5 key takeaways from Election Day 2024
Election night 2024 is over. Donald Trump has reclaimed the White House after a victory in Wisconsin early Wednesday morning. Here are five big-picture takeaways from how America voted:
Trump is stronger than four years ago
Trump didn’t lose reelection in 2020 by much. If a few thousand votes in a few key swing states had broken the other way, he would have been president instead of Joe Biden.
So any shift toward Trump in 2024, even a minor one, had the potential to be decisive.
The big takeaway from Tuesday is that America did shift toward Trump in 2024 — and the shift wasn’t minor. In Florida, he defeated Harris by 13 percentage points, roughly quadrupling his 2020 margin. He lost in Virginia — but by 5 points this time instead of 10. In the deep blue states of New York and New Jersey, he performed better (on the presidential level) than any Republican in decades. The list goes on.
Much of this movement — winning red states by more than expected; losing blue states by less — didn’t scramble the electoral math. But it reflected larger demographic and geographic trends that could propel Trump to victory in the all-important battlegrounds once all the votes there are counted.
Trump did especially well in rural areas
Late Tuesday night, the Associated Press called the two Southern swing states, Georgia and North Carolina, for Trump. In both, the former president improved on his 2020 performance in nearly every small, red, rural county — a couple hundred votes here, a few thousand there. Harris did slightly better than Biden in some places, too — including several key suburban and exurban counties around Atlanta and Charlotte. But ultimately, it wasn’t enough to overcome Trump’s relentless rural firewall.
According to the preliminary exit polls (which may change as more of the vote comes in), Trump won 63% of the rural vote nationally — up from 57% four years ago. Meanwhile, Harris didn’t do any better than Biden among urban voters (60%) — and narrowly lost suburban voters, a group Biden won.
Trump also overperformed with Latino voters
Early exit poll data can be a bit fuzzy — but if the initial numbers end up being roughly accurate, Trump may have just secured a bigger share of the Latino vote than any Republican since George W. Bush.
Four years ago, the exit polls showed Trump winning 32% of Latinos. Right now, they show him winning 45%. In Michigan, they show him winning 60% of Latinos. If true, that would be a net shift in Trump’s direction of more than 35 percentage points.
Nationally, Latino men seem to be mostly driving this movement. In 2020, they voted for Biden (59%) over Trump (36%). This year, they voted for Trump (54%) over Harris (44%).
Again, exit polls can change — and they’ve struggled to precisely quantify the Latino vote in the past. But assuming the basic direction of this year’s Latino numbers are correct, it could represent a major sea change in U.S. politics.
Democrats struggled in down-ballot races
In the current Senate, Democrats have a working majority — 51 to 49.
But 2024 was always going to be an uphill battle. For one thing, they had almost no room for error. (Losing even one seat could mean losing control of the entire chamber.) And for another, they were defending lots of vulnerable seats; Republicans were barely defending any.
On Tuesday, some Senate Democrats and Democratic candidates — Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, Texas’s Colin Allred — ran ahead of Harris in their states. But it wasn’t enough, and they lost anyway.
In West Virginia, Democrats had effectively ceded the seat held by outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin long before Election Day. In Nebraska, independent challenger Dan Osborn failed to unseat GOP Sen. Deb Fischer.
Once Gov. Jim Justice won in West Virginia and businessman Bernie Moreno won in Ohio, that was it — two seats flipped, and the Senate flipped with them.
The polls weren’t wrong
Votes are still being counted, but it looks like "the polls" had a pretty decent night.
This was not a foregone conclusion. In both 2016 and 2020, the polls significantly underestimated Trump's support in key battleground states. Many political observers wondered if the same thing would happen again in 2024 — or if, by trying not to underestimate Trump a third time, pollsters would tweak their methodologies too much and underestimate Harris instead.
This time around, however, the best nonpartisan polling averages seem to have been fairly accurate.
Again, it's too early to say what the final margins will be in every battleground, let alone nationally. But the pre-election polls estimated that none of the swing states would be decided by more than a point or two, or three at most. And currently, all of them remain within that range.
In the end, Trump could win most — or even all — of the swing states and earn a comfortable Electoral College victory. But even a swing-state sweep falls well within the possibilities implied by the deadlocked pre-election polling — as long as none of those victories are outside the usual margin of error.