Two big pieces of 2024 data
Presidential-by-CD and full vote history, it all came down to turnout in Wisconsin, Conclave 2025, migration data, Trump approval drops
No. 358 | April 25th, 2025
🇺🇲 2024
The Downballot, formerly Daily Kos Elections, released their 2024 presidential results for all 435 house seats this week.
G24 vote history is complete in L2. It’s calculated a bit differently, but Echelon Insights called a D+1.3 electorate by registration the week before the election and L2’s final number shows we were exactly on target, at D+1.3.
Party registration is not party ID, though, which we think currently stands at R+3 for the 2024 electorate. That’s why you’re continuing to see Republicans make gains in registration, as people update their registration to match their party affiliation.
Also, for those doubting that new voters would make the difference: there were 20.3 million first time voters, around 13% of the total.
L2 also tracked 4.6% of the electorate that moved across state lines since 2020. The highest rate of new movers was Florida, at 11.7%.
Below is a rundown from their email:
🇺🇲 2026
Democrats’ Wisconsin win all came down to turnout, with an 8 point swing from November, according to estimates from Split Ticket.
⛪ Conclave 2025
The College of Cardinals has changed substantially since the last Conclave in 2013. The share of European cardinals has dropped from 51% to 40%. That’s still more than double Europe’s share of the world’s Catholics, a 41% plurality of which live in Latin America.
Polymarket pegs Italy’s Pietro Parolin and the Philippines’ Luis Antonio Tagle as the frontrunners.
🗺️ Data Visualization
Using the holy grail of Facebook data, The New York Times has released new visuals to showcase global migration trends.
📻 Intersection Radio
Check out my appearance on The Crosstabs Podcast.
“Ruffini explains how the Democratic coalition has fractured along educational rather than economic lines, with cultural values becoming increasingly decisive in voting behavior. This analysis shows the disconnect between political elites and mainstream voters, highlighting an underlying optimism among immigrant and working-class communities that starkly contrasts with the pessimism often expressed by college-educated whites.”
My friend, Dr. Michael Cohen, released a new edition of his book Modern Political Campaigns, which he talks to Zac McCrary about.
“He studied under iconic pollster Bill Hamilton as a student, worked in the trenches in Republican campaigns, spent time at Gallup, apprenticed under renowned GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio and worked with famed Dem strategist Mark Penn when Michael was an in-house pollster at Microsoft. Along the way, Michael started his own firm (Cohen Research Group), built the successful Congress in Your Pocket tech app, and wrote Modern Political Campaigns to bring the campaign literature up to speed with the ever-evolving political industry - including a new edition that includes a focus on the role AI is playing in political campaigns. This is a great nuts-and-bolts conversation on the political industry with a smart pollster, tech entrepreneur, and author.”
📊 Public Opinion
Americans’ views on free trade are polarizing quickly.
Good political advice is to study the views of white college graduates—and then do the opposite. Ruy Teixeira cites my analysis from Party of the People in his latest piece for the Liberal Patriot:
“Between the 2012 and 2024 elections, Democratic performance among white college graduates improved by 17 points, while declining by 37 points among nonwhite working-class voters.
Less well appreciated is how politically polarized white college graduates have become as these trends have unfolded. Patrick Ruffini’s analysis of data from the 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES), an academic survey with over 60,000 respondents, demonstrates this vividly. Across 50 policy items, white college Democrats are highly likely to give consistently liberal responses, while white college Republicans give consistently conservative responses…
‘[G]iving the conservative or liberal answer more than 75 percent of the time places you in [ideological] camps. Otherwise, you’re in a non-ideological middle ground. The 75 percent cutoff is an important one. Above we find Assad-like margins for Donald Trump or Joe Biden in 2020 of more than 98 percent. If you’re above this threshold, you’re not persuadable in the slightest. In the middle, your vote is basically up-for-grabs, progressing from one candidate to other in sliding scale fashion according to your policy views.’”
President Trump’s approval ratings have continued to decline steadily. Some wearing off of the honeymoon after the first month was inevitable, but the post-“Liberation Day” decline was largely self-inflicted.
📰 Media Habits
Pew Research released new data on teens and parents views toward social media.
