Republican Donald Trump has claimed victory in the 2024 presidential race after Fox News projected he had beaten Democrat Kamala Harris, capping a stunning political comeback four years after leaving the White House.

“America has given us a strong and unprecedented mandate,” he told a crowd of supporters at the Palm Beach County Convention Center Wednesday morning.

Other news outlets have not yet called the race for Trump, but he appeared close to winning after capturing the battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia and holding leads in the other four, according to Edison Research.

Harris did not speak to her supporters, who had gathered at her alma mater Howard University. Her campaign co-chairman, Cedric Richmond, briefly addressed the crowd after midnight, saying Harris would speak publicly on Wednesday.

“We still have votes to count,” he said.

The former president was showing strength in wide swaths of the country, improving on his 2020 performance everywhere from rural areas to urban centers.

Republicans won a majority in the US Senate after flipping Democratic seats in West Virginia and Ohio. Neither party appears to have an advantage in the battle for control of the House of Representatives, where Republicans currently hold a narrow majority.

Trump entered Election Day with a 50-50 chance of claiming the White House, a remarkable turnaround from Jan. 6, 2021, when many pundits said his political career was over. That day, a crowd of his supporters stormed Congress in a violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election results.

Trump has received more support from Hispanics, traditionally Democratic voters, and among lower-income households that have felt the rise in prices keenly since the last presidential election in 2020, according to Edison polls.

Trump won 45 percent of Hispanic voters nationally, trailing Harris with 53 percent, but up 13 percentage points from 2020.

About 31 percent of voters said the economy was their top issue and voted for Trump by a margin of 79 percent to 20 percent, according to exit polls. About 45 percent of voters nationwide said their family’s financial situation is worse today than it was four years ago, and they favored Trump by 80 percent to 17 percent.

Global investors were increasingly pricing in a Trump victory late Tuesday. U.S. stock futures and the dollar rose, while Treasury yields rose and bitcoin rallied — all flagged by analysts and investors as trades favoring a Trump victory.

At Howard University, where a large watch party was being held for Harris, supporters were leaving in droves, anticipating that the vice president would not address the crowd Tuesday night.

Cedric Richmond, a co-chairman of the Harris campaign, briefly addressed the crowd and said Harris would not be speaking. “We still have votes to count,” he said. “We still have states that haven’t been called yet.”

Trump was winning a larger share of the vote than four years ago in nearly every corner of the country.

By 12:30 p.m. ET, officials had nearly finished counting ballots in more than 1,600 counties — about half the country — and Trump’s share was up about 2 percentage points from 2020, reflecting a sweeping if not particularly deep, of the Americans. support for the president they ousted four years ago.

He improved his numbers in suburban counties, rural areas and even some big cities that are historically bastions of Democratic support; in high-income and low-income counties; and in places where unemployment has been relatively high and in places where it is now at record lows.

Harris had large margins among urban and suburban voters, but her support in those places was well behind President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

Nearly three-quarters of voters said American democracy is under threat, according to exit polls, underscoring the depth of polarization in a nation where divisions have grown stronger amid a fiercely competitive race.

Trump has used increasingly apocalyptic rhetoric while fueling unfounded fears that the electoral system cannot be trusted. Harris warned that a second Trump term would threaten the foundations of American democracy.

Hours before the polls closed, Trump claimed on his Truth Social website without evidence that there had been “a lot of talk about massive fraud” in Philadelphia, echoing his false claims in 2020 that fraud occurred in large cities dominated by democrats. In a later post, he also claimed there was fraud in Detroit.

“I don’t respond to bullshit,” Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey told Reuters.

A Philadelphia city commissioner, Seth Bluestein, responded to X: “There is absolutely no truth to that claim.”

Trump voted earlier near his home in Palm Beach, Florida.

“If I lose an election, if it’s a fair election, I’ll be the first to admit it,” Trump told reporters.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a major Trump supporter, watched the results at Mar-a-Lago with Trump.

Millions of Americans waited in orderly lines to vote, with only sporadic blackouts reported in a handful of states, including a few non-credible bomb threats that the FBI said appeared to come from Russian email domains.

Tuesday’s vote capped a dizzying race fueled by unprecedented events, including two assassination attempts against Trump, Biden’s surprise withdrawal and Harris’ rapid rise.

No matter who wins, history will be made.

Harris, 60, the first female vice president, will become the first black and South Asian woman to win the presidency. Trump, 78, the only president to be impeached twice and the first former president to be criminally convicted, will also become the first president to win non-consecutive terms in more than a century.