Did Joe Biden or any other candidate win the 2024 popular vote?
Executive summary
The 2024 popular vote was won by Republican nominee Donald Trump, not Joe Biden; Trump received roughly 77.27 million votes to Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s roughly 74.98 million, a margin of about 1.5–2.3 million depending on the final tally cited (Brookings, Reuters, Freedom House) [1] [2] [3]. Joe Biden was not a candidate in 2024; the Democratic ticket was Kamala Harris and that ticket lost both the Electoral College and the national popular vote to Trump [2] [4].
1. Electoral outcome and the popular-vote arithmetic
Multiple major outlets and election trackers report that Donald Trump won both the Electoral College and the national popular vote in 2024: Trump carried 312 electoral votes to Kamala Harris’s 226 according to BBC and other reporting [4], and national popular-vote tallies compiled by Brookings and Reuters show Trump at approximately 77.27 million (49.9%) and Harris at approximately 74.98 million (48.3–48.4%), a popular-vote advantage for Trump of roughly 1.5 percentage points or about 2.3 million votes in some summaries [1] [2] [3]. These counts are consistent with national trackers such as Cook, AP, and 270toWin that attribute the win to Trump and continue to update totals from state-certified returns [5] [6] [7].
2. Where the notion “Did Joe Biden win?” comes from—and why it’s misleading
Questions asking whether Joe Biden won the 2024 popular vote conflate 2020-era expectations with the actual 2024 candidates: Biden did not run in 2024 and therefore could not have won that year’s vote; the Democratic nominee was Kamala Harris [2]. Contemporary reporting and the official compilations list Harris as the Democratic candidate and show her trailing Trump in both the electoral count and the popular vote [2] [8]. Any claim that Biden won in 2024 is contradicted by public, consolidated vote tallies and election-result pages maintained by major media, research organizations, and government sources [6] [9].
3. Sources, authority and near-final counts
The most widely cited national tallies come from the Associated Press, Reuters, national election trackers and aggregators (AP, Reuters, Cook Political Report, 270toWin) and are reflected in academic and civic summaries such as the American Presidency Project and Freedom House, all of which identify Trump as the popular-vote winner in 2024 [6] [2] [5] [9] [3]. Brookings’ state-by-state analysis uses AP/Edison pools and reports a near-final vote count of Trump 77,266,801 and Harris 74,981,313 [1]. The Federal Election Commission also publishes official result documentation for the 2024 presidential general election, providing the formal record [8].
4. Context, turnout and what the margins mean
Turnout in 2024 remained high by historical standards, with the Census Bureau later reporting roughly 65.3% of the voting-age population casting ballots in the presidential contest; that context helps explain why raw vote totals were large and why small percentage swings translated into millions of votes [10]. Analysts noted that Trump increased his raw vote total from 2020 while the Democratic tally dropped from the Biden 2020 high, producing the nationwide swing that delivered both the popular-vote plurality and the Electoral College victory to Trump [1].
5. Caveats, acceptance and lingering disputes
Freedom House and mainstream outlets report that the election “proceeded smoothly” and that final results were widely accepted with no evidence of significant foreign interference or large-scale fraud that would overturn the outcome, though concerns about election deniers and future institutional riskability remain part of the post‑election debate [3]. Official results are those certified by states and compiled by federal agencies and media pools; where near-final counts existed, outlets continued to update totals until certification, and the publicly available final reports (FEC, AP, Reuters) provide the documentary basis for the conclusion that Trump won the 2024 popular vote [8] [6] [2].