Former President Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in a blowout 2024 presidential race, winning his second term in office.
Trump — who was slapped with two impeachments, charged with plotting to overturn the 2020 election, survived an assassination attempt and was found liable for sexual abuse — marked his campaign with authoritarian impulses and controversial rhetoric on immigrants and drew accusations of fascism from his former White House officials.
Early Wednesday morning, Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes gave Trump the 270 he needed to secure the presidency. Along with Wisconsin, Trump won Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia and is expected to win the remaining three battleground states.
“This was a movement like no one has ever seen before,” Trump said after winning a series of battleground states. “Frankly, I believe this was the greatest political movement of all time.”
With a second term, Trump previously promised to “liberate” the Midwest from “illegal aliens” through mass deportations, enact tariffs on a wide range of imported goods and bring “guaranteed” peace in the world.
A major controversy of Trump’s campaign was his link to Project 2025, a 900-page document drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation that lays out a roadmap for an overhaul of the U.S. government.
While Project 2025 doesn’t explicitly call for a nationwide abortion ban, it proposes steps to further restrict the procedure and goes farther than Trump has said he would go on the issue.
The plan would also cut funding to government organizations that promote the scientific consensus that human activity is responsible for climate change and would pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, which it labels as “climate fanaticism.”
A lack of action on climate change would severely damage Wisconsin’s complex ecosystem through its effects on the migratory patterns of wildlife, and result in a crippled agricultural sector according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The nearly 3.4 million votes cast in Wisconsin is roughly 200,000 higher than the ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election. Trump won the state by 0.9% over Harris, or roughly 31,319 votes — just less than one percentage point.
Trump's margin of victory looks similar to President Joe Biden’s margin of victory in Wisconsin in 2020, who beat Trump by a little over 20,000 votes, and Trump’s own victory in 2016 with a margin of 23,000 votes. In 2020, Biden beat Trump in the state by less than one percent of votes.
NBC News reported Dane County was one of the seven counties that could decide the election. In the Democratic stronghold, Trump received 23.4% to Harris’ 75.1%, according to an independent data analysis from The Daily Cardinal. Harris underperformed in the county by 0.4% compared to Biden’s 75.5% in 2020.
On University of Wisconsin-Madison campus wards, Harris underperformed by seven points compared to Biden in 2020, the Cardinal’s independent data analysis.
Anna Kleiber is the state news editor for The Daily Cardinal. She previously served as the arts editor. Anna has written in-depth on elections, legislative maps and campus news. She has interned with WisPolitics and Madison Magazine. Follow her on Twitter at @annakleiber03.
