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“It’s more, dare I say, a vibe than anything else,” he added, alluding to the Harris campaign. They certainly did not read the room for an entire campaign built on vibes.
“They just want to live in the same country as their parents. I don’t know if that’s a social issue or an economic issue,” he said. “They want a nice life, and they feel it slipping away.”
The Trump campaign tapped several groups to run its on-the-ground organizing work, including Turning Point, which doesn’t have a youth focus.
The goal was to lose less, according to Kirk, who works to get young people involved in conservative politics. “But in the last couple of weeks, we were whispering to each other that there might be something bigger.”
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He was the only major Republican who joined the platform over the summer and has grown his follower count to almost 14 million, trumping Harris’ 5 million. Trump also did a number of extended interviews on some of the top podcasts in the country, many popular among young men.
Harris had both a student-organizing program and a large social media presence to connect with young Americans as Election Day drew closer, but the polls were still showing her lagging behind Biden in terms of her standing with this group.
In the past, voters under 30 have proved essential to the outcome of elections because of the small shifts in support.
Vice President Harris hoped it 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 largest change. The support of youth in the state went from 49 to 49 for Harris and Trump.
The University of Chicago conducted the final Youth focused poll ahead of Election Day, which showed a possible information gap. 80% of those under 40 said they know what they need to know about Trump, and just a small portion felt the same about Harris.
According to Della Volpe, who is the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, there was a sense that younger people’s personal finances would be better under a Trump administration.
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Harris made abortion an issue of her campaign. It’s an issue that has galvanized young voters to turn out for Democrats in recent elections.
The issue of abortion was the second most important topic in this election, according to early data from the Associated Press.
To Della Volpe, it’s part of a trend he has been watching for years, where a significant number of young men, especially those 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 don’t want 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. That investment was made by Donald Trump. I think a lot of the playing field was put together by Democrats.
The former president won in the Electoral College but he was able to expand his coalition due to demographic shifts. With a victory in the popular vote, he will be able to have full control of the levers of power in Washington, for the first time in his three runs for president.
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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. As a result of the Fed’s inflation fix, more expensive borrowing for things like cars and mortgages is now required. It will take some time for Americans to feel the Fed’s rate cut as a result of 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. In the election white voters went up as a share of the electorate from 30% to 71%.
Trump won an astounding 46% of Latinos in this election. That is the highest ever for a Republican, even higher than George W. Bush in 2004. But it was driven by men. He won a majority of Latino men by double-digits over Harris, while Harris won 60% of Latinas.
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.
Adding to that the fact that some white men with college degrees narrowly voted for Trump and the large margin with non-college white men, Harris just couldn’t make up that ground.
The campaign was clear that men and women think differently of each other. In the final NPR/PBS News/Marist poll before the election, there was evidence of this.
Most of the women thought that Harris would carry out her more moderate proposals in this campaign, compared to five years ago when she ran for president. A majority of men, however, doubted her sincerity and thought she was just making those promises to get votes.
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.
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.
In a group of swing states where so much attention has been paid, it is not surprising that this would happen. But Trump did not see those declines. He went up in the three regions.
Trump is on track to win the popular vote. 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 won 3% of them who said they made a decision in the last week.
A strong opening for the Harris campaign started 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.
When a party loses an election they try to figure out where they went wrong and what to do about it in the future.
The Democratic Party still doesn’t seem to have a solution for winning over working class voters, who used to be very supportive of the party.
At the same time, what really matters is the right candidate in the right environment. A decade ago, Republicans were wringing their hands about how to win over the Latino population and issuing dire warnings that they would become a permanent minority unless there was a comprehensive immigration reform.
