Donald Trump will become the 45th US president after a stunning victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, in what many analysts have described as a Brexit-Style Upset.
The Republican nominee’s projected victory came down to a handful of key swing states, despite months of polling that favoured Clinton.
The battlegrounds of Florida, Ohio and North Carolina cleared the way for his.
Trump’s victory in Wisconsin put him over the 270 out of 538 electoral college votes needed to win the White House.
The US president-elect took to the stage at his victory rally in New York and said: “I just received a call from Secretary Clinton. She congratulated us on our victory.”
“Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country.”
He added: “It is time for us to come together as one united people.”
Trump, a real estate tycoon, former reality TV star and political neophyte, was universally ridiculed when he declared his candidacy in June last year.
Clinton, on her part, had dreamed of becoming the first female US president, however, the former secretary of state did not show up for what was meant to be her victory rally across town in Manhattan.
Similarly, Democrats were also unable to wrest control of the Senate from Republicans, who retained their majority in both chambers of Congress.
By the end of polls, Clinton had suffered major blows in Democratic-leaning states like Pennsylvania and Iowa, where a Republican has not won since 2004.
New Hampshire and Michigan – which were meant to be part of the Clinton firewall – remained too close to call as of Wednesday morning.
Trump, a populist billionaire, provoked controversy on the campaign trail for comments about women, Muslims and a plan to build a wall along the US-Mexican border, while Clinton saw her campaign dogged by FBI investigations into whether she abused state secrets by operating a private email server during her time as US secretary of state.
Last Sunday, the law enforcement bureau cleared her once again of any criminality.
Meanwhile, the global financial market is already reacting to Trump’s emergence as President-elect.
The US dollar has fallen by three percent to the Japanese yen, while the Mexican Peso is ploughing fresh record lows against the US dollar and the euro.
The greenback fell as much as 3.8 percent against the yen, the biggest intraday decline since the Brexit referendum, 2.4 percent against the euro and 2.3 percent against the Swiss franc.
For the Nigerian naira, a drop in the dollar may not necessarily yield a strengthening of the currency against other currencies, but the naira will be stronger, relative to the dollar.