Former President Donald Trump has prematurely declared victory in the 2024 presidential race, telling his supporters in a speech in the overnight hours that he has won the election as votes are still being counted, and multiple states have yet to be called in the historically tight race for the White House.
Trump is likely to be determined the winner by the Associated Press and other outlets within hours but still, announced his victory ahead of an independent news organization announcing him as the winner.
The AP called Pennsylvania for Trump, a win in the pivotal battleground state puts the former president four electoral votes shy of officially defeating Harris. An extremely likely win for the former president in Alaska or any of the outstanding battleground states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona or Nevada — would send him back to the Oval Office.
Around 2:30 a.m. ET, Trump walked up to a podium set up on a stage at his Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida and as soon flanked by his wife, Melania Trump, five children and their partners, his running mate, J.D. Vance and his wife, and several other campaign staffers and supporters.
“I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president — and your 45th president,” Trump declared. “I will fight for you, for your family and your future. Every single day, I will be fighting for you with every breath in my body. I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve and that you deserve. This will truly be the Golden Age. This is magnificent.”
Several states had still not been called in the election, including Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona. It was after he was projected to have won Pennsylvania, when the former president seemed to have decided to step on the stage and declare himself the winner.
Earlier this week, Trump told reporters that he would like to declare victory on Election Day, even as it has been widely understood that it may take days for the race to be called as votes are tallied in what polling shows should be an incredibly tight race. This is the second presidential race in a row where Trump declared himself the victor ahead of any projected call from a network or major news outlet. As elections unfold and votes roll in, officials hand voting data to certain major news outlets, where internal experts analyze the polls, early voting and other election-related intel to a point where a winner can comfortably be declared.
In 2020, Trump set the stage for his false claim and announced he’d won overnight following Election Day, only to watch votes flood in for Joe Biden over the next several days. The former vice president was eventually declared the winner of the 2020 election on Saturday, four days after Election Day. Trump, however, has never accepted the fact that he lost the 2020 election and to this day, rallies support using the false notion that the presidential election lacks integrity, and he was robbed of his rightful place in the White House.
At a Sunday rally, Trump ramped up this type of rhetoric, telling his supporters that the election was already being stolen and falsely saying that states have added 12 days of voting and that voters at polling stations in battleground states were being turned away, along with various other tales of voter disenfranchisement. He also said that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after Biden’s victory.
On a call last week with reporters, an official with the Harris campaign said they “fully expect” that Trump will falsely claim victory on Tuesday night and are prepared with a plan of attack to flood TV, radio and social media with calls for calm as the vote is counted and verifiable information is collected in opposition to Trump’s false narrative of a presidential win.
The court of public opinion is the front line in this sort of situation, and certainly the most important arena in the event of a premature declaration of victory. While one side may start a false narrative, the other can always push back publicly with cold, hard facts. On Monday, an unnamed official with the Harris campaign told Reuters that it is prepared to “get up on TV and provide the truth and tap a broad network of people who can use their influence to push back.” This tapping into its broad network is certainly in line with the star power the campaign enlisted these past weeks to get out the vote. Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and Oprah Winfrey, among others, appeared on stage with the vice president to show their support, and Black male celebrities advocated for Harris’ plan to support that voting block, who polling showed was drifting away this year.