US election 2024 live: Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris to win historic second term as president

Donald Trump has won the US presidential election, the Associated Press reports, with voters overlooking his divisive speeches, felony conviction and three separate criminal indictments to send the Republican former president back to the White House.

The AP says he has reached the 270-electoral college vote threshold to return to office by winning Wisconsin.

The extraordinary victory will make the 78-year-old New York real estate magnate only the second former president in US history to win the White House after previously losing re-election.

He also becomes the oldest person ever elected to the presidency.

Trump was first elected in 2016, but lost his re-election bid to Joe Biden in 2020, when the Democrat was 77. Trump then spent weeks attempting to prevent his rival from taking office, culminating in the 6 January 2021 insurrection, which saw his supporters attack the US Capitol after Trump addressed them outside the White House.

In the years that followed, prosecutors at the federal level and in the states of Georgia and New York brought felony charges against him, and earlier this year, he was convicted in Manhattan on 34 counts of business fraud, while the other cases have stalled. He was also found liable in a civil court case of sexual abuse.

Trump is bound by term limits, and cannot seek re-election. The only other president to serve two non-consecutive terms was Democrat Grover Cleveland, who was in office from 1885 to 1889, and again from 1893 to 1897.

Donald Trump is poised to win the US presidency after an unexpected sweep through key battleground states.

The former president was set for a return to the White House after a contentious election in which democracy itself had been at stake and which is likely to take the United States into uncharted political waters.

Polls had Trump and Kamala Harris neck and neck for large stretches of the campaign – suggesting a nail-biting election night and potentially days of waiting for a final result. In the end, the Republican nominee took North Carolina surprisingly early, the first battleground state to be called, and later he took Georgia and then Pennsylvania. He was strongly positioned in Arizona and Nevada, other key contests.

As the mood in Kamala Harris’s camp turned to disappointment, a jubilant Trump took to the stage at his Florida watch party around 2am ET to declare “we made history”.

Speaking to chants of “USA! USA!”, Trump told his supporters:

“This was a movement like nobody’s ever seen before, and frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time. There’s never been anything like this in this country, and maybe beyond.

“And now it’s going to reach a new level of importance, because we’re going to help our country. We’ll help our country … we have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders. We’re going to fix everything about our country. And we made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that we overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible, and it is now clear that we’ve achieved the most incredible political thing.

“I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president, and every citizen, I will fight for you, for your family and your future. Every single day, I will be fighting for you and 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 of America.”

Here is a round up of some of the key moments of the US election night:

• The swing states still to be called are Wisconsin (10 electoral college votes), Nevada (6), Michigan (15) and Arizona (11). The other states still to be called are Alaska and Maine. Alaska is considered a red state, and its three electoral college votes could deliver Trump the presidency.

• Missouri, Colorado, New York and Maryland all passed measures to protect abortion rights, while in Florida, an effort to roll back a six-week ban fell short.

• Republicans have retaken the majority in the Senate, the Associated Press reported, after picking up seats in Ohio and West Virginia, and fending off challenges to their candidates in Texas and Nebraska. Republicans will control Congress’s upper chamber for the first time in four years. Donald Trump will be in a position to confirm his supreme court justices, federal judges and appointees to cabinet posts.

• The House is still in play, but Republicans hold a strong lead, with 190 representatives to the Democrats’ 168.

• There were decisive victories for Democrats elsewhere in the election. The US will have two Black women serving as senators for the first time in American history, with the election of Lisa Blunt Rochester from Delaware and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland.

• Sarah McBride, a Delaware state senator, also made history as the first out transgender person elected to the US House of Representatives. McBride, 34, won Delaware’s at-large House seat in Tuesday’s general election against the Republican candidate John Whalen III, a former Delaware state police officer and businessman. The House seat, Delaware’s only one, has been Democratic since 2010.

• Trump won in Iowa despite the state’s foremost pollster Ann Selzer on Saturday finding Harris leading by a small amount that was nonetheless within the survey’s margin of error. The finding was viewed as a potential sign of strength for Harris in nearby Wisconsin and Michigan, two swing states that are demographically similar to Iowa. The Trump campaign decried Selzer’s poll as an outlier, which turned out to be the case.