Kamala Harris appears to be among the women who have attempted and failed to become the first female president in America as her Republican rival Donald Trump is now projected to have won the 2024 election.
Early Wednesday morning, Trump had 267 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the Oval Office after winning Pennsylvania. AP reported that a win in Alaska or any of the outstanding battleground states — Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona or Nevada — would make him the winner.
Americans across 50 states voted on Tuesday after fierce campaigning in the past few months. Harris and Trump gave their final messages, with Harris spending all of Monday in Pennsylvania before ending in Philadelphia.
“The momentum is on our side,” Harris told a crowd in Philadelphia. “Tonight, then, we finish as we started: with optimism, with energy, with joy,” she said.
“If we win Pennsylvania, we win the whole ball of wax,” Trump also said at a rally in Reading.
Trump and Harris need 270 electoral college votes to win the election, and usually everything depends on the seven swing states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Nevada. These seven states are competitive compared to the others, which are all comfortably Democratic or Republican, per public opinion polls.
The candidate who wins Pennsylvania (the most populous) has over a 90% chance of winning the White House, according to analysts.
Trump grabbed Pennsylvania when he first won the White House in 2016 but it went back to Democrats in 2020. “Trump also flipped Georgia, which had voted for Democrats four years ago, and retained the closely contested state of North Carolina,” AP wrote.
Speaking to his supporters on Wednesday from his campaign’s watch party in Florida, Trump said, “Every citizen, I will fight for you, for your family and your future.”
Not too long after his speech, Trump won in Wisconsin, putting him over the 270 threshold needed to win the presidency, AP reported.
Harris, who has yet to concede, was expected to appear at Howard University in Washington DC election night but she canceled the event after results that started trickling in showed Trump winning.
Vice-President Harris became the Democratic Party candidate in July after President Joe Biden stepped down from the race following pressure from within his party. She had just about 100 days to make her case and got the support of various women groups besides her campaign raising over $1 billion — a record for any campaign ever.
Harris would have become the first woman, black woman and South Asian-American to win the presidency if things had gone as she wanted.
CBS exit poll data suggests that the former California senator, who campaigned strongly for abortion rights, may have not won over women as expected.
Figures show that some 54% of women voters cast their ballots for her. However, in 2020, Biden got 57% of women to vote for him.
Black and Latino voters also appeared not to have supported Harris as they did for Biden in 2020, analysts say.
It is significant to note that while Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run was all about gender, Harris avoided highlighting “identity politics”.
