How Trump Won
An Analysis of the 2024 Election and the Remaking of the GOP
It is easy to downplay Donald Trump’s monumental victory. After all, the polls only underestimated Trump’s support by around 3 points, basically the same margin as in 2016 (2 points) and smaller than in 2020 (4 points). Outside of some last-minute (characteristic) panicking, Trump’s team remained consistently confident over the past several months, with no major personnel or strategic changes. The inevitability of a Trump win, however, does not undermine the shocking realignment that 2024 represents. No longer is Trump a burden for Republicans—now, the Republican Party is a burden for Trump.
In 2016, Trump underperformed candidates across the country. Republicans in the House outperformed Trump by 3 points; Senate candidates, whether establishment Republicans like Marco Rubio or Tea Party disruptors like Ron Johnson, similarly significantly outperformed Trump.1 Maybe Trump politically awakened the new, exotic (to DC insiders) blue-collar white man, but this still came with a significant downside—the loss of the imaginary “suburban white woman.”
In 2024, however, Trump outperformed the party. Senate candidates of all kinds fared worse than Trump, often by decisive margins.2 Even those who won significantly still underperformed Trump, not exactly inspiring optimism for the GOP.3 In states where the Senate race was within 5 points in either 2018 or 2024,4 Republican Senate candidates outperformed the 2018 result by a mere 8 points—just two-thirds of the 12 point shift in the generic House party vote over the same period. Trump displayed an edge over every type of Senatorial candidate.
In the House, despite the popular vote margin increasing since 2022, the Republican Party won a statistically equivalent number of seats.5 No battleground Congressional races reflected support for an alternative to Trump’s brand except, perhaps, with Larry Hogan’s endorsement of the Democratic Party.6 Anecdotally, the story of this election has been Trump downplaying the traditional Republican brand in favor of his own—running away from the pro-life position, condemning the Heritage Foundation, or campaigning with progressive Tulsi Gabbard against former Vice President Dick Cheney.
What happened between 2016 and 2024 for Donald Trump, perennially unpopular with a checkered past, to surpass the party of Lincoln and Reagan? To understand America’s, and the GOP’s, realignment, we must understand two tasks Trump accomplished in 2024—the charming of the middle-aged and the charming of the young.7
Let’s start with the former: it’s much simpler. Voters age 45–648 shifted toward Trump by 8 points.9 The reasons were likely purely economic—the middle-aged are old enough to have savings yet not quite old enough to retire, so inflation hits them the hardest. They thus voted against the Biden Administration, which had brought on inflation by rejecting economic consensus in favor of Elizabeth Warren-linked “heterodox economists” (read: kooks) who pushed inflationary policies after dismissing inflation as merely “transitory.”10 Hispanics, the poorest racial group in America, were most affected, leading to a 37 point rightward shift among Hispanic 45-64 year olds.11
Yet, middle-aged voters are insufficient to explain Trump’s overperformance, as many voted for both Trump and down-the-ballot Republicans. After all, why wouldn’t they? If the Democratic Party is untrustworthy on the economy, then so are Democrat Congressmen and Democrat Senators. Trump’s landslide victory was not engineered by middle-aged economic agents holding their noses but by the young.
Saying support from young voters won Trump the election may sound absurd. After all, 18-29-year-olds voted for Kamala Harris by double-digit margins.12 But this misses that those double digits represent a 13-point swing away from the Democrats since 2020. The shift becomes even starker when considering that 25-29-year-olds only voted 3 points to the right in 2020—while 18-24-year-olds shifted 22 points. These voters, around 3% of whom voted for Trump but supported Democrats for the House, are whom we postulate are the non-Republican Trumpists who made this election the landslide it was.
Much of what the commentariat rates as Trump’s greatest electoral flaws—his stark rhetoric or messy personal life—are non-issues or even assets.
The young are far more demographically variable than middle-aged Trump voters—whites shifted significantly left since 2020, while minorities shifted significantly right.13 But for every young white that the Democrats picked up, two minority youths switched to the Republican Party. This is an invaluable, unprecedented victory.14 Beyond winning over the largest minority group in America (Hispanics), Trump laid the groundwork to make them the base of the GOP.
Before we move on to explaining why, we should clear up a misconception that has somehow become common knowledge among the commentariat. Purportedly, Trump’s victory was engineered by “young men” who, inundated with internet content lionizing masculinity (no, really, this is the theory) have led politics to become stratified along gender-lines. This analysis is flatly wrong. While, indeed, young men shifted more to the right than young women, both groups shifted.15 Sure, the difference between male and female voting preferences is significant; that difference has been significant for nearly 50 years. However, the political trend is not towards political radicalization, with young women experiencing the same right-ward pressures as young men.
So, how was this analytical error made? First, political commentators are used to thinking in a first past the post way; after all, in an Electoral College system, how else should one think about elections? Thus, when they look at demographics, they look at only one statistic: is the majority with us or against us? Seeing that young men now vote Republican while young women vote Democrat seems to mean that both groups must be radicalizing, even when no such radicalization occurs.
Moreover, one group has radicalized along gender lines—college-educated whites.16 Among college-educated whites, there is perhaps this strange “gender war.” Among the general population, however, no comparable gender war exists (except, perhaps, for long-term political differences). Talk of a widespread gender war seems to be our political intellectual class (really the dregs of the intellectuals in this country) projecting personal insecurities on the public. America’s politics are not the same as Harvard Yard’s.
With that aside, what accounts for the sudden shift in minority preferences? The economy is not fully explanatory: while Hispanics are more likely to prioritize the economy, they are also less likely to view the Democratic Party as untrustworthy on the issue.17 Young Hispanics shifted not because of what they care about but because of what they don’t care about.
No battleground Congressional races reflected support for an alternative to Trump’s brand.
This year, Democrat rhetoric has centered on “protecting democracy.”18 Among whites, 35% thought democracy was “the most important issue,” and those who thought “democracy [was] threatened” voted 11 points to the left of those who thought it “[was] secure.” Only 27% of Hispanics, on the other hand, thought democracy was “the most important issue,” and those who thought it was threatened were 7 points more likely to vote for Trump.
At first, this phenomenon makes little sense. After years of apoplectic news anchors, cackling politicians, and even “democracy-experts” proclaiming that Trump is the second coming of Mussolini, why would Hispanics prefer a candidate who they believe threatens democracy? To answer that question, just look at Spanish-speaking politics. Many Hispanics, including the young, primarily speak Spanish, consume news in Spanish, and follow their ancestral nations’ politics closely. From this perspective, Trump’s faults fade away. A Salvadoran American who supports Nayib Bukele’s dictatorial state19 would have little trouble with Trump becoming “dictator on day one.” A Costa Rican who voted for Rodrigo Chaves in 2022—Chaves only decided to run for President after being removed from his cushy World Bank job for sexual misconduct—might find it difficult to disqualify Trump for his sex crime charges. And it would be hard for a Spanish-speaker to miss the torrential wave of Koch Brothers-backed libertarian media that has shifted hearts and minds across Latin America—indeed, Koch Brothers-backed candidates have led nations from Argentina to Ecuador.
When we start to compare American Hispanics to the rest of the Spanish-speaking world, their preference for Trump but not the Republican Party becomes obvious. Trump’s putative authoritarianism may actually appeal to young Latin Americans, only 43% of whom support democracy in theory. Trump’s checkered past and unorthodox brand of Christianity coupled with his eschewal of historic conservative issues like abortion and traditional family values appeals to a group that is unusually religious yet unusually unlikely to actually attend church. Trump’s reinvention of the Republican Party does not represent a shift to the left—indeed, on immigration and crime policy, his views are further right than Bush or Romney. It’s simply a different political movement.
Much of what the commentariat rates as Trump’s greatest electoral flaws—his stark rhetoric or messy personal life—are non-issues or even assets among his new base. The new Trump base does not seek the return of a manufacturing industry they never worked in or a cultural order they’ve never seen. Rather, they want a powerful leader to rip up the old order with a chainsaw and replace it with something new—an America Made Great Again, even if that greatness does not resemble any time in American history. What Trump’s new base wants is not Republican incrementalism but a conservative revolution. Trump’s landslide is not a mandate for Republicanism but for Trumpism, not for fundamentalist Catholicism or supply-side economics but for the creation of a new America. If the Trump Administration fails to remember this, its mandate will disappear—and, with it, the only clearly viable path for the future of conservatism in America.
While both candidates were incumbents, even non-incumbents facing strong opponents (like Joe Heck in Nevada) fared similarly to Trump.
In Michigan, Trump-skeptic (no longer!) Mike Rogers underperformed Trump 1.7 points, losing an open Senate seat in a state Trump won; in Wisconsin, Tea Partying Eric Hovde underperformed Trump by 1.7 (notice a pattern?), decisively losing to arch-progressive Tammy Baldwin in a seat Trump won; in Nevada, veteran-businessman Sam Brown (who really doesn’t like carpetbaggers, except maybe himself) underperformed Trump 4.7 points, losing a state Trump won decisively; and in Arizona, the “Future of MAGA,” Kari Lake, underperformed Trump by 7.7 points, losing to political chameleon Ruben Gallego.
In Texas, Tea Party poster child Ted Cruz underperformed Trump by 6 points; in Ohio, Trumpist (or at least, Trump Junior-ist) Bernie Moreno underperformed Trump by 7 points; in Montana, stereotypical veteran-businessman-camper extraordinaire Tim Sheehy underperformed Trump by 13 points; and in Pennsylvania, globalist establishmentarian (no longer!) David McCormick underperformed Trump by 1.7 points (that pesky number). The only candidate in a well-funded race who did perform similarly to Trump was Rick Scott—but he spent tens of millions of dollars of his own money to fend off an ill-funded has-been in a now deep red state.
Not including Joe Manchin’s anomalous election in 2018 or Rick Scott’s admittedly impressive win this year in Florida
They will win somewhere around 221-223 (in 2022, they won 222) despite salutary gerrymandering efforts in North Carolina.
From here on, we will be discussing electoral demographics. These will come from the Roper Research Exit Polls (2024 or 2020), the longest running and most trustworthy exit poll in American politics. There are also exit polls from NBC and the NORC at UChicago; they are mostly consistent with Roper’s results.
These voters make up the lion’s share (around 35%) of voters.
Slice this pie any way you like, and it’ll look suspiciously similar: white (6 points) or black (8 points), male (7 points) or female (14 points), the shift was the same.
At the time, even significant liberal economists such as Larry Summers were warning of more structural problems.
Gender had little to do with the shift, with Hispanic women shifting 31 points and Hispanic men shifting 35 points.
Indeed, they were the only age group to vote for Harris by more than one point.
18-29-year-old whites shifted 9 points to the left relative to 2020 (with 18-29-year-old white women shifting 14 points to the left and men shifting 5 points to the left), while 18-24-year-old blacks have switched 18 points to the right relative to 2020 (from D+96 to D+78), and 18-24-year-old-Hispanics have shifted 56 points to the right (from D+57 to D+1).
Among blacks, young women shifted 4 points right, while young men shifted 13 points. And among Hispanics, young women shifted 20 points right while young men shifted 49 points right.
Among this group, Trump has retained his 2020 3-point lead, while women voted 7-points to the left of their 2020 result. Among the young, the radicalization is even clearer—young White college-educated men voted Harris by 5 points, while young college-educated White women voted for Harris by 32 points.
Whites who voted based on the economy preferred Trump by 77 points, while equivalent Hispanics only preferred Trump by 35 points.
This was the largest single issue for voters (with 34% of voters thinking it was the “most important issue”), and over half of Democrat voters based their vote on it.
You are putting too much trust in the pollsters.
On the day before the election, the main headline on the front page of the print NYT was "Tightest Contest in Decades Grows Tighter at Finish". The same day I submitted an op-ed column to the WSJ explaining why one shouldn't trust the pollsters when they make such statements. My article appeared online on Election Day, while voting was underway and no results were yet available, and in print the morning after election day. The article began with the following:
"No, the election polls weren’t wrong. We no longer have election polls. All we have are projections, which can be far off from reality. In this year’s New York Times/Siena College surveys, pollsters received a response from only 2% of the people they contacted, the Times reports. Response rates have been plunging for years: The Pew Research Center reported a decline from 36% in 1997 to 6% in 2019."
The low response rate is the fundamental flaw facing pollsters.
For those with WSJ access the full article is at https://www.wsj.com/opinion/when-is-a-poll-not-a-poll-voters-trust-models-2024-election-ed04cd18
Unfortunate for a conservative group to perform this analysis through the lens of identity politics. It seems to demand equity of outcome (all groups vote the same pattern) as the desired end state. You can do better than that.