians said they feared sensitive data about Americans could be passed to the Chinese government.
The video app’s owner, Bytedance, has repeatedly denied such claims.
It originally had a deadline of 19 January to find a buyer – and many users were shocked when it “went dark” for a number of hours when that date came round, before later being restored.
However, President Trump has now extended the deadline several times.
The last extension was on 19 June, when the president signed another executive order pushing it back to 17 September.
Mr Trump’s latest comments suggest multiple people coming together to take control of the app in the US.
Among those rumoured to be potential buyers include YouTube superstar Mr Beast, US search engine startup Perplexity AI, and Kevin O’Leary – an investor from Shark Tank (the US version of Dragons’ Den).
Bytedance said in April that it was still talking to the US government, but there were “differences on many key issues”.
It’s believed the Chinese government will have to approve any agreement.
The president said the identity of the buyer would be disclosed in about two weeks. Pic: Fox News
President Trump’s interview with Fox News also touched on the upcoming end of the pause in US tariffs on imported goods.
On April 9, he granted a 90-day reprieve for countries threatened with a tariff of more than 10% in order to give them time to negotiate.
Deals have already been struck with some countries, including the UK.
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The president said he didn’t think he would need to push back the 9 July deadline and that letters would be sent out imminently stating what tariff each country would face.
“We’ll look at the deficit we have – or whatever it is with the country; we’ll look at how the country treats us – are they good, are they not so good. Some countries, we don’t care – we’ll just send a high number out,” he said.
“But we’re going to be sending letters out starting pretty soon. We don’t have to meet, we have all the numbers.”
The president announced the tariffs in April, arguing they were correcting an unfair trade relationship and would return lost prosperity to US industries such as car-making.
Iran will have the capacity to begin enriching uranium again in “a matter of months”, the UN’s nuclear watchdog boss has said.
Rafael Grossi, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said that US strikes on three sites a week ago had caused “severe damage” but it was not “total”.
Mr Grossi told CBS News: “The capacities they have are there. They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that.
“But as I said, frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there.”
Iran still has “industrial and technological capabilities… so if they so wish, they will be able to start doing this again”, he added.
A satellite overview shows excavators at tunnel entrances at the Fordow site in Iran. Pic: Maxar Technologies/Reuters
Iranian nuclear and military sites were attacked by Israel on 13 June, with the Israelis claiming Tehran was close to developing a nuclear weapon.
The US then carried out its own strikes on 22 June, hitting Iranian nuclear installations at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, under Operation Midnight Hammer.
Iran has insisted its nuclear research is for civilian energy production purposes.
US President Donald Trump said last weekend that the US deployment of 30,000lb “bunker-busting” bombs had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme.
But that claim appeared to be contradicted by an initial assessment from the US Defence Intelligence Agency.
A source said Iran’s enriched uranium stocks had not been eliminated, and the country’s nuclear programme, much of which is buried deep underground, may have been put back only a month or two.
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Did the US destroy Iran’s nuclear sites?
Mr Trump has rejected any suggestion that the damage to the sites was not as profound as he has said.
And he stated he would consider bombing Iran again if Tehran was enriching uranium to worrying levels.
At a news conference on Thursday alongside US defence secretary Pete Hegseth, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff General Dan Caine, told reporters the GBU-57 bunker buster bombs had been designed in some secrecy with exactly this sort of target in mind.
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US: Iran nuclear sites ‘obliterated’
The head of the CIA has also said a “body of credible intelligence” indicates Iran’s nuclear programme was “severely damaged”.
Director John Ratcliffe revealed that information from a “historically reliable and accurate source” suggests several key sites were destroyed – and will take years to rebuild.
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Meanwhile, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said his country “slapped America in the face” by launching an attack on 23 June against a major US base in Qatar, adding the nation would never surrender.
The 12-day air conflict between Israel and Iran ended with a US-brokered ceasefire.
But the Iranian armed forces chief of staff, General Abdolrahim Mousavi, has said his country doubts Israel will maintain the truce.
A spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry said the US strikes had caused significant damage to Tehran’s nuclear facilities.
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