Young voters went for Trump in a big way this year
Unpacking the 2024 Young Vote Heres What We Know So Far: In a Big Way Towards President Donald Trump
He referred to the Harris campaign as a vibe more than anything else. They did not read the room for an entire campaign that was built on vibes.
“They just want to live in the same country as their parents. I don’t know if it’s an economic or social issue. They feel like it’s slipping away because they want a nice life.
Turning Point’s advocacy organization, which doesn’t have a youth-only focus, was one of several outside groups that were tapped by the Trump campaign to run its on-the-ground organizing work.
“The goal was, of course, to lose by less,” said Kirk, whose organization focuses on getting young people engaged in conservative politics. We were whispering that there might be something bigger in the last few weeks.
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Over the summer, he was the only major Republican who joined TikTok – where he grew a follower count that now stands at 14 million, higher than Harris, who has 5 million followers. Many young men are drawn to some of the extended interviews conducted by Trump on the top websites in the country.
Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth Poll, noted Harris’ declines were about 15% in the Northeast, Minnesota and Illinois. In California, Washington and Oregon, there’s still a lot of votes to be cast. In red states and swing states, she was down by 10% and 4%.
Voters under 30 have proved to be crucial for Democrats in the past because of minimal shifts in support that can decide an election.
Vice President Harris had hoped that the group would be a part of her winning coalition. Instead, she underperformed, and President-elect Trump made gains.
It was a loss especially pronounced in the blue wall states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – where the vice president’s margins dropped significantly from President Biden’s commanding leads four years ago.
Michigan had the biggest change. A sobering 24 point drop from 2020 in youth support was recorded by Harris and Trump, both receiving equal shares of youth support.
The final youth focused poll from the University of Chicago pointed to an information gap a month before the election. While nearly 80% of those under 40 said they “pretty much already know” what they need to about Trump, just 57% felt that way about Harris.
“From the earliest focus groups I conducted this year, there was this innate sense that younger people’s personal finances were better and would be better under a Trump administration,” said Della Volpe, who serves as the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.
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Harris made protecting access to abortion a central part of her campaign. It’s an issue that has galvanized young voters to turn out for Democrats in recent elections.
According to early data from the Associated Press, those under 30 are most likely to vote for a political party that supports the economy and jobs, and less likely to vote for a political party that supports abortion.
The trend he has been watching for many years is that a majority of young men who have grown up with Trump feel disconnected from the modern Democratic Party.
“They’re telling us in our surveys and our focus groups that the Democratic Party doesn’t speak to them. They are choosing not to be affiliated with it. This is something that you can’t turn around in 30 days or 100 days,” he said. “To do this takes years of investment. Donald Trump made an investment. I believe a lot of the playing field was put together by Democrats.
The former President Trump won the election in a big way, expanding his coalition with historic demographic shifts. He is on pace to win the popular vote for the first time, which will result in him controlling the levers of power in Washington.
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Americans have been upset at higher than normal prices and the lack of affordable housing despite the fact that unemployment is low, wages are up and inflation is down. The Federal Reserve’s inflation fix 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.
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%.
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 gained a majority of Latino men by double digits over Harris.
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.
Harris had no chance with the huge margins with non-college white men, the fact that even white men with college degrees narrowly went for Trump, and the fact that even white men with college degrees couldn’t make up that ground.
But, in this campaign, it was clear that men and women view women in power differently. In the final NPR/PBS News/Marist poll before Election Day, there was evidence of this.
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 believed she was just making the promises in order to get votes.
In the House, Democrats were hopeful they could hold onto or flip several races they either lost or likely won’t be able ton — 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.
She was off about a million votes in New York and other blue states, for example.
It is not uncommon for this to happen when attention is focused on a particular set of seven swing states. But Trump did not see those declines. He went all the way up in each region.
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.
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. 4% of people said they decided in last few days, and he won them. They decided by 12 in the last week, and he won 3% of that.
The polls closed dramatically after a strong opening to the campaign of Harris. In fact, the averages had Trump slightly ahead in an average of the swing states.
After an election, the losing party goes through a period of trying to understand where it went wrong and what to do 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.
At the same time, what really matters is the right candidate in the right environment. When Republicans were making dire warnings about being in a permanent minority unless the party embraced a comprehensive immigration reform, it was only a decade ago.
