Does a candidate have to get +50% of the vote to win?
A candidate must get 50%+1 of the electoral college (EC) votes to become president outright, which is 270 (of 538 electoral college delegates).
The EC is a broken system that desperately needs to be scrapped in favour of popular vote election, but that would unfortunately require a constitutional amendment, which we have already discussed is nigh on impossible at present (as it would first have to pass through congress by a two-thirds vote and then be ratified by three-fourths of state legislatures, or a national convention of delegates from each state, which is even less likely).
This is a quick summary of the US president election process.
US Presidential Election Process
270 EC votes has only ever failed to be achieved once, in the 1824 Presidential election, and the House ultimately voted to elect John Quincy Adams, based on the Twelth Ammendment which had been adopted 20 years earlier based on another election mess created by the original constitutional provision that elected the President and the Vice President separately (meaning you could have the president be a member of one party and the vice president a member of the opposition party, which in practice caused political havoc as partisanship ramped up).
This is a great podcast about the Electoral College, why it was created, the numerous problems with it in modern times, and why it hasn’t been changed in more detail than my explanation above, if you are interested in more of a deep dive.
I would say it is highly unlikely that could occur in the 2024 presidential election, but so many unprecedented events have occurred over the last decade or so that I think it would be stupid to make such a declaration, especially given the current electoral permutations and the republican plots to achieve that goal if Trump cannot win outright.
