The realignment is here
The first GOP popular vote win in 20 years, the Red Wave hit everywhere, 2024 realigned the electorate as much as 2016, less secure voters moved towards Trump, everything got more correlated
No. 338 | November 15th, 2024
🇺🇲 2024
A few post-election interviews, focusing on my book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, and how it explained much of what we saw last Tuesday.
The Ezra Klein Show: “The Book That Predicted the 2024 Election”
Somebody’s Gotta Win Podcast: “How the 2024 Election Killed Identity Politics.”
The Atlantic: “The Strategist Who Predicted Trump’s Multiracial Coalition.”
And you can also catch me on a Niskanen Center/Liberal Patriot panel discussion at 3 p.m. eastern today.
Donald Trump’s multiracial coalition led to the first GOP popular vote win in 20 years. Electoral College bias will drop to something like 0.4 points, after a 3.7 bias in 2020.
The red shift was pretty much everywhere. It was bigger in cities and bigger in Latino counties, but ultimately, the cross-cutting nature of the shift showed that it was a bad environment for Democrats to be running in.
Republicans are on track to win the House popular vote by about three points, but will only hold a narrow majority of around 5 seats. In this new era, redistricting and geographic trends have not favored the GOP in the House.
2024 was as much a “realigning” election as 2016, with just as big if not bigger shifts in the educational and class makeup of the parties. The Harris coalition looks more like Bob Dole’s 1996 coalition than the Obama coalition. And for the first time, the Republicans represent both low-education and low-income voters, in a thoroughgoing working class realignment.
You’ll also notice that you can draw a line right around the middle of the education vote share gap and this predicts the winner in all but one election since 1996. The candidate with the lower-education coalition typically wins, which is why I argue that it’s so important for Republicans to continue to push this working class shift.
I made a chart of all the shifts in the major demos in AP VoteCast. You can tell a story here not just about race, but people on the fringes of the economy whose sense of security has been gutted by three years of inflation. This includes big shifts right among young people, unmarried voters, and the non-college educated. And that includes younger women and single women, groups heavily targeted by the Harris campaign with its abortion message.
CNN has a great feature showing the shifts the traditional network exit polls.
The income gap is fully inverted, not just among whites. Donald Trump is the first Republican in decades to win more support from the lowest income than the highest income voters.
It was a multiracial and multiethnic coalition, with Trump gains in places with higher foreign-born populations & in areas with more Irish, Italian, & Polish ancestry and fewer white college graduates.
It was also a turnout election, and Republicans turned more of their voters out. Turnout in battleground state Trump counties was well above 2016 levels, beating Democratic county turnout in battlegrounds. And turnout in non-battleground blue counties just collapsed.
The highest cost of living in urban areas shifted the most toward Trump.
Everything is getting more correlated. The relationship between presidential and Congressional vote shares only continues to tighten.
The big picture is that this was a change election, and Donald Trump won on the top issues: the economy and immigration. As Gallup data shows, this is a very reliable way to predict the outcome of presidential elections.
A scorecard of polling error. It wasn’t as bad this year as in 2016 and 2020, but the polls still undercounted Donald Trump for the third time in a row—showing there’s something about his working-class, low-propensity coalition that’s hard to poll.
I also had a thread on this, with insights and data from our final battleground state polls.
Harris performance vs. Democratic Senate candidate performance.
The FT’s John Burn-Murdoch with another tour de force on the problems facing the Democratic coalition. The change in how the Democratic Party is perceived over the last few decades just says it all.
I was recently on YouTube watching parts of the full ABC broadcast of election night 2016, and it was *wild*. At the start of the evening the panel was talking about how the increase in Latino population (e.g. in Florida's I-4 corridor) would put Hillary over the top, how after Trump got embarrassed the Republicans would need to shift left on immigration, etc., etc. Makes you wonder how people will look back at last week's election in 8 years.
We can like this analysis and still quibble with its terminology, specifically The Atlantic's claim that the crucial division between voters is now the 'educated' vs. the 'uneducated.' Pretending that 'college degree' equals 'educated' simply commits the fallacy of logical equivocation. There's no reason to suppose that someone who spent three or four years on a college campus has a better general education than someone who spent the same amount of time learning a trade, reading books and browsing the internet.
The only way to tell how these two individuals' grasp of what's going on in the world, and of how things work, compare and contrast is by interviewing them; and what you'd likely find is what you'd expect: neither individual knows everything, and each knows things the other does not. What the degree-bearer can doubtless claim is to be better inculcated into a certain college-wide cultural ethos; but it doesn't follow that what the degree-bearer possesses more of is education. It would be entirely arbitrary to define education that way.