MICHIGAN, USA — The results are in Wednesday. Swing state Michigan has officially been declared red this presidential election.
It happened after Donald Trump acquired all the 270 electoral votes he needed to win the 2024 presidential race Wednesday morning.
The win is a historic one. Trump, 78, is the oldest president ever elected. He will also be the first defeated president in 132 years to win another term in the White House, and the first person convicted of a felony to take over the Oval Office.
The state was one of the last to be called in the 2024 election. But officials expected a delay.
Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said in November they anticipated the count lasting until the end of the day Wednesday. Here's why.
Experts and election officials say state laws are a factor and that time and labor are necessary to process and correctly tabulate ballots.
In Michigan, a new law gives local elections officials more time to process and tabulate mail ballots, which helped alleviate the logjam that slowed ballot counting in the 2020 presidential election.
The race between Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump was contentious from the start, especially in Michigan. The state was deemed one of just seven key swing states in the election.
The reason the former president will be back in the Oval Office is thanks to victories in those states.
While Harris collected states with large electoral college numbers, like California and New York, Trump started taking over in those pivotal seven.
Trump garnered wins in three swing states—North Carolina, Georgia and Pennsylvania—putting him just a few electoral votes short of a win.
Trump then gave his victory speech, saying "We're going to help our country heal."
He later took a fourth swing state, Wisconsin, putting him over the 270 electoral votes he needed early Wednesday morning. That led the Associated Press to call the race.
Michigan was called around 2 p.m., favoring Trump, but the margin was slim. Around 70,000 voters decided the outcome of the swing state, with 2,781,289 voters (49.7%) choosing Trump and 2,707,058 (48.4%) choosing Harris.
Larger counties like Wayne, Oakland and Kent, were blue, while the rest of the state was largely red. A surprising shift came from historically-blue Muskegon County, which shifted red this election.
Check out how each county voted in Michigan using this map.
Keep up-to-date as the rest of the results finish pouring in Wednesday on our elections page here.
