Why Trump won — 9 takeaways from the 2024 election

Updated November 08, 2024 at 08:11 AM ET

What happened in the 2024 election was a political earthquake.

Former President Trump not only won in the Electoral College, but he won so big that he expanded his coalition with historic demographic shifts. For the first time in his three runs for president, he is on track to win the popular vote — and have full control of the levers of power in Washington.

So how did it happen? Trump's victory starts with the issues that led to a rightward lurch in this election — and was fueled by men.

Here's a deeper look and some other takeaways from this election:

1. The issue landscape favored Republicans from the start.

For two years, voters have been in a bitter mood about the economy and upset about high border crossings.

Despite economic improvements — unemployment is low, wages are up, inflation is down — Americans have continued to chafe at higher than pre-pandemic prices and the lack of affordable housing. Ironically, the Federal Reserve's inflation fix — raising interest rates — meant more expensive borrowing for things like mortgages and car loans. The Fed has started to cut rates, but it will take time for Americans to feel it — right in time for a Trump presidency.

Voters placed the blame squarely on the Biden administration — despite the U.S. recovering economically better than other developed countries after a pandemic that Americans felt Trump mishandled. But Vice President Harris struggled to separate herself in the eyes of voters on the economy, and Trump's handling of the pandemic was barely an issue this time around with voters nostalgic for the economy of five years ago.

Exit polls showed Biden's approval rating at just 40%; two-thirds rated the economy negatively; only a quarter said their financial situation was better now than four years ago; three-quarters said inflation had caused them a severe or moderate hardship over the last year; and voters said they trusted Trump more on not just the economy, but immigration, crime and, while it was lower on the list of priorities — foreign policy, too.

Harris led on handling abortion rights, but more narrowly than pre-election polling showed.

2. White voters went up as a share of the electorate for the first time in decades, helping Trump.

White voters have sided with Republicans in every presidential election since at least 1976. And in this election, white voters went up as a share of the electorate from 67% to 71%.

That is remarkable, considering that, quite simply, white people are a smaller share of the population in the country than ever before. They have been steadily declining as a share of eligible voters, and that is not changing any time soon because of growth with Latinos and Asian Americans.

So the fact that they were a larger share of the electorate than four years ago was a boon to Trump.

3. Trump expanded his coalition, driven by men.

Trump won an astounding 46% of Latinos in this election. That's the highest ever for a Republican, even higher than George W. Bush in 2004. But that was driven by men. He won a majority of Latino men by double-digits over Harris, while Harris won 60% of Latinas.

There was a similar gender divide among younger voters. Harris won 61% of women, 18 to 29 years old, while Trump narrowly won young men.

In fact, Trump won men in every age group, and Harris was unable to win a large enough share of women to offset Trump's gains.

4. Women turned out as a higher share, but not enough for Harris to win.

Women were 53% of the electorate, up a point from 2020. But while Harris won a majority of women — including winning moms while Trump won dads — she only won 53% of women, down from Biden's 57%.

That was, in particular, because of the pronounced gender divide by education among white voters. Harris won a higher share of white women with college degrees, but Trump won an even wider margin with women who didn't go to college, and there were more of them who voted.

Add to that Trump's massive margins with non-college white men and the fact that even white men with college degrees narrowly went for Trump, and Harris just simply couldn't make up that ground.

5. The gender divide brings up the question of when America would be ready for a woman to be president.

Things might have turned out differently for Harris if she wasn't tied to the Biden administration, and Trump — or any other Republican — had been president while voters' views of the economy were this bleak.

But, in this campaign, it was clear that men and women view women in power differently. There was evidence of this, for example, in the final NPR/PBS News/Marist poll before Election Day.

A majority of women said they thought Harris intended to carry out the more moderate proposals she put forward in this campaign as compared to five years ago when she also ran for president. A majority of men, however, doubted her sincerity and thought she was just making those promises to get votes.

This will be dissected more in the coming months and years.

6. Ticket-splitting happened, but not enough for Democrats to prevent a GOP wave.

Democratic candidates outran the top of the ticket in lots of House and Senate races.

In fact, when looking at the margins, they did so in every Senate race Republicans were looking to flip except West Virginia and Maryland. Senate Democratic candidates did better than Harris by roughly 13 points in Montana, 8 in Arizona, 7 in Ohio, 4 in Nevada, 2 in Wisconsin and Michigan and less than 1 in Pennsylvania with vote still being tallied in some places.

It wasn't enough, though, for Democrats in Montana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Incumbent Democrat Jacky Rosen is leading narrowly in Nevada.

In the House, Democrats were hopeful they could hold onto or flip several races they either lost or likely won't be able to win — including in Pennsylvania, Arizona and California. When all the votes are counted, Democrats may come up just short of winning the majority, because it's just tough to swim against the tide of the top of the ticket in a presidential year.

7. Democratic voter turnout appears to be way off.

Biden got 81 million votes in 2020 to Trump's 74 million. Trump is on pace to get close to that, but Harris may come up some 10 million votes short of Biden's 2020 total.

Her declines were acute in blue states she won — for example, she was off roughly 900,000 votes in New York, 500,000 in New Jersey and Maryland, 300,000 in Massachusetts, 180,000 in Virginia.

Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth Poll, noted Harris' declines were about 15% in the Northeast, Minnesota and Illinois. (There's still a lot of vote out in California, Washington and Oregon.) She was down 10% in red states and about 4% in swing states.

It's perhaps not surprising that this would happen when so much of the attention has been trained on an even-smaller-than-usual set of seven swing states. But Trump did not see those declines. He went up in all three regions.

8. The polls underestimated Trump's support again, but they were also useful.

The final FiveThirtyEight national polling average had Harris ahead by slightly more than 1 point. DDHQ, factoring in Robert F. Kennedy's campaign, had Harris ahead by slightly less than a point.

Trump is on pace to win the popular vote 50%-48%. That 3-point shift is well within the polls' margins of error, and they got right Harris' overall number. FiveThirtyEight's average had Harris at 48%. DDHQ had her at 47%.

But there was a continued underestimation of Trump's support nationally and in the key swing states, as has been the case in each of the past three presidential elections, though it is notable that late deciders broke for Trump. He won the 4% of people who said they decided in the last few days by 6 points. He also won the additional 3% who said they decided in the last week by 12.

Things usually tend to break one way in elections, and they did again this time.

While the polls appeared to again underestimate Trump's support, they did indicate several key storylines that proved true in this election. Harris, and Biden before her, consistently lagged in surveys with Latinos and young voters, for example.

And despite a strong opening to Harris' campaign, the polls closed dramatically, starting about a month ago nationally and in the swing states. In fact, the averages had Trump slightly ahead in an average of the swing states.

Factoring polling error from past elections, that pointed to the possibility of exactly what happened — a big Trump Electoral College win.

9. Democrats will have to do some soul-searching on the way forward.

It is the case that after every election, the losing party goes through a period of trying to figure out where it went wrong and what to do to try to win in the future.

There are no clear answers for the Democratic Party, but Democrats continue to struggle to win over working-class voters, a group that used to be solidly in their camp.

Harris narrowly lost the suburbs, and maybe more notably, voters who make between $30,000 and $100,000 a year voted for Trump. Harris won those who make more than $100,000 a year, a group Republicans used to win.

In other words, Trump won the working and middle class, while Democrats won over college-educated people who are financially better-off.

That's a shift in American politics, and unless the Democratic Party can figure out how to win those voters again and not continue to get blown out in rural areas, they are in danger of becoming a party that is strictly for the elites. And there are not enough of those voters for Democrats to win.

At the same time, what really matters is the right candidate in the right environment. Remember, it was only a decade ago when Republicans were wringing their hands about how to win over the growing population of Latinos in this country and issuing dire warnings of being in a permanent minority unless the party embraced a comprehensive immigration overhaul.

Well, it went a completely different direction — and won a record share of Latinos in this election.

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