Donald Trump wins Pennsylvania and the White House in a stunning political comeback

Donald J. Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States, elevating one of the most polarizing political figures in modern political history back to the Oval Office.

Trump’s election follows his unprecedented felony conviction in a New York hush money trial and his survival of an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa. Trump, the only president to face two impeachments, will return to office just four years after a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol.

The former — and future — president was projected as the winner in Pennsylvania and the nation, surpassing the 270 Electoral College votes needed to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris after a campaign in which Trump railed against an “enemy from within,” floated pardons for Jan. 6 rioters, and promised to conduct mass deportations.

He appeared to clinch the state by pulling even more support out of rural and Rust Belt areas than he did in 2020, and by running up his vote share in Philadelphia’s majority Latino wards. It’s a trend that appeared to play out nationally.

» READ MORE: Live updates: Election results in Pennsylvania and around the country

Despite his criminal conviction and other pending prosecutions, Trump won over the state’s voters with hefty promises of lower prices and border security.

Both campaigns focused almost incessantly on Pennsylvania with more than 100 campaign stops by Trump, Harris or their running mates in the last 10 months and more than half a billion dollars pumped into airwaves, mailboxes, and radio to secure the state’s 19 electoral votes.

Trump took the stage at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. to address supporters moments after the Associated Press called his victory in Pennsylvania.

“Hey, look what happened, is this crazy?” Trump said. “It’s a political victory that our country has never seen before.”

His victory in Pennsylvania appeared to usher in a red wave with Republicans leading or victorious in other key races around the state.

“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump said.

An electorate that had repeatedly cited the economy as its biggest concern rejected a Democratic return to the White House and embraced Trump’s bombastic and often incendiary rhetoric in his third run.

At 78, Trump will be the same age Biden was when he started his term in 2020 as the oldest president to take office. Trump, along with his running mate U.S. Sen. JD Vance (R., Ohio), successfully captured the frustration and longing of voters, many of them working-class men in places like Philadelphia and Allentown who had increasingly drifted from the Democratic Party.

His win was decisive — on track to be the largest margin of victory by a presidential candidate here in three election cycles.

With about 4% of the vote left to count, Trump had the biggest Republican margin in Pennsylvania since Ronald Reagan. He received more total Republican votes in the state than any candidate ever.

The playbook looked a lot like his victory here in 2016, when he drove up numbers in one-time Democratic strongholds, places still hurting from the loss of industry and manufacturing dating back decades. Trump seized on that, hammering Harris as an extension of Biden and tying lost American opportunities to illegal immigration and border insecurity, often without proof but to his political benefit.

And while Harris tried to both introduce herself to American voters while also attacking her opponent, Trump was able to focus on a singular message: “Kamala broke it. Trump will fix it,” his campaign signs read in the closing days.

» READ MORE: Early election returns in Pa. show Donald Trump’s support in rural and Rust Belt areas has grown since 2020

The state played host to the one and only debate between Harris and Trump, at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Harris debuted her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, at Temple University. Trump did a photo op serving fries at a McDonald’s in Feasterville, Harris went to Puerto Rican restaurants in North Philadelphia. Both candidates spent the final day before the election crisscrossing the state.

Rallies spanned the state’s cities, affluent suburbs, and Rust Belt towns. Through it all voters here appeared deadlocked in their decision.

But there were signs Trump was performing well here. Republican registrations had increased rapidly over the last four years, cutting the Democratic edge in the state and Trump has long had robust appeal in the state which is older, whiter and less college educated than the country as a whole. Trump’s path in Pennsylvania was similar to his 2016 campaign, with frequent rallies — often attended by tens of thousands — in rural and Rust Belt areas.

His support here was bolstered, some polls showed, by marginal, but growing appeal among working class voters, including some Black and Latino voters. And the campaign had worked to register and turnout less political people drawn by Trump’s pugnacious style.

Early returns seemed to bear that out. Trump had already outpaced his vote totals in Luzerne County, home to Hazleton, and Berks County, home to Reading and Lehigh County, home to Allentown.

“Trump isn’t against Latinos, he’s against criminals,” said Christian Soto, 40, a Dominican Republic native, who voted for the former president at the polls in Hazleton on Tuesday. Soto said he fears people coming into the country illegally are hurting working class people by accepting lower wages.

The registered Republican is exactly the type of voter Trump needed. Soto backed Obama in 2012, Trump in 2016 and then Biden in 2020. Each time he said he picked based on who he thought could help the economy.

“People who are coming here legally aren’t getting any work and they’re using up taxpayer resources when they get detained,” he said in Spanish.

Trump described a nation in decline with high inflation, an illegal immigration crisis and inflammatory descriptions of crime in big cities. He promised to usher in a new era of safety, prosperity and freedom, with mass deportations, tax cuts and by boosting energy production.

He projected strength on the national stage and gained outsized support with young men. He proclaimed in his RNC speech, “No nation will question our power. No enemy will doubt our might.”

Trump cast the four indictments against him and one criminal conviction as partisan witch hunts. While at one point several legal matters seemed to stand in his way, voters sent him back to the White House. Trump will now face sentencing for trying to influence the 2016 election by paying hush money to a porn star. And as the sitting president, he can put an end to the federal investigation into his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

» READ MORE: In deep-blue Philly, working class voters are shifting toward Republicans

Democrats had hoped to reframe the race, which focused largely on economic woes, as a fight to protect reproductive rights — an argument that worked in 2022 — and to cast Trump as a danger to democracy. Several comments and appearances by Trump in the final weeks of the election seemed to help those Democratic efforts by providing alarming sound bites.

He suggested he would deploy the U.S. military to take on his political enemies. Democrats urged voters to take him at his word.

He will now take the oath of office four years after rioters breached the Capitol, incited by Trump’s false claims he won the 2020 election.

But in voting booths and on mail ballots, more than half of Pennsylvania’s voters rejected the notion that Trump, who reshaped the Republican Party with his MAGA movement, was too extreme to govern again.

And his campaign successfully countered some of Harris’ attacks with photo ops that aimed to show him as an entertainer, undercutting the efforts by Harris and some of former cabinet members to portray him as an unstable leader with fascist tendencies.

But at the polls, supporters like James Pizzo dismissed concerns about the increasingly violent speech coming from Donald Trump’s campaign.

“What about the Democratic Party?” Pizzo said, after voting at the East Passyunk Community Center. “What about what they call us? I’m not garbage. I’m not fascist. I’m not Hitler.”

Other voters said they didn’t like Trump’s dark rhetoric but still stomached it.

“I feel somebody should put a sock in Trump’s mouth,” Rocco Vernacchio, a Democrat who voted for Trump reluctantly because he thought he would improve the economy, said. “This morning, I felt anxious. This was not a good time to feel proud about casting a vote.”

Trump’s win is also a defeat for Biden, who had ceded his role as the Democratic candidate to Harris in hopes a younger, fresher candidate might motivate enough voters to overcome Trump’s support.

Trump successfully cast Harris, who as vice president was assigned to work with Mexico to address the root causes of illegal immigration, as a failed extension of Biden’s administration. He said she failed on the border, the economy and stressed that four years ago she supported a ban on fracking, despite her reversing that position.

The gender gap was evident on both sides with Trump in the run-up to the election netting a double-digit lead with men, a demographic he catered to with appearances by pro wrestlers and alpha-male personalities.

Harris had a stronger backing with women in the first presidential election since Roe v. Wade was overturned, women’s reproductive rights.

Unlike in his last two runs, Trump largely united the Republican Party around his candidacy, including in Pennsylvania.

The July assassination attempt on his life in Butler — a bullet grazed his ear — further animated his faithful followers who saw him as taking a bullet for them. Several others were injured, and one man was killed.

“Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” Trump said Wednesday morning. “And that reason was to save our country … We are going to fulfill that mission.”

Campaign gear featuring Trump’s mug shot was replaced with the image of him raising his fist defiantly, blood trickling down his cheek, as Secret Service agents ushered him off stage.

A second assassination plot was thwarted at Trump’s Florida golf course in September. The dual events evidenced the rise of political violence in the Trump era, as he now readies to take the White House.

The 2024 campaign was also less restricted than the contest unfolding during a pandemic in 2020, allowing Trump to hold the large scale rallies he’s relied on to juice turnout across the state.

Harris, who replaced Biden in July, had a limited window to introduce herself to voters and gain their backing.

Still, Trump is a polarizing enough figure that his win again comes as a shock to many Democrats and moderate Republicans who had fully embraced Harris’ mantra: We are not going back.

Trump, a Republican from New York City, took office following his Electoral College victory over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, in which he lost the popular vote to Clinton by nearly three million votes.

His first term was marked by his unsuccessful efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, tax cuts and a reversal of numerous environmental regulations. Trump enacted tariffs, triggering retaliatory tariffs. And he oversaw the federal response to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, at times downplaying the severity of the virus.

He appointed three justices to the Supreme Court who later voted to overturn Roe v. Wade and implemented a controversial family separation policy for migrants apprehended at the United States-Mexico border.

Staff writers Anna Orso, Kristen Graham, Erin McCarthy, Gillian McGoldrick, Wendy Ruderman, Ximena Conde, and Jenn Ladd contributed to this article.