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It’s official: Donald Trump is the Republican Party’s nominee for president

Donald Trump is officially the Republican Party’s nominee for president of the United States.

On Tuesday evening, Trump secured the 1,237 delegate votes needed to become the nominee at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

As is customary in conventions, Trump’s home state of New York put him over the top. Donald J. Trump Jr., Trump’s son, announced the majority of the state’s delegates for his father.

"It is my honor to be able to throw Donald Trump over the top," Donald Trump Jr. said, shortly before Frank Sinatra's "New York, New York" began playing. "Congratulations, Dad."

Because of the states he’d won in the primaries and caucuses, Trump already had many more than 1,237 delegates pledged to him going into the convention. Still, in the runup there was a lot of wrangling over whether anti-Trump forces might change the rules and allow those delegates to vote for other candidates.

On Monday, there was a last-ditch vote around those rules. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop explained, that effort could have theoretically blocked Trump from getting the nomination. But it failed, extinguishing any last hope that someone else could still be the GOP nominee.


Watch: The political science that predicted Trump’s rise

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