Category: Heckuva job, Trumpy

Some things are now certain about the 2024 election:

1. Kamala Harris has set the record for the most votes ever cast for a losing candidate. She received more votes in 2024 than Trump did in 2020.

2. Donald Trump has been the Republican candidate three times and got more votes each time. That ties a record. (Surprisingly, Franklin Roosevelt does not own this record. He got fewer votes in 1940 than he had in 1936. Trump’s co-holder is Grover Cleveland, who ran three times and got more votes each time he ran. Like Trump, he won the first and third elections and lost the second.)

The final total will be about 75 million votes for Harris and 77.3 million for Trump. The total number of Presidential votes will be about 155 million, which is three million less than 2020. Harris dropped about six million from Biden’s 2020 count, while Trump picked up about three million.

Why were there fewer voters?

In a macro sense, that is easy to explain in one word: California. California is a Democratic stronghold where the Republican effort is a lost cause, so there are two possible sources of the massive decline from Biden’s count to Harris’s: (1) Democratic voters who felt their votes were not needed; or (2) Republican voters who felt their votes were not useful. At this moment, the true source appears to be the former. Trump’s 2020 and 2024 vote counts were almost identical in California, but Harris dropped almost two million below Biden’s total. In 2020, there were 25.1 million eligible voters in California, and Biden got 11.1 million votes. In 2024, there were 26.9 million eligible voters, and Harris received 9.3 million votes. If Harris had pulled Biden’s percentage of the eligible voters in California, she would have gotten 2.6 million additional votes, which accounts for nearly all of Trump’s national margin of victory.

Given some of the same apathy in other safe blue states, Harris probably lost three million votes nationally from lackadaisical voters who (correctly) deemed their Presidential votes irrelevant to the national outcome. Excluding those voters, the remainder of the 2020-2024 change is a shift of three million voters from blue to red, producing the final total of Harris down six million and Trump up three million.

Where did the shift come from?

The three million additional Trump votes were generated approximately as follows: Latinos +2 million, Whites +1.3 million, all others slightly down.

The most significant trend was the shift among Americans who are classified as neither black nor white. There was basically no shift in the preferences of black or white voters from 2020 to 2024, but a significant shift in all others.

	Trump 2020 %	Trump 2024 %
White men	61	60
White women	55	53
Black men	19	21
Black women	9	7
Latino men	36	55
Latino women	30	38
All other	38	46

Black and White voters represent 5/6 of the nation, and their enthusiasm for Trump was completely unchanged. One and two-point shifts are statistically meaningless.

On the other hand, Latinos shifted. In 2020, there were about 20.5 million Latino votes, and Trump received only about 6.6 million of them. In 2024, about 18.6 million Latinos went to the polls, and Trump got about 8.6 million of their votes. That change alone accounted for about two million additional Trump votes.

There was also a shift in voter turn-out.  The exit polls estimate that the percentage of White voters increased from 67% in 2020 to 71% in 2024. That means there were almost six million additional White voters. Based on the percentages that voted for Trump in each election, he increased from a little more than 60 million White votes to a bit below 62 million, accounting for a gain of approximately a million and a half.

Among the voters who are neither Whites nor Latinos, Trump received a higher percentage of their votes, but because of lower turn-out, his absolute number of votes from this group declined slightly.

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Focus on the swing states

The fact that millions of Democratic voters stayed home in “sure thing” states helps us to understand why Harris lost the popular vote, but it offers no real enlightenment about why she lost the election, because the election is decided by the swing states, and the number of voters increased in every one of them.

I’m going to pick one of those purple states, Wisconsin, and use it as a microcosm. In both elections, each candidate received some 1.6 million votes and change in Wisconsin, with the total number of votes increasing slightly in 2024.

In 2020, Trump got 48.8% of the vote in Wisconsin and lost by only 20,000 votes.
In 2024, Trump got 49.7% of the vote in Wisconsin and won by only 30,000 votes.

Trump gained 0.9%. That’s a very small shift, basically 30,000 votes. A change that small in a state with more than three million voters is almost impossible to detect with sampling techniques, but the exit polls do give us some clues.

The voting by race shows us that the entire shift occurred among non-white voters.

• In 2020, Biden won 46% of white voters in Wisconsin. In 2024, Harris won the very same percentage.
• In 2020, Biden won 73% of non-white voters, but Harris dropped to 67%. Non-white voters are only 15% of the electorate in Wisconsin, but they were critical to the redshift. Democratic support in that bloc dropped 6 points in 2024. 6% of 15% is 0.9% – and that’s exactly the Trump gain in 2024 over his previous performance.

It’s possible to drill down a little bit deeper.

Among college-degreed non-white voters, a very small group in Wisconsin, Trump’s support was basically unchanged. He got 24% of their votes in 2020 and 25% in 2024, a statistically meaningless difference.

Among non-white voters without college degrees, however, Trump support increased from 26% to 35%. While this group is only 11% of the Wisconsin electorate, a 9 point increase accounts for a change of 0.99% in the state total (9% of 11%), and again that’s basically the entire shift we were looking for.

The moral of the story, if there is one: American elections are so close in the swing states that they can be decided by a small shift in a small segment of the population. There are only about 350,000 non-white, non-degreed voters in Wisconsin, and Trump is not popular with them, but he is more popular than he was in 2020.

And that was enough to transform a small loss into a small victory – and color the entire state red.

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What about the future?

What’s good for the red team?

The implication of the increase in the absolute number of white voters is that there was a significant drop in the number of non-white voters, from about 54 million to about 45 million. That’s always bad news for Democrats, and it was made far worse by the great Latino shift. Joe Biden had received about 38 million votes from non-white voters, but Kamala Harris could gain no more than 29 million. This immense decrease more than offset the fact that Harris slightly outperformed Biden among white voters. The fact that there were fewer non-whites going to the polls and that more of them shifted to the red team was a fatal 1-2 knockout blow in 2024 that the Democrats will have to turn around in the future if they hope to win national elections. The Democrats absolutely need to maintain their hold on the non-white vote, and to promote high turnout from that group, given that their former hold on the White working class has disintegrated.

Additional bad news for the Democrats comes from the fact that celebrity endorsements seem to have negligible value. The Blue team had every celebrity of significance. Name the biggest stars in the world – the ones that can sell out the largest venues in minutes: Bruce Springsteen, Taylor Swift, Beyonce – all supported Harris. The most significant celebrity influencer, Oprah, was also in Harris’s corner, as were all of the late-night hosts. Those endorsements did not seem to mean much.

Was there any good news for the blue team?

Yes, but you have to dig deep into the demographics to find it in America’s movement toward secularism.

1. The Democrats are taking an ever-increasing share of the vote from people with no religion (65%  in 2020, 71% in 2024). Equally important, the size of that voting bloc is increasing. It consisted of about 34.8 million voters in 2020 and increased by about three million in 2024.
2. The size of the Democrats’ least-favorable bloc (white evangelicals) is decreasing. Nearly 30 million voters identified as part of this group in 2020, and that number dropped below 25 million in 2024. A continued decrease is critical for Democrats because an astounding 82% of these voters cast their lots with Trump in 2024.

The percentage of Americans with no religious affiliation is now one of the most important voting blocs. As a percentage of the electorate:

• Traditional Protestant denominations are 27%
• People with no religion are 24%.
• Catholics are 22%
• Evangelical Christians are 15%
• Other religions are 10%

That snapshot of the electorate reflects the dramatic change in the country in the past 70 years.

ADULT AMERICANS	1956	1967	1990	2010	Today
Christians	96	93	83	77	68
Other religions	3	5	6	5	7
No religion	1	2	9	14	22

As it turns out, the Democrats are on the right side of those changes. This is perhaps their greatest hope to offset their loss of the working class.

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The great education gap.

The natural tendency among media pundits is to portray each American election as a single close race. I tend to view them as a tug-o-war between two landslides.

In 2024, white voters with no college degree cast approximately 39 million votes for Trump, compared to 19 million for Harris. Landslide.

All other voters cast approximately 56 million votes for Harris and 38 million for Trump. Counter-landslide.

The greatest achievement among Trump’s ground forces in 2024 is that they got far more of the “white no college” team to the polls. Among whites without college degrees, there were about 3.6 million more at the polls in 2024 than in 2020, while the “all other voters” group shrank in that same period.

A Trump share cost 67 cents on Wednesday. The cost today is 54 cents and it is still steadily falling. The current price is approximately in line with 538’s estimate of Trump’s chances, so maybe that recent decline is just some kind of course correction. Frankly, I have no idea what the whole cycle has meant.

If I were a paranoid man, I would say that some crypto-rich Trump nuts were using the betting markets to set up his next January 6th, so he can say “How can I have lost if I had a 67% chance of winning? They must have cheated.”

I don’t think that, but it’s as good an explanation as any other I’ve read.

Although the national polls are still quite even, the betting market now shows Harris with an implied 75% chance of winning the popular vote. Trump’s chances are in free fall in this market as well. The Trump “share” was priced at 43 cents Monday, but has tumbled to 25 cents today – a 40% drop in value in just a week.