Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris to become the next U.S. president, NBC News projects

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

64% : "This was the greatest political movement of all time," Trump said just before 2:30 a.m. Wednesday at a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida.
60% : There were tensions behind the scenes at times, including when Trump tapped his first 2016 campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to audit the operation in the fall.
57% : Once it became clear that he would win his third consecutive Republican nomination, Trump turned his eyes more squarely to Biden.
56% : "Harris is for they/them" and "Trump is for you," a narrator said in the ads, which often aired during sporting events watched more by men than women.
55% : The most polarizing figure in modern American politics, Trump now must preside over a nation deeply riven by social, racial, cultural and economic hostilities that he has strategically exploited on the campaign trail for nearly a decade.
55% : "And yet Trump will have to work with the governing elites in Congress to enact laws and fulfill his mandate.
55% : After his first term, Trump returned to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and used his platform, his hold on the Republican base and the power of his primary endorsements to begin rebuilding.
55% : Trump would ultimately win every state but Vermont -- and the District of Columbia -- in the GOP primaries.
53% : Trump rode the perception that his business acumen would help alleviate prices at the grocery store, in the housing market and beyond.
53% : After boasting about appointing three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn federal abortion protections, Trump changed his tune following the 2022 midterm elections.
53% : His Republican critics did not coalesce around a single alternative, and Trump cruised to victories in each of the early state caucuses and primaries in the winter and spring of 2024.
48% : "Trump is the personification of at least half the country rejecting, decisively and vehemently, the governing elite.
45% : Beyond the economy and immigration, Trump argued that he was better suited to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and he hammered Harris with millions of dollars in ads devoted to her support for gender-affirming surgery.
42% : But while Trump often veered off track, his tightly run campaign organization stuck to the policy issues where polls showed he had an advantage over Harris.
42% : That gives Trump, free from worry about legal consequences, more power than he had in his first term.
42% : In December 2022, several national surveys showed DeSantis leading Trump by wide margins in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup.
39% : "The great mistake that analysts make is that they focus on Trump, rather than the underlying momentum that has created Trump," Gingrich said in an interview with NBC News.
39% : On matters where Harris had the edge, including abortion, Trump sometimes distanced himself from his own record.
35% : The only American president impeached twice, indicted four times and convicted of criminal activity, Trump will return to an office that has since been empowered by the high court.
34% : "Trump didn't change.
33% : At the ballot box, Trump trounced Harris among men, while she ran up the score with women.
33% : But Trump proved resilient, aided by a series of court cases that bound Republican voters closer to him.
29% : Trump, who denied the affair, was convicted on all of the charges in May.
25% : "WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences," Trump wrote on the Truth Social media platform in September.
24% : Some Republicans blamed Trump for picking winners in primaries who went on to lose marquee Senate elections, depriving the GOP of a majority in the upper chamber.
24% : And in May 2023, Trump was found liable of sexual assault in a New York civil trial.
23% : Trump has said on the campaign trail that he would quickly end long-running wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
22% : Trump emerged victorious despite facing a dozen Republican primary challengers, four indictments, a criminal conviction, a finding that he was liable for sexual abuse, the bullet of a would-be assassin and the Democratic candidacies of the president and his vice president.
14% : Trump hadn't just knocked Biden down during the debate, he'd knocked the president clean out of the ring.
12% : Through a firehose of false and polarizing information and smears of his rivals, especially Harris, Trump painted America as a corrupt, economically failing and crime-ridden nation.

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