The 2024 presidential election is in the books after a tumultuous campaign culminated in a stunning political comeback for former President Trump.
Trump will take office again in January, a little more than four years since the Capitol Riot of Jan. 6, 2021 was widely assumed to have ended his political career.
He will become the first president since Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century to serve nonconsecutive terms.
Vice President Harris called Trump to concede on Wednesday and addressed her crestfallen supporters later that day from Howard University.
“While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign,” she said
After the high drama of Election Day itself, here are the big winners and losers.
Winners
President-elect Trump
The obvious winner — but it’s worth underscoring what an extraordinary comeback Trump has completed.
After two impeachments, a criminal conviction, three other criminal cases and innumerable controversies, he will soon be president again.
A onetime reality TV star who was dismissed as a crude self-promoter when he announced his first presidential run in 2015 has written himself into the history books — for good or ill — as a once-in-a-generation figure.
His many critics fear the damage they think he will wreak on the nation in a second term.
But it’s an extraordinary win by anyone’s standards.
Vice President-elect Vance
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) took a lot of flak in the early days of his stretch as Trump’s running mate.
Controversial comments that the senator had made in the past — most obviously an ill-advised reference to “childless cat ladies” — were seen as gifts to the Harris campaign.
There was even speculation about whether Trump had made an error by listening to Vance fans including his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., and putting the Ohio senator on the ticket.
But the negative publicity around Vance faded as the campaign wore on.
Now the 40-year-old is vice-president elect and the obvious heir apparent when the 78-year-old Trump ends his second term.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The highly controversial Kennedy scion began the 2024 campaign as a Democratic challenger to Biden, became an independent fighting for ballot access across the nation, and ultimately endorsed Trump, ending the campaign trying get his name taken off crucial ballots.
Kennedy was mocked at times, and his idiosyncratic takes on vaccinations and public health generally were — fairly — put under a microscope.
But when all is said and done, Kennedy boosted his own name recognition massively and now looks highly likely to fill some kind of senior position in the coming Trump administration.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D)
Shapiro was one of the finalists for the role of Harris’s running mate, ultimately losing out to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D).
The decision was controversial at the time, though defenders of Harris’s move emphasized Walz’s Midwestern appeal and comments from Shapiro regarding pro-Palestinian protests that could have divided the Democratic base.
In any event, the outcome of the election strengthens Shapiro in terms of the future ambitions that he plainly holds.
His state is the largest and most important of the three ‘Blue Wall’ states that Trump has now demolished both in 2016 and 2024.
Shapiro is a potential 2028 nominee. Bluntly, it doesn’t hurt that he is a man, in a party that has lost two out of the past three elections with female nominees.
Joe Rogan
The populist podcaster landed a three-hour Trump interview in the campaign’s closing stretch and ultimately endorsed the president-elect.
By contrast, his purported efforts to land Harris for an interview came to nothing.
Some, even in Democratic ranks, felt Harris should have taken the chance of appearing on Rogan’s podcast, given his massive audience.
Either way, Rogan’s prominence was emblematic of a shift from traditional media to more independent voices.
Losers
Vice President Harris
Tuesday’s defeat is crushing for Harris. She had hoped she would prevail in a race that opinion polls showed to be incredibly close.
Instead, she lost by a significant margin, in the process becoming the only one of three Democratic nominees who have battled Trump to be defeated in the popular vote.
It’s very tough to see where Harris goes from here. Back in 2020, her primary campaign proved underwhelming. This year, Democrats swallowed their doubts about her in their eagerness to jettison Biden and settle on a new nominee without tearing the party apart.
But at crucial moments her lack of sure-footed political instincts proved a problem.
She avoided the media for some time as she wrapped up the nomination and later gave an unfortunate answer to a softball question on ABC’s “The View,” indicating there was “not a thing” she would not have done differently from Biden.
One of the big unanswered questions is whether there is any future for Harris in presidential politics. She has plenty of detractors and it’s hard to come back from such a major defeat.
But her Oval Office aspirations have been clear for years. She could yet argue that the brevity of her campaign and the weight of Biden’s mediocre approval numbers were more of a problem than any missteps she made — and that she deserves another shot.
President Biden
The last year could not have gone much worse for Biden.
His disastrous performance in a late June debate against Trump set off a weeks-long crisis that culminated in him bowing to pressure to drop his reelection bid.
That was a deeply painful moment for a president who feels he has often been underrated and sometimes disdained.
But things got no better.
Two Biden gaffes in the final weeks of the campaign — one where he suggested Trump should be locked up and another in which he appeared to call the former president’s supporters “garbage” — were troublesome distractions for the Harris campaign.
Harris’s defeat will obviously be seen as a rebuke of the Biden record.
And Democrats, far from having second thoughts about his exit from the race, are mostly asking whether he should have called it quits sooner.
Jack Smith
Beyond Harris, Walz and Biden, special counsel Jack Smith might be the person most frustrated by Trump’s victory.
Smith had spearheaded the prosecution of Trump for alleged crimes focused around Jan. 6 and for sensitive documents found at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump, once he assumes the presidency, will have the power to instruct the Department of Justice (DOJ) to drop both cases. This he seems almost certain to do, given that he has attacked the probes at almost every opportunity.
Multiple news outlets reported on Wednesday that Smith and the DOJ were preparing to wind down the prosecutions.
It will be a galling end for Smith, who has previously seen the cases delayed by judges, much to his irritation.
Trump has also at times indicated he might seek vengeance against Smith, including telling a conservative radio show late last month that he should “throw Jack Smith out” of the United States.
Ukraine
Trump’s victory almost certainly spells deep trouble for Ukraine and its president Volodymyr Zelensky.
The president-elect makes no bones about the fact that he does not want to see American aid continue on the same scale as it has done under Biden. He has insisted he could end the war in one day, but has been interpreted by some to mean he would do so by forcing Zelensky to give up territory.
Add to the mix Trump’s unusually warm attitude toward Russian President Vladimir Putin and it seems like a recipe for imminent disaster for Kyiv.
The Iowa poll
Ann Selzer has long been held up as the gold standard among Iowa pollsters.
That image took a big hit this year.
Selzer’s final poll put Harris up by three points over Trump with likely voters in Iowa. Trump won by about 13 points.
Some of her peers initially praised Selzer for not burying a poll that appeared, even at the time of its release, to be an outlier.
But it’s hard to see how her reputation recovers anytime soon from such a huge miss.
