US election 2024 live: Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris to win historic second term as president

Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman and prominent Trump critic, has urged Americans to accept the election results “whether we like the outcome or not”.

Cheney, who campaigned for Kamala Harris, said Americans, the courts, members of the press, and those serving in the federal, state and local governments “must now be the guardrails of democracy”.

“We now have a special responsibility, as citizens of the greatest nation on earth, to do everything we can to support and defend our Constitution, preserve the rule of law, and ensure that our institutions hold over these coming four years,” she wrote.

Republican Tim Sheehy’s challenge for the Montana Senate seat was considered a referendum on whether Democrats can win in largely rural states, which have moved to Donald Trump’s far-right brand of Republicanism.

The race prompted questions about whether grassroots campaigning – which historically has proved successful in Montana – is at all effective when news coverage and campaign spending have made local politics national.

Montana, which has a population of 1.1 million, saw $280m in campaign ad spending, according to the Associated Press.

Pennsylvania and Ohio, which saw $340m and about $500m in respective spending, have about 10 times the population of the western state, further underscoring its perceived importance to both political parties.

Republican Tim Sheehy is projected to defeat three-term incumbent Montana senator Jon Tester, flipping a closely watched Senate seat and adding to the GOP’s newly won majority in the upper House.

Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL, ran as a Donald Trump-supporting conservative in a state where he is immensely popular.

Tester – a moderate and the Senate’s only working farmer – was considered one of the most vulnerable Democrats on the ballot nationwide. He was the only Democrat holding statewide office in Montana, which has voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every contest since 1992.

The Guardian relies on the Associated Press to determine the outcomes of elections across the United States. The New York-based global news agency has a presence in every US state and a long and authoritative history of determining the winners of elections at the presidential, congressional and state level. Here is more information about their process.

You can keep track of the results from all 50 states as they come in here.

Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, has congratulated Donald Trump in a post on X accompanied by a photograph of the two of them in the White House during Trump’s first term in office.

“The friendship between Canada and the US is the envy of the world,” Trudeau wrote. “I know President Trump and I will work together to create more opportunity, prosperity, and security for both of our nations.”

David Smith

Sometimes fear triumphs over hope. Donald Trump’s shocking victory in the 2016 US presidential election was described as a leap into the political unknown. This time there is no excuse. America knew that he was a convicted criminal, serial liar and racist demagogue who four years ago attempted to overthrow the government. It voted for him anyway.

The result is a catastrophe for the world. It saw Kamala Harris’s competence and expertise, her decency and grace, her potential to be the first female president in America’s 248-year history. It also saw Trump’s venality and vulgarity, his crass insults and crude populism, his dehumanisation of immigrants that echoed Adolf Hitler. And the world asked: how is this race even close?

But elections hold up a mirror to a nation and the nation does not always like what it sees.

Future historians will marvel at how Trump rose from the political dead. When he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, people gathered outside the White House to celebrate, brandishing signs that said, “Bon Voyage”, “Democracy wins!”, “You’re fired!”, “Trump is over” and “Loser”. There was a tone of finality, a sense that, after four gruelling years, this particular national nightmare was over.

But Trump could do no wrong in the eyes of his cult-like following, a freakishly resilient appeal that has three main components.

First, there is the celebrity and successful businessman persona, fashioned over years by his book The Art of the Deal and the reality TV show The Apprentice. Harris recruited numerous big-name endorsers such as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé; Trump was star of his own show.

Second, Trump has understood that, whereas Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama resonated in an era of aspiration, this is an age of anxiety. The upper-working class and lower-middle class fear loss of status and yearn for a safety blanket. Young people worry they will be worse off than their parents’ generation and unable to buy homes. Many, wrongly, perceive Trump as an economic populist because he rails against elites and “says it like it is” or “speaks how they feel” or “doesn’t give a fuck”.

Third, there is Trump the culture warrior. For nearly a decade he has tapped into America’s id: a long and painful racial history of progress and backlash, stoked anew by the election of Obama and white Christians finding themselves in the minority. Xenophobia is at the heart of his political identity. In addition, his campaign spent millions on ads fuelling hysteria about transgender rights (“Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you”).

Together, with a sinister assist from billionaire Elon Musk, it was enough to eke out victory.

Helena Horton

An election that barely mentioned climate could end up being the most consequential for the planet in modern history. Donald Trump is expected to pull the US out of the Paris agreement, joining just three other countries, Iran, Libya and Yemen.

The agreement’s overarching goal is to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2C above preindustrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above preindustrial levels.” Those countries that signed up agreed to taper off their carbon emissions by the middle of this century to achieve this.

He is also expected to cancel many of Biden’s climate policies and, as he said, “drill, baby, drill”, turbocharging oil and gas production.

This will have dire consequences. CarbonBrief has estimated this will cause an additional 4bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) by 2030 emitted from the US. This would negate twice over all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years.

Experts believe a second Trump presidency would end all hope of keeping global warming below 1.5C, the limit agreed by scientists which would avoid the worst impacts of climate breakdown. These include extreme, deadly weather events which can wipe out populations and cause mass deaths, as well as temperatures rising to make some parts of the world uninhabitable, as well as climate related severe disruptions to the food supply as fertile lands become desert.

It also has global impacts; when right wing parties falsely claim that lowering emissions and switching to a green economy is expensive, and the US is not participating in this effort, they can plausibly ask why other countries are doing that. This is likely to happen in the UK, where politicians are already falsely claiming the Labour government’s green policies will drive up energy bills and cause rationing. To be clear, this is utterly false, but it is a message that could take hold in difficult times if there is not a proactive effort to make the positive economic case for the green transition.

South Africa’s president Ramaphosa congratulates Trump on his election victory

Rachel Savage

South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa has congratulated Trump on his election victory.

In a post on X, Ramaphosa said he was looking forward to working closely with the US during South Africa’s G20 presidency next year. The US will succeed South Africa as president of the grouping, which includes 19 of the world’s biggest economies and the European and African unions.

South Africa’s head of public diplomacy, Clayson Monyela, deleted an earlier post on X, in which he said:

“I’ll leave it to my seniors but congratulations are in order for the president-elect….

Historically relations between South Africa & the US thrive under a Republican White House.”

Last year, the US ambassador to South Africa accused the country of providing arms to Russia, a claim South Africa’s government furiously denied.