The 2024 Election Annotated

We finally have access to the most comprehensive data on what happened in 2024 ... so I put on my political submarine gear and did a deep dive.

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I mentioned yesterday that Catalist has released its comprehensive exit poll of the 2024 election. It’s probably the most valuable data on what happened in the election … and for campaign nerds like me, it’s one of the year's best days.

I took some time today to pull out a few interesting data points, which suggest to me that Democrats may not be in as perilous a state as the 2024 election results would indicate.

The Democrats’ Consistent Voters Advantage

Harris continued to do well among voters who have consistently participated in elections. Compared to Biden in 2020, Harris retained support among voters who regularly cast ballots in recent elections. Harris also retained steady support among some demographic groups, particularly women and older voters in the battleground states.

In the near term, this might be the most important data point from the Catalist survey because the Democratic advantage with consistent voters should continue to give the party an edge in special elections and the 2026 midterms. (Consistent voters disproportionately vote in both.) Indeed, this newfound edge with consistent voters is probably a good part of the reason why Democrats overperformed in the 2022 midterms and didn’t do worse in 2024.

Trump’s Occasional Voter Advantage

We find that Harris lost the most among an interconnected set of groups: people of color, young voters, men, and irregular voters.

In all three past presidential elections, Trump has made varying inroads among these voters, more so than previous Republican presidential nominees, while a disproportionate number of these voters seem to drop off during midterms when Trump is not on the ballot.

As Amy Walter and Carrie Dann wrote in the Cook Political Report, “Harris wanted an electorate heavily populated with frequent voters, while the Trump team wanted an electorate filled with voters who have not participated as much in major elections.” Trump got the latter, and that is why he’s president.

Give Trump credit on this one: His campaign prioritized mobilizing disengaged/irregular voters, and it worked. Moreover, Trump’s 2024 success with these voters is part of a longer trend.

However, as the Catalist report makes clear, this could be a problem for Republicans in 2026, as it was in the 2018 and 2022 midterms (occasional voters are less likely to vote in midterms). But what about 2028, when Trump won’t be on the presidential ticket? Is there a Republican politician who can motivate and mobilize these infrequent Trump voters, who seem far more wedded to him than to the GOP? We don’t know, but if 2018 and 2022 are any indication (and to a lesser extent, 2024, when four Republican Senate candidates lost in states that Trump won), it might be a heavy lift.

We know Trump does well with occasional and disengaged voters. But we’ve seen very little evidence that this edge translates to the rest of the Republican Party.

Kamala Harris Ran A Better Campaign Than She’s Given Credit For

Trump’s gains from 2020 were smaller in battleground states. While Trump did not secure an overall majority of the popular vote when accounting for all ballots cast, his performance improved in two-way support, which looks at only ballots cast for Democrats and Republicans. In 2020, he received 49% of the two-way vote and increased that share to 52% in 2024. However, his gains in the battleground states were about half the size, going from 49% to just over 50%.

I’ve made this point before, but Harris’s deficit in the swing states was smaller than the overall swing in the popular vote of around 6 points. That means that in the states that saw the most of Harris (in both positive and negative ways), people responded more favorably than the country as a whole.

Democrats Have A Minority Voter Problem … but they also might have a solution.

Voters of color continue to support Democrats, but support has dropped successively over the past three presidential elections. Voters of color remain a key part of the Democratic coalition, with Black voters in particular continuing to support Democrats at the highest rate among all racial groups. But over the past several general elections, Democratic support has continued to erode among voters of color. Drops from 2020 to 2024 were highest among Latino voters (9 points in support), lowest among Black voters (3 points), and 4 points for Asian and Pacific Islander groups (AAPI) … As with other demographic groups, support drops were concentrated among the younger cohorts of voters, particularly young men. For instance, support among young Black men dropped from 85% to 75%, and support among young Latino men dropped from 63% to 47%.

There’s no question that Democrats have lost substantial ground with Hispanic voters, as this chart shows.

Democrats lost 14 points among Hispanic voters between 2012 and 2024. While the drop-off was larger in 2024, the long-term trend is undeniable.

However, this chart from the Catalist survey of what happened in the 2022 midterm offers an interesting counterpoint.

Among Hispanic voters, there was no drop-off in support for Democrats from 2020 to 2022 … but the drop-off from 2020 to 2024 was dramatic.

In addition, look at what happened between 2016 and 2020.

Pew Research

These numbers come from Pew. They show that Democrats did better with Hispanic voters in the 2018 midterms and then lost 13 points with them in 2020 (which was a pretty good year for Democrats).

One possible takeaway from these various data points is that the Democrats’ problems with Hispanic voters are primarily oriented around low-engagement voters who are more likely to vote in presidential elections. However, this could also be a Trump-related phenomenon. In other words, low-engagement voters are turning out in presidential elections because they want to vote for Trump, but they are not as supportive of other Republican candidates.

Gender Played A Decisive Role in 2024

The partisan gender gap remains high and grew in 2024. Women have long been more likely to support Democrats than men. The gender gap in partisan preferences increased in 2024: women continued to support Harris (55% support) at roughly the same levels that they supported Biden in 2020 (56%). But men moved towards Trump in 2024, from 48% support for Biden in 2020 to 42% support for Harris in 2024. These changes were seen across racial and other demographic groups.

According to Split Ticket’s Lakshya Jain, Trump’s 11-point shift in support among male voters is the “sharpest increase in at least the past decade of U.S. politics.”

It’s very difficult to say if Harris’s gender was the reason why Democrats lost support among voters, but the chart below is pretty damn interesting.

In 2012 and 2020, there were 8—and 9-point gender gaps. In 2016 and 2024, when a woman was at the top of the Democratic ticket, the gender gap was 12—and 13-points, and virtually the entire shift was among male voters (Democrats went from 48 percent support with men in 2020 to 42 percent in 2024; Trump went from 52 percent to 57 percent).

To be clear, there could be other reasons why Democrats gained support with men in 2020 and lost in 2024 (COVID, the state of the economy, etc). Still, if the numbers from 2012 and 2020 are the default gender gap when a man is the Democratic nominee … well, let’s just say that could be a helpful data point for Democratic primary voters.

Gender Played a Decisive Role in 2024 Pt. 2

I’m giving Jain another shout-out because he had an excellent look at the Catalist data in the Washington Post that included this rather startling data point.

“White, college-educated voters shifted to the right, and by significantly more than White, noncollege voters did. In fact, Kamala Harris barely underperformed Biden with White, noncollege voters, which raises a whole new set of questions about where the party goes from here.

These numbers are completely counterintuitive to what we’ve seen over the past several election cycles — namely, Democrats increasing their advantage with white college-educated voters.

But I dug in the data and, lo and behold, most of the shift among white college-educated voters came from men.

Harris lost one point of support from white college-educated women and 6 points from men. Conversely, Clinton gained slightly among both groups in 2016, though two points more with women. Biden significantly increased his support with college-educated voters, but more with men than women.

Harris also lost ground among white non-college-educated men, though not quite as much as among college-educated voters — but again, we see a slight gender gap. Harris lost three points with non-college-educated men and matched Biden among women. That particular gender gap was two points larger in 2016, when Clinton lost one point with non-college-educated women and six points with non-college-educated men.

The more you look at this data, the easier it is to draw the circumstantial conclusion that Democrats do worse among men when there is a woman at the head of the presidential ticket.

Beware of The Small Sample Size

After years of historically high support among Democrats, a significant share of young voters swung toward Republicans. Voters under the age of 30 dropped from 61% Democratic support in 2020 to 55% in 2024. Similar support drops are evident when examining voters by generational cohorts, such as Gen Z or Millennials. These drops were larger than drops for any other generation or age group, and other trends in the demographic data, such as drops among different racial groups and the gender gap, were more pronounced among young voters than the rest of the electorate.

The Democratic drop-off in the youth vote was incredibly pronounced and is evident across multiple demographic groups. If these trends continue, that could potentially be very bad news for Democrats.

But for fun, I looked at the 2020 Catalist report, and this chart is interesting.

The Democrats’ biggest demographic gain in 2020 was among voters aged 18-29! I bring this up because, as bad as the Democratic performance was with younger voters in 2024, we don’t know if it’s the beginning of a larger trend or merely a one-off outcome. The long-term trend with younger voters, before 2024, was increasingly Democratic.

There is one other reason to suspect that 2024 is an outlier.

This chart is from Elliott Morris and appeared in late April, but more recent data backs it up. As Morris notes, “According to these polls, Trump is now about as unpopular as he was in 2020. According to the exit polls, Biden won young people by 25 points.” It’s too early to say, but it’s certainly possible that Trump’s support among younger voters in 2024 was an aberration.

The overall conclusion I draw from this data is that in the near term, Democrats have a significant edge with consistent voters that should translate into continued wins in special elections and a likely victory in the 2026 midterms. For all the think pieces about what Democrats need to do differently, the major takeaway from the 2024 data is that the political wind will likely be at their backs for the next 18 months.

The data is less clear regarding the long-term political implications. Will Democrats continue to lose ground with minority voters? Will occasional Trump voters turn out in 2028? Was the youth vote shift in 2024 the beginning of a new political trend or an aberration? Will nominating a man in 2028 bring different results for Democrats?

Only time will tell.

Musical Interlude