Once again, most of the pollsters and pundits underestimated Donald Trump. The fact that he notched not just a resounding Electoral College win but apparently a clear popular vote victory, too, is remarkable, particularly given how he broadened his coalition to be far more multiethnic than it was in 2016 and 2020. Here are some takeaways.
50-state picture. Harris underperformed Biden in 48 states, and the two where she bettered his totals—Maine (54 percent vs. 53 percent) and Washington (58.4 percent vs. 58.0 percent) were tiny gains in strategically irrelevant states.
Identity politics misfire. The Democrats’ identity politics gameplan didn’t work out the way the way they’d planned across multiple demographic fronts.
Latino men. Trump won Latino men by 10 points, compared with a 23-point win for Biden and a 31-point win for Hillary Clinton among this group.
Latinas. They went +44 for Hillary Clinton, +39 for Biden—and just +24 for Harris.
Miami Dade County. Trump won here by 11 points, becoming the first Republican to win in this Latin American mecca—55 percent foreign born—since 1988.
Starr County, Texas. In the most Hispanic county in the United States, Trump won by 15 points after losing by 5 points in 2020 and 60 points in 2016.
Puerto Rican joke non-fallout. CNN hosts spent much of the night hyping the possibility that Trump would be hurt by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s off-color joke about Puerto Rico. But Trump improved his margin in heavily Puerto Rican Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, from 45 percent in 2020 to 48 percent this time. In heavily Puerto Rican Osceola County, near Orlando, Trump improved his margin from 42 percent in 2020 to 50 percent. In New York’s heavily Puerto Rican Bronx, Trump improved his margin from 16 percent to 27 percent. And so it seems the media was fantasizing that Puerto Ricans would base their votes on a joke told by a comedian hours before Trump took the stage at the Madison Square Garden rally.
Female vote. Fox News’s voter analysis had Harris beating Trump by only 7 points with female voters. CNN’s exit polls gave her a 10-point win with women (and Trump had an identical margin with men), but even if their figure is correct, that’s down from Clinton’s 13-point margin with women and Biden’s 15-point margin. Sixty-two percent of white women without a college degree, derided by The View’s Sunny Hostin Wednesday as “uneducated white women,” voted for Trump.
Black men. Fox put the black male vote at 24 percent for Trump. ABC News put it at 20 percent. CNN’s analysis shows that Harris’s margin with black men (+58) was lower than Biden’s +60 and Clinton’s +69.
The white vote. According to CNN, support among white men eroded for Trump, from +31 in 2016 to +23 to +20 this year. His margin with white women also declined, going from +9 in 2016 to +11 in 2020 to +5 in 2024. So much for the popular media narrative that Trump was running an explicitly racist campaign designed to appeal only to white voters.
The rural vote. According to CNN, Trump’s margins in the cities and suburbs was almost identical to 2020. But his margin in rural areas increased from +15 to +27, which was the same figure he had in 2016.
The Jewish vote. After capturing 30 percent of the Jewish vote in 2020, this time Trump got 19 percent, according to NBC News, 21 percent according to ABC News, and 32 percent according to Fox. (It’s not clear why the Fox estimate shows such a large disparity.)
Jill Stein vote in Michigan. Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who is Jewish but a notable critic of Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, got 22 percent of the vote in Muslim majority Dearborn, Michigan, according to NBC, or 18 percent according to the Detroit Free Press. Trump flipped the state.
Catholics. Trump won only 47 percent of the Catholic vote in 2020 but got 60 percent this time.
Gen X Triumph. According to NBC’s exit poll, the only age group Trump won was 50-to-64 year olds, but it was a substantial 8-point win—and this cohort made up the largest portion of the electorate, at 35 percent.
Young Bros but not Baby Boomers. Trump won seniors by 7 and 5 points in 2016 and 2020, respectively, but lost this group by 1 point this year. Biden won 18–29-year-olds by 24 points; Harris won them by only 13 this year. According to CBS, men under 30 went for Trump by 18 points.
The election wasn’t just a referendum on Trump and Harris but also on the media, which portrayed Trump as the reincarnation of Hitler. In the campaign’s closing days, they tried to distract voters by falsely claiming that Trump was calling for the execution of Liz Cheney, and by obsessively focusing on the Puerto Rican joke, among other non-issues. The Democrats spent more than $1 billion on Harris’s makeover and the media tried hard to help, ganging up on Trump and J. D. Vance in the debates and selling Harris as a moderate, even though she has governed as a progressive her entire career. Ultimately, the media may have helped Trump more than they were able to hurt him.
Most progressive pundits are now blaming Biden for Harris’s loss, and he deserves plenty of blame. But so, too, does the Democratic Party for rigging the primary, stifling what should have been an open process, and handing the nomination to Harris without voter or even delegate input. A popular excuse is that Harris simply didn’t have enough time to mount a successful campaign. In fact, she had too much time. She did well for a time evading interviews and running solely on vibes. But the more voters saw of her, the less they liked her.
Trump’s favorability ratings in the exit polls were even worse than Harris’s. But voters apparently perceive Trump as more capable, and they like his policies more. Many voters may also appreciate Trump’s authenticity. Harris appeared ready to reinvent herself and say whatever people wanted to hear to get elected. Ultimately, she proved to be an unmarketable product—one who might now return to California, where she can at least be herself again.
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