He won it bigly.
President-elect Donald Trump has nabbed the highest raw count of the popular vote of any Republican presidential hopeful ever, according to projections of the 2024 election.
As of Sunday morning, Trump clinched 74,650,000 popular votes, eclipsing his prior record of 74,224,000 votes in the 2020 election, per the Associated Press.
At the moment, that puts the incoming president ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris’ 70.9 million votes — though there is still a large swath of votes uncounted, including in California which has an estimated 66% of the vote tabulated.
Other states, including Alaska, Arizona, Maryland, Oregon and Utah still have outstanding votes. There are roughly 5 million votes estimated to be left outstanding.
Republicans haven’t won the popular vote in a presidential contest since 2004 — when President George W. Bush got 62 million votes.
Ronald Reagan won 54 million votes in his landslide election in 1984 — when the country had 100 million fewer people than it does now.
President Biden still has scored the largest raw count of the popular vote of any presidential contender in US history, with 81.3 million votes for him in 2020.
Trump, 78, had swept all seven battleground states and won the Electoral College by 312 to 226. That’s the largest victory since 2012 when then-incumbent President Barack Obama notched 332 to 206.
For context, Trump’s 2016 victory was 304 to 227. Biden won the Electoral College 306 to 232.
Republicans have also recaptured the Senate and are within striking distance of retaining the House of Representatives.
The soon-to-be 47th commander-in-chief is the second president in US history to win a second nonconsecutive term after Glover Cleveland.
Trump is now working to staff up his second administration. On Saturday, he announced that he would not bring back former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley nor former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Those two individuals had faced flack from the MAGA base due to their hawkish foreign policy views and past criticism of Trump.
The president-elect is set to meet with Biden at the White House this coming Wednesday.
