XPost: talk.politics.guns, sac.politics, alt.society.liberalism
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Democrat data firm Catalist just released the most comprehensive report
to date on how President Donald Trump won the 2024 election. But as
usual, the corporate media and Democrat consultant class are misreading
the data - and underestimating just how devastating last November was
for liberals.
Breaking down the data
The Catalist report largely confirms what many exit polls found last
year. Trump made gains among minority and young voters, too many Biden
voters stayed home, and infrequent voters voted Republican. But the
scale of these shifts and some other trends that have thus far flown
under the radar hint at much deeper problems for Democrats than just one
bad election night.
Trump's gains among men - particularly minority men - were particularly astonishing. Among men overall, Trump performed six points better in
2024 than he did in 2020. But among black men, he performed seven points better, and among Latino men, he improved by an incredible 12 points.
Kamala Harris did not improve among a single subset of men examined in
the Catalist survey.
SOURCE: The Cook Political Report
Even among women, Harris struggled. Latina women moved seven points to
the right. The only group among whom Harris improved over Joe Biden's
2020 performance was married white women - and even then, she did only
one point better.
In another troubling trend for liberals, the newest voters were less
likely to vote Democrat. In 2024, for the first time in Catalist's
dataset, the Democrat candidate won fewer than 50 percent of the voters
for whom that election was their first time ever voting - a cohort of 24 million Americans last year.
That data point alone should be setting off alarm bells for liberals. Typically, younger voters lean left and become more conservative as they
age. If that trend holds but Republicans begin performing better with
young people as soon as they're able to vote, it creates a prohibitively
low electoral ceiling for Democrats.
Perhaps the most important takeaway from the Catalist report is also the
most nuanced. As the Cook Political Report explains, "For much of the
2024 election, the Harris campaign was convinced that they could win if
the electorate looked similar to 2020, while the Trump campaign was
eager to expand the electorate."
In a sense, Harris got the electorate she wanted - 47 percent of voters
were "super voters," meaning they had voted in all of the last four
general elections. In 2020, that number was 38 percent. And Harris
actually performed better with this subset of voters than either Joe
Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016, winning 50 percent of their
votes.
But among less frequent voters - those who voted in 0, 1, 2, or 3 of the
last 4 general elections, Harris lost ground. While Biden won at least
53 percent of the vote among all of these groups, Harris failed to crack
50 percent with any of them.
Moreover, according to Catalist's estimates, 30 million people who voted
in 2020 stayed home in 2024. About 55.7 percent of that group voted for
Biden.
SOURCE: The Cook Political Report
Key takeaways
Taken together, these findings offer a few insights. First, Trump was
indeed successful at expanding the electorate - and shattered
conventional wisdom about minority voting patterns. Liberal dreams of an "emerging Democratic majority" driven by people of color and women, so
popular in the early 2000s, are now coming crashing down. The 2024
electorate, which was three percent less white than 12 years ago,
produced the first Republican popular vote winner since 2004.
Second, the gender divide is real and growing. The failure of the Kamala
Harris campaign to reach men was not just a media narrative - it showed
up in an enormous way at the ballot box. Since last November, Democrats
have failed to reckon with their alienation of men and the aggressive feminization of the party. Unless Democrats address that problem
quickly, expect the rightward trend among men to continue no matter who
is on the ballot.
Third, the Obama coalition is collapsing, and traditional Democrat
messaging tactics are becoming less effective with voters. As Cook put
it, "Had the 2024 electorate been in place in 2012, the team in Chicago would've been over the moon." But in 2016, 2020, and 2024, that same
coalition that delivered two terms for Obama became increasingly
pro-Trump - despite Democrats and the corporate media launching a
decade-long smear campaign to portray Trump as racist and sexist.
Fourth, Americans who are less political, or at least less inclined to
vote, really, really didn't like what they saw from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and really did like Donald Trump's message. What the "less
frequent" voter data suggests is that a majority of Americans who have
not voted in every recent election were incentivized to show up at the
polls to vote for a change in direction - a clear rejection of Biden's presidency.
The media misses the mark again
Following the release of the Catalist data, The Bulwark - a vehemently anti-Trump outlet - published its own breakdown of the data. It contains
this somewhat amusing line: "Republicans were not able to boost their
margins in the swing states in 2024 as much as they did nationally -
meaning that in the states that actually matter, where all the ad
spending and stumping happens, Democrats are in a stronger position than
they are in the rest of the country. That's something."
Really? Trump won every single swing state and cut his margin of defeat
in half in states like Virginia and New Jersey. Maybe Trump didn't
improve as much in the swing states as he did nationally, but that's
only because his improvement nationally was so impressive. If anything,
that analysis should lead to the conclusion that Trump's appeal is even
broader and more robust than his popular vote victory or landslide
Electoral College margin would suggest.
The Bulwark then trots out a now-familiar line: that no other Republican
will be able to match Trump's margins among rural and working-class
voters. "Since Trump hijacked their political party, they've been
shedding reliable college-educated suburban voters - along with most traditional Republican values and policies," the piece reads. "And while
Trump is able to offset this loss with Saddam Hussein-level margins
among working-class voters, especially in rural areas, there's no
evidence a Republican who isn't Trump can conjure similar appeal with
voters otherwise uninterested in politics."
But wait - didn't The Bulwark and the rest of the Never-Trump crowd just
get done telling us from 2021 to 2024 that Trump would be an electoral
anchor on the party? Didn't they all blame him for Republicans' underperformance in 2022 and insist that January 6 and left-wing lawfare
would make him unelectable? Now, however, we're supposed to believe that Republicans don't stand a chance without him on the ballot.
Even if that analysis were correct, it would mean that another more "traditional" Republican candidate would be able to bring back those college-educated suburban voters who used to be a core component of the
GOP coalition. And if that Republican candidate could maintain some
subset of the rural and working-class base that Trump activated, it
would leave him or her in a similarly strong electoral position.
Ultimately, what drives the political elite crazy isn't just that Trump
keeps winning - it's that he keeps proving them wrong. Again and again,
they've declared him finished and out of step with the American public.
Yet each time, he defies the odds, redraws the political map, and
reshapes the electorate in ways they neither understand nor control.
Trump didn't just win in 2024. He shattered long-held assumptions about
voter behavior, media influence, and party loyalty. What Democrats and
the media fail to realize, and what each new revelation about last
November proves, is that the old playbook no longer works - and that the outsider the elites tried to cancel is now the defining figure of a new political era.
https://amac.us/newsline/elections/trump-victory-explained-new-data-sheds -more-light-on-kamala-harriss-2024-collapse/
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