Alex Muir: Where and how Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris
Many people are shocked. But the math isn't hard to understand.
By: Alex Muir
The Americans have held their election, it went fairly smoothly, and while some states are still counting and a few close House races and Nevada’s Senate race are not yet settled, the big picture result is set. I have been a pollster and data analytics vendor for the last five election cycles in the United States, and there are some numbers people should be bearing in mind as they think through what happened Tuesday.
Donald Trump had clearly won enough electoral votes to become the 47th president of the United States on election night. In the end he swept almost all the battleground states, and the GOP’s Senate majority is now large enough to work around Senators Collins and Murkowski, who are not always reliable Republican votes, allowing Trump to pick his cabinet and confirm judges with considerable freedom.
So how did we get here, and why are so many people surprised when the drivers behind this election have been clear for months?
To start, the underlying narrative of the election favoured Trump. Polling, commentary and media coverage alike all noted the high levels of dissatisfaction with the economy, crime, quality of life and the border. Pollsters often ask a “right track, wrong track” question to gauge general optimism and contentment with the current management, and the news here was grim with clear majorities throughout the year opting for “wrong track.” In the final Gallup poll taken just before the election, 72 per cent of Americans said they were dissatisfied with the way things were going. Not majorities of Republicans, but large absolute majorities, including a significant plurality of the Democratic party’s voter base. This all favoured Trump over Harris, as she represented the incumbent administration.
Trump was able to take advantage of this to successfully frame the ballot question. In effect he was able to make this election about “Do you think the people in charge are doing a good job working for your interests, or do you want me to make changes?” Many wanted those changes, including both new voters and people the Democratic party traditionally considered part of its voter coalition.
Harris tried to build a contrast with Trump, aiming to paint him as dangerous and authoritarian. The contrast that actually developed boiled down to Trump versus an unsatisfactory status quo, however, not two competing visions of change.
The Washington Post put up a fantastic visualization of the result on election night — red arrows mean vote in that county shift to the GOP, blue to the Democrats vs. 2020 presidential results. To put it gently, this was not a micro-targeted shift of a few ultra-specific audiences.
The raw numbers are also instructive. This wasn’t just a case of a new wave of Red votes swamping the Blue; the Democrat vote is down since 2020, and Trump is only slightly up.
The final result will be closer than that as West Coast ballots get counted (there are millions outstanding in California alone) and the final mail-in and absentee ballots must also still be counted, but overall, the stark failure of the Democratic campaign is clear.
There are a few factors at play here. First, in 2024, new voters were Trump voters. Looking at polling crosstabs, it was stark how the “zero of four” voters were overwhelmingly supporting Trump. (“Zero of four” or “0/4s” is polling industry shorthand for a voter who hadn’t voted in any of the last four elections. This includes both habitual non-voters and new registrants.) In the early vote, which was over 70 million ballots, in the swing states, Trump produced tens of thousands more votes from Republicans who hadn’t voted before than Harris did from new-voting Democrats. When you added infrequent voters showing up this year, the split became even more massive, and stayed in Trump’s favour. Exit polls (despite their limitations, which is beyond the scope of this analysis) confirm this trend. In 2020, Biden won first-time voters by 32 points. This year Trump won them by nine.
Young voters were another problem for the Democrats. Joe Biden won voters 18-29 by 24 points in 2020. The exit polls so far paint a different picture. Bear in mind that to this point exit polls are not weighted to the final electorate — impossible with ballots still be counted — so we don’t yet know how accurate they are. But based on the information currently available, Kamala Harris won them by just 13 points. In 2020, the oldest tranche in that 18-29 grouping were Millennials; four years on and it’s almost wholly a Gen-Z voting bloc.
Gen-Z voters are not Millennials and there were some early indications of a potential Gen-Z shift back to Republicans. Data on values propositions like a return to church attendance, particularly among some Gen-Z men, supported this. A lot will be made of Trump’s outreach to Gen-Z men through podcasts and other non-traditional channels, and that is certainly part of the puzzle, but the left-wing dismissiveness of the “Bro-volution,” as one pundit called it this week, risks missing a real cultural change in young America. Note that there was a smaller, but real, rightward shift among women in this age range as well.
Crucially, Donald Trump had a historically good performance with Hispanics, particularly Hispanic men. Trump lost Hispanics by just eight points, besting George W. Bush’s nine-point loss in 2004 and blowing away the performances of every other Republican this century. Trump won Hispanic men by 10 points, a 33-point shift from 2020, and narrowed Democrats’ lead with Hispanic women by 15 points. Bearing in mind that Hispanics represent 14 per cent of the electorate and growing, you can see the importance of these numbers in states like Florida, Arizona and Texas.
We did a lot of Hispanic focus groups this year and the story we heard over and over again was that the Biden-Harris immigration policies were bringing crime and danger into their communities and that the Biden-Harris economy was failing them. Democrats countered this with “Latinx,” “representation,” and accusations of racism. That may have played well in ethnic studies departments and with the punditry, but they fell flat with real voters leading real lives. The numbers can’t be denied.
Speaking further to that disconnect was the “Hinchcliffe” effect and pundit pearl clutching about Trump's Madison Square Garden rally. There was a clear early signal on Tuesday night that this was going to be a good night for Trump when heavily Puerto Rican Osceola County and Orange County in Florida came in. Trump eventually won Osceola, a county Biden won by 14, and cut 10 points off of his 2020 loss in Orange. Trump also won Miami-Dade County, which has a lot of Puerto Ricans too. Comedy, whether good or bad, is sometimes taken as just that.
The implications of this shift are major, and will matter beyond this election. The GOP is moving toward having a more diverse coalition than the Democratic party. The Democrats are increasingly dependent on only two demographics: college-educated white women and urban African-Americans. Republican vote share is moving substantially upwards in a wide variety of demographics.
That makes the problems Harris had with African-American voters and urban voters all the more serious. One of the first warning signs for Harris was a Trump win in heavily Black Baldwin County, Georgia. After going for both Clinton and Biden by nearly two points in 2016 and 2020, it swung to a two-point Trump win this year. That kind of small but meaningful shift would show up across the country. As of this moment, with votes still being counted, Harris is winning places like Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Detroit by five to 10 points less than Joe Biden did four years ago.
The exit polls don’t suggest that Harris did worse among Black voters, however. Her margins are the same as Biden’s, but Black turnout, which was down in the early vote, continued to underperform on Tuesday night. There were simply not enough votes for her among Blacks to offset Republican gains elsewhere.
There are other areas where Harris failed to turn out people who voted for Biden or lost elements of those audiences to Trump. Biden won the union vote in 2020 by 16 points. Harris won it this year by just 10. I suspect that if you exclude public-sector union members, the shift would have been even more stark. Trump beat Biden among white Catholics by just 12 points in 2020. He beat Harris by 23. This shift played out in key places like Erie and Bucks counties in Pennsylvania, both of which flipped from narrow Biden wins to narrow Trump wins.
The evolving vote preferences in Gen Z and among a wide swath of the Hispanic community are long-term strategic factors in American elections, and Trump gained there. The failure of the Harris campaign to match Biden’s 2020 turnout in some of their key constituencies, meanwhile, was one of the fundamentals in this result. The margin in critical Pennsylvania is 134,315 votes, and Harris underperformed Biden’s 2020 tally by 114,704. This story happened across the key states — Trump gained strength, and Harris lost it.
Political campaigns are storytelling exercises, and the success or failure in constructing and distributing your narrative to your audience are the things that endlessly preoccupy professionals. Trump had a more cogent story to tell. He expanded his coalition, while Harris was unable to get even the audiences she started with out to vote in 2020 numbers. The outcome may be shocking to many. But the “how” of Trump’s win is easy to see in the numbers.
Alex Muir is a principal at WPA Intelligence, a full-service research and data firm based out of Washington, D.C. He has provided polling, data analytics, or qualitative research to campaigns ranging from presidential primaries, gubernatorial races, U.S. House and Senate races, and independent expenditures all the way down to local ballot initiatives. He also does corporate and public affairs work, up to and including in support of Fortune 100 companies. He also leads most of WPAi’s international projects and has worked with political, corporate, and non-profit clients in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Mexico, Ukraine and Israel. He is married to Line editor Jen Gerson; Gerson abstained from any role in the preparation or publication of this article.
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Very interesting, thanks for sharing this. My gen Z kids are now all voting age, and I can say that while they may not be a perfect average, they definitely are more right wing in their beliefs and their friends are too. (I’m more centrist with a right lean when it comes to some topics, but think overall I occupy the middle and would probably be a swing voter if I lived in the US)
At any rate, I’ve heard some very reflective comments from some democrats, while others are intent on calling this a racist and misogynistic win for republicans. I think that interpretation really fails to understand the deep suffering many people experienced over the last 4 years, and to my perception, the great divide between upper middle class/upper class and those who are living pay cheque to pay cheque. In the US the divide between socioeconomic groups is even more pronounced than in Canada - or that’s what I’ve seen from the conferences and events I’ve attended in the US, some of which have included outreach to low income groups.
I’ve also observed that my American friends who fall in the demographic of white and college educated do not have any understanding of what other socioeconomic groups live with. They give lip service to it, but they don’t understand that things like pronouns are something you have to have a certain amount of privilege to even consider. People worried about a roof over their head and food in their belly generally don’t have time to think about extra things like pronouns. (This becomes even more absurd when one considers the high rate of illiteracy in some sociodemographic groups and that many wouldn’t even understand pronouns to care about them.)
I’ve rambled - but the TL;DR version is - yes, there’s a big divide where the democrats are living in a very insulated reality and they’re losing voters because what they say doesn’t match reality in people’s lives. There shouldn’t be any mystery about that, and yet it seems the echo chambers are so strong, that the best many democrats are coming up with is misogyny and racism as dog whistles. I hope with time the conversation becomes more balanced and introspective as it’s really tiresome seeing people acting like life as they know it just ended and unfriending anyone who supported Trump rather than trying to understand why someone may have made that decision.
Great fact based piece. What I find odd, though, is how well the Trump campaign "owned" the "this country is getting worse" message, despite clearly positive trends over the last two years on inflation, employment, real wage growth, decreasing wealth and wage inequality... you name it. The Democrats need to ask how they completely lost control of the underlying vibe among voters even given this backdrop. Did the GOP master new media that much more quickly and more effectively?