This post is adapted from a panel presentation I did on Friday at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend.
First, the topline numbers: Donald Trump won the election 312 to 226. Trump received 76,857,299 votes, while Kamala Harris got 74,365,231, for a total of 151,222,530 ballots counted. Trump’s margin was around 2.5 million votes.
Trump got 2,633,324 votes more than he received in 2020, while Harris received 6,918,270 ballots fewer than were recorded for Joe Biden in 2020. That means that there were around 4,285,000 fewer votes counted in 2024 than in 2020. In 2020, meanwhile, the vote total increased by more than 26,000,000 over 2016. The remarkable number of ballots counted in 2020 has yet to be explained.
Trump actually scored three points lower with white voters in 2024 than he did in 2020, so his margin of victory came from minority voters. The story of the 2024 election is that the Republican coalition of middle-class and working-class voters that we have been talking about for some time, actually came into being. The numbers that follow are from exit polls and therefore are not Gospel, but they should be close enough to make the point.
Harris carried the black vote 83% to 16%. Trump won 24% of black men, but black women are the most hard core Democratic demographic, and only 8% percent of them went for Trump.
Harris carried the Hispanic vote 56% to 42%. Once again, Trump did notably better with Hispanic men, whom Harris carried by only 50% to 47%, In 2020, Trump lost Hispanics by 63% to 35%. His improvement this year was critical to his victory.
Trump carried white voters 55% to 43%. This was down from the 58% of white voters that Trump won in 2020.
Exit polls suggest that American Indians were Trump’s best demographic, stronger than whites. I have no idea why this would be true, and suspect it is an artifact of small sample size, but take it for what it is worth.
One notable finding is that age was not much of a factor in 2024. For many years Democrats have believed that they own young voters, and their get-out-the-vote efforts on campuses reflect their assumption that the large majority of those votes will go to them. But that didn’t happen in 2024. Trump did pretty well with young people (18-29), losing by only 46% to 52%. Going up the age scale made little difference. Trump got 47% of those 30-44, 52% of those 45 to 65, and 51% of those over 65.
What we saw in 2024, more than anything, was a class realignment. Trump carried voters without a college degree by 14 points, while Harris carried those with a college diploma by 13 points. Again, that is something that we have been talking about for a while. But bear in mind that in 2020, Trump carried those without a college degree by only two points. Almost all of his improvement in that category between 2020 and 2024 came from minority voters.
So 2024 was a landmark election, manifesting a substantial realignment of the parties. The obvious question is, will that realignment hold? Or was Trump’s relative success among minority voters the result of his personal appeal to those groups?
The latter was definitely a factor. The Democrats’ lawfare, the multiple assassination attempts, and Trump’s bold personality did appeal to minority men (and, of course, to men in general). But I am optimistic that the realignment will hold, for several reasons.
First, the movement of the working class to the GOP is based on solid economic reality. Bidenflation, job stagnation and the traumas caused by the open Southern border were the key elements driving blue-collar votes, although a disdain for wokeness no doubt contributed. Those economic factors are not going away. I think blue-collar voters will see real economic relief during Trump’s term.
Second, there is evidence that working class voters are increasingly identifying with the GOP, not just with Donald Trump. Thus, in polling done shortly before the election, more voters described themselves as Republican or Republican-leaning than as Democrat or Democrat-leaning. This is a change: since the New Deal and World War II, there have generally been more self-described Democrats than Republicans. Forty years ago, we heard a lot about Reagan Democrats. You don’t hear many references to Trump Democrats. I think those voters mostly see themselves as Republicans.
Third, the GOP has a lot of upside with minority voters. The dam has now been broken. Voting Republican is now not just acceptable, but common within those demographics. I don’t think Democrats can hang on to the overwhelming majority of black votes that they got even in 2024, and I think Hispanics and Asians will continue to move toward the Republicans based on both economic and cultural issues.
So Trump’s unique appeal did contribute to his win this year. But I think that underlying realities point to a bright future for Republicans with minority voters, and therefore to a lot of winning elections.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/11/how-trump-won.php
No comments:
Post a Comment