“America has given us a strong and unprecedented mandate. It was a historic realignment. Uniting citizens of all walks of life around a common core of common sense”.

Never knowingly understated, these were some of his words Donald Trump like him he proclaimed victory early Wednesday morning.

Unlike some of his claims after the 2020 election, much of the above statement is supported by data.

President-elect Trump increased his vote share in 90% of US counties compared to 2020 and became only the second Republican since 1988 to win the popular vote.

He also increased his vote significantly among many demographic groups that had been least likely to support him in the past.

Watch the latest: Musk ‘joined Trump during call with Ukraine president’

There is still work to be done, not least on the Arizona battlefield, but now the outcome is clear, where does his victory stand in history and how much of a mandate does he really have from the American people?

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How big was the gain?

Kamala Harris would have won if she had convinced 123,750 people in equal proportions in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan to vote for her over Trump.

That sounds like a big number, but it’s less than 0.1 percent of the more than 140 million people who voted in the election, and less than 1 percent of voters in those three key states.

However, presidential elections often tend to be even closer to this. Trump’s victory this year is the clearest this century that was not achieved by President Barack Obama.

How big were the winnings?

Trump has made improvements almost everywhere, but he may still end up with fewer votes than he won last time.

Despite warnings about what was at stake in this election, it looks like the final number of people who will vote will be lower than in 2020.

The Democratic vote is down about 10 million, while Trump’s vote looks relatively similar to last time, despite a growing population.

In terms of share of the vote, however, he has carried it in more counties than any other candidate since at least 2004, and has the highest Republican vote share this century in more than two-thirds of the counties from America.

Most of these improvements were not by much, however. Only 120 of the 2,800 counties saw an improvement of more than five points — the fewest by a winning president this century other than Joe Biden.

This is reflected if you look at the number of counties in which he has gone from majority Democratic to majority Republican — 95 counties so far. That number was also the lowest this century, short of that achieved by Biden, and less than half of what Trump overturned in 2016, perhaps a sign of recent partisanship in US politics.

What about the type of people who support it?

This one tells a similar story.

President-elect Trump has gained ground among most voter groups. The biggest increase in support was among Latinos (from about one-third to just under half) and younger voters (from about one-third to two-fifths), who were key to securing his win.

An increase of less than eight points was enough to win majority support among people making less than $50,000, who had supported every Democrat since Bill Clinton. And crucially, he took back the suburbs, where American elections are so often won or lost.

Those marginal gains by various groups helped Trump win key battlegrounds and go some way toward broadening his coalition of voters, making it more representative of the average American.

The youngest voters, the oldest voters, the lowest-income voters and Latinos all voted much closer to the US average than they have in other recent elections. So while they might not necessarily be “for” the president-elect as a whole, they were willing to vote for him.

While black voters and non-college voters have shifted further toward Trump, these two groups still differ significantly from the average in this election. A clear education divide also remains, with university graduates much more likely to vote Democratic.

Democratic decline

While much of the story so far is about a small but unified shift in support, there have also been some truly historic and surprising results, particularly in the big cities.

In New York, Chicago, Detroit and Las Vegas, Trump won a larger share of the vote than any Republican since George HW Bush in 1988.

He still lost overall in counties that include those cities, but once again it was a story of progress, whether it was who turned out or the increased support.

But there have been former Democratic strongholds that have gone Republican, including parts of Florida like the former Miami-Dade, which has America’s second-largest voting-age Latino population and supported Hillary Clinton by a margin by almost 2:1 in 2016.

Its more than one million voters endorsed a Republican for the first time since 1988, and President-elect Trump won the largest share of the Republican vote since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide.

He also returned Pinellas to the Republican column and made significant gains in other large population centers such as Broward and Palm Beach counties.

The turnaround in American politics since Trump shook everything up in 2016 means there are now just two counties out of more than 3,000 that have voted for the winning candidate in every election since 2000.

They are Blaine County, Montana, an agricultural area on the border with Canada, and Essex County, a mountainous part of New York state, on the border with Vermont.

The Essex-man was a key part of some of Tony Blair’s big election victories at the turn of the millennium. Perhaps another Essex man is rising again, this time to define America as it moves into the next period of its history.

The Data and forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to delivering transparent journalism from Sky News. We collect, analyze and visualize data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite imagery, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.