New year, new political era

The best visualizations and survey findings of 2024, H1-B data dump, Americans now more unified, TikTok rising, GLP-1s hitting grocery spending

No. 343 | January 3rd, 2025

🇺🇲 2024

Nate Cohn says 2024 confirmed that we are in a new political era, marked by new voter coalitions and just maybe, the “R” word — realignment:

This new partisan conflict has led to very different electoral coalitions. In 2016, Mr. Trump made enormous gains among white voters without a college degree, including in Northern states, where Republicans had not been able to sustain breakthroughs. Since then, he has made even larger gains among young, Black, Hispanic and Asian voters — and did so by representing everything Democrats thought these groups opposed.

After three Trump elections, the partisan gap between white and nonwhite voters is now smaller than at any time since the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The partisan generation gap has fallen by two-thirds. Perhaps most strikingly, the old class divide between rich and poor and capital and labor has seemingly vanished.

The exit polls found Mr. Trump losing voters making over $100,000 a year, while winning among voters making less — including those making less than $50,000. If anything, 20th-century fights are emerging as plausible areas of bipartisan consensus, with Republicans seemingly receptive to labor and spending on infrastructure, while Democrats seem more open to deregulation and supply-side remedies to problems like housing and energy.

In place of the old class conflict, there’s a new educational divide. Before Mr. Trump, people voted about the same way with or without a degree. Now, the gap between voters with or without a degree is as large as the income gap was back in 2012 — and all the way back to the dawn of survey research.

In some cases, Trump-era electoral shifts can be interpreted as an acceleration of longer-term trends; in other cases, they’re new developments. Either way, these trends have brought American politics to a very different place.

The Upshot also invites four prominent public pollsters to grade the 2024 polls.

🗺️ Data Visualization

A number of The Intersection’s favorite sources look back on their favorite visuals, data stories, and findings from the year, starting with Axios’ look back on the 2024 news cycle according to Google Trends:.

If you want a trip down memory lane to the wild early days of Trump’s first term, this Google Trends graphic is a throwback The Year in News visuals we used to put together.

The New York Times takes a look back at 2024 as told by visual stories and graphics.

The Upshot reflects back on some data points and discoveries they found surprising in 2024, with original R plots for most of them. Some of my favorites:

AEI’s most interesting data points from 2024.

And also from American Storylines and Daniel Cox, who are always on top of the growing gender divides among young people:

2024 Group Chat Wrapped.

Using raw data from the Department of Labor to uncover some surprising facts about the H-1B debate. While the magnitude of the issue is slightly exaggerated here — as this includes all applications, not the 85,000 approved visas as limited by statute — the point stands that this program is being used to recruit workers into mid-level positions at below market wages, not necessarily the global all-star team that Elon is talking about.

📊 Public Opinion

My co-founder, Kristen Soltis Anderson, writes that Americans are more united in our outlook about the country's institutions than we have been in a while:

There is rising and perhaps unexpected alignment between Americans of different walks of life, from left to right. Granted, this alignment may at first glance seem like a problem, for what unites us, increasingly, is what we distrust. But consider this: We have thought of ourselves as so divided for so long, might there be some upside to starting the new year knowing we aren’t quite as polarized as we thought and that people with whom we assumed we had nothing in common also believe our institutions must do better?

Since the early 1990s, majorities of Americans have said that our nation is “greatly divided when it comes to our most important values,” except for the year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In the weeks before the 2024 elections, Americans reported a record-high level of division. Fewer than one-fifth said we were mostly “united and in agreement about our most important values,” and that figure held true for Republicans, Democrats and independents alike.

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

Very cool new AI tool at Stanford.

📰 Media Habits

Use of TikTok for news is skyrocketing.

🔬 Academia

GLP-1 uptake is already hitting grocery spending.