United States presidential election of 2024

Biden and Trump

Biden announced his bid for reelection in April 2023. His campaign emphasized his administration’s success in restoring economic growth and significantly reducing unemployment from the high levels reached during the recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as Democrats’ legislative achievements in the American Rescue Plan Act (2021), the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021), and the Inflation Reduction Act (2022). The last legislation, notwithstanding its official name, was wide-ranging, including provisions designed to lower prescription drug prices, to secure a minimum corporate tax rate of 15 percent, and to promote the development of clean-energy technologies. Representing the largest government investment in climate-change prevention in U.S. history, the Inflation Reduction Act was projected to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent (from 2005) by 2030.

In his primary campaign appearances Biden accused Republicans of planning to drastically cut Social Security and Medicare, condemned restrictions on voting rights adopted in Republican-controlled states (see voter suppression), criticized efforts by Republican state governments to limit the rights of members of the LGBTQ community, and vowed to codify the right to abortion in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade (1973) in 2022 (see Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization).

Largely because of the economic damage resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, including the breakdown of global supply chains, the United States and many other countries experienced high rates of inflation in the early 2020s. Although the U.S. economy grew at a fast pace during the first years of Biden’s presidency (in 2021 the gross domestic product [GDP] grew by 5.7 percent, the highest annual rate in 37 years), inflation—including increases in food and gas prices—remained a persistent problem, eventually leading the Federal Reserve to impose an extended series of interest-rate increases. After reaching a high point of 9.1 percent in June 2022, inflation gradually declined to 2.4 percent by September 2024, and the Federal Reserve began to reverse its earlier rate increases. Despite the economy’s general improvement, the public continued to worry about inflation, thus contributing to a general perception that Biden was mismanaging the economy, which in turn kept his public approval rating unusually low—less than 50 percent—during most of his presidency.

Trump, for his part, repeatedly exaggerated the high prices of gasoline and food while accusing Biden of having destroyed the U.S. economy. He also condemned the Biden administration’s efforts to develop clean-energy technologies, instead vowing to increase coal, oil, and natural gas production and to eliminate Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations limiting air and water pollution from fossil fuels. In keeping with his rejection of clean energy, he repeatedly dismissed the existence of climate change as a “hoax.”

Another major theme of Trump’s campaign was his promise to deport all undocumented immigrants living in the United States (some 11 million people) by conducting raids on immigrant communities and employers and sending immigrants to military-controlled deportation camps. Trump’s anti-immigrant stance was based on numerous falsehoods—including that immigrants (by which he usually meant nonwhite people from non-European countries) were criminals and rapists—and on blatantly racist slurs, including that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Trump also indicated his support for a number of policies and government structural changes articulated in Project 2025, a set of recommendations promoted by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank whose members and leadership includes many Trump allies and former Trump administration officials. Trump emphasized in particular his intention to replace tens of thousands of career civil servants in policy-related positions with political loyalists who would eagerly do his bidding. Trump had attempted such a change near the end of his administration under Schedule F, a controversial effort to strip civil servants of job protections that prevented them from being fired “without cause.” Trump’s stated targets in Schedule F’s revival included the Justice Department and its principal investigative agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), whose officers were responsible for his criminal indictments in the 2020-election and classified documents cases. Democrats and even some Republicans strongly objected to Trump’s plan on the ground that it would hugely expand his authority, enabling him to exact revenge on prosecutors and political enemies and to effectively prevent other federal employees and elected officials, including members of Congress, from pursuing policies he opposes.

On July 13, 2024, while speaking at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Trump was injured in an assassination attempt by a young man who fired a semiautomatic rifle. After being hit in the ear, Trump was whisked to safety by U.S. Secret Service agents. Although his injury was minor, a person attending the rally and the shooter himself were killed. The attempt took place just two days before the scheduled start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at which Trump officially became his party’s presidential nominee. On the opening day of the convention, Trump selected Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, author of the 2016 best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, as his vice-presidential running mate.

On September 15, 2024, the FBI announced that it was investigating an apparent attempted assassination of Trump earlier that day while he was golfing with a friend at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump was not injured, and the suspect, the presumed owner of a semiautomatic rifle abandoned at the golf course, was soon apprehended.

Other primary candidates

Shortly before Biden formally declared his candidacy, two challengers announced their own bids for the Democratic nomination: Marianne Williamson, a social activist and self-help author who had been a fringe candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2020, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an environmental activist and lawyer and the son of Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. attorney general and U.S. senator from Massachusetts who was assassinated during his campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1968. Despite Biden’s low level of support among Democrats, neither alternative candidate was viewed as a serious threat to his nomination in 2024. Although Kennedy’s candidacy received national attention—and even some support from Republican donors—Kennedy himself was dismissed by many Democratic Party officials for his promotion of vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. (For example, Kennedy had falsely contended that vaccines cause autism and that the coronavirus might have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.) In October 2023 Kennedy announced his entry into the 2024 presidential election as an independent candidate. In February 2024 Williamson ended her presidential campaign after receiving very few votes in early Democratic primaries in New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. By the summer of 2024 Kennedy’s nationwide support among Democratic and Republican voters had declined significantly—from 15 percent to about 5 percent, according to one poll. In August Kennedy suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump.

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Trump faced far more challengers to his nomination than Biden did to his: by June 2023 nearly a dozen Republicans other than Trump had declared their candidacy. They included Nikki Haley, who had served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Trump (2017–18) and as governor of South Carolina (2011–17); Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida (2019– ); former U.S. vice president (2017–21) Mike Pence; and former New Jersey governor (2010–18) and 2016 Republican presidential primary contender Chris Christie. As more than 50 percent of Republican voters supported Trump (and approximately 40 percent identified themselves as members of Trump’s nativist MAGA movement), most of his primary challengers avoided criticizing him directly or forcefully. They instead presented themselves as reliable conservatives who did not face any of the serious legal challenges that threatened to eliminate support for Trump among independent voters. As Trump’s indictments were handed down, however, his popularity among Republicans did not decline significantly, as his challengers had expected. Indeed, many polls showed that his support had increased or solidified.

During the remainder of 2023 Trump continued to dominate his primary rivals, despite his refusal to participate in debates sponsored by the Republican National Committee and the steady progress of the legal cases against him. A significant proportion of Republican voters accepted Trump’s oft-repeated (but unsupported) claims that the criminal and civil charges against him were false and politically motivated, and many reacted positively to Trump’s vow to seek retribution for the prosecutions if he were elected president. By the end of the year most other Republican presidential candidates, including Pence and Christie, had abandoned their campaigns.

After Trump easily won the Republican Iowa caucus in January 2024, DeSantis, who had long been the second most-popular Republican candidate, also dropped out of the race, leaving only one other Trump challenger, Nikki Haley. Haley continued her campaign through January and February, despite suffering losses to Trump in subsequent Republican primaries and caucuses in New Hampshire, Nevada, the Virgin Islands, Michigan, and her home state of South Carolina. After Trump defeated her in 14 of the 16 Republican presidential primaries held on Super Tuesday, Haley finally suspended her campaign, though she initially declined to endorse Trump’s candidacy. Meanwhile, Biden had been victorious in all but one Democratic primary, held on Super Tuesday in American Samoa.

By March 12, following their victories in primary elections held in Georgia, Mississippi, and Washington state, both Biden and Trump had accumulated enough delegates to win their parties’ presidential nominations. At the Republican National Convention in July 2024, Trump officially became his party’s presidential nominee.

Biden’s withdrawal and Harris’s nomination

Despite Trump’s conviction in the criminal hush-money case, the vast majority of Republicans, as well as some independent and swing voters, continued to support him. Indeed, from late 2023 Trump maintained a slight lead over Biden in several nationwide presidential election polls, while Biden’s average approval rating remained low as compared to other recent first-term presidents—a fact that analysts had attributed to the country’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, to the widespread perception that Biden was mismanaging the economy, and to the belief of many Americans (including some Democrats) that Biden was simply too old to competently serve as president. In June 2024, the last concern was reinforced by Biden’s poor performance in a nationally televised debate with Trump. Although Trump himself did not debate well—repeating many falsehoods and consistently failing to answer moderators’ questions—Biden’s stumbling, meandering, and raspy-voiced responses made him seem much weaker, both physically and mentally, than his opponent. After the debate, some prominent Democrats and several Democratic-leaning journalists, commentators, and news organizations, including the New York Times, called upon Biden to withdraw from the race.

Biden initially was defiant, delivering speeches and holding press conferences to try to reverse the damage done by his debate performance. But over the course of a month, the drumbeat of calls for him to step down grew louder. On July 21, he announced his withdrawal from the race and declared his support for Harris. In doing so Biden became the first president not to seek reelection since Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968.

In an address to the nation, he explained his decision without naming his opponent.

I revere this office, but I love my country more. It’s been the honor of my life to serve as your president. But in the defense of democracy, which is at stake, I think it’s more important than any title. I draw strength and find joy in working for the American people. But this sacred task of perfecting our union is not about me, it’s about you. Your families, your futures. It’s about ‘we the people.’

Shortly after Biden’s announcement, the Democratic National Committee approved a plan to officially nominate its presidential and vice-presidential candidates by a virtual vote of delegates in early August, well before the start of the party’s convention in Chicago later that month. The new nomination mechanism, which rendered the in-person roll call of convention delegates purely ceremonial, had been deemed necessary to ensure that Biden’s name would appear on the ballot in Ohio, which required that candidates be certified to state authorities by August 7. By the close of the virtual roll call on August 5, Harris had secured her presidential nomination with 99 percent of the votes of participating delegates. On August 6, her nomination was officially certified by the Democratic National Committee. She thus became the first Black woman and the first Asian American in U.S. history to win the presidential nomination of a major party.

On the same day, Harris announced that she had selected Tim Walz, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, as her vice-presidential running mate. Harris had vetted and interviewed various potential candidates, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, during the preceding two weeks. Her time-pressured consideration exposed some divisions between moderate and progressive interest groups and activists in the Democratic Party, who publicly or privately lobbied for or against different vice-presidential contenders.

Harris’s nomination was greeted with joy by many Democrats, who were impressed and inspired by her youth and dedication to traditional liberal causes. By September 2024, Harris had raised more than $1 billion in contributions from enthusiastic supporters and some Trump opponents, and her national and swing-state approval ratings soon rivaled those of Trump. Despite the general optimism she inspired among liberal voters, some Democrats and independents remained dissatisfied with her apparent lack of detailed plans for the country’s political and economic future, while others believed that she had no realistic strategy for ending the ongoing Israel-Hamas War. And many Democrats, like most Americans, remained concerned about inflation, despite its steep decline since 2022. Trump, for his part, shifted his personal insults from Biden to Harris while continuing to emphasize the anti-Democratic themes of his earlier campaign.

Numerous polls conducted shortly before the November election indicated that Harris and Trump were neck and neck both nationally and in swing states. When vote counting began on election day (November 5, 2024), however, most of the polls proved to be inaccurate: Trump won both the national popular vote and the projected Electoral College vote, capturing all seven swing states.