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Analysis: Trump’s win powered by improved performance across electorate

Nearly three weeks after the 2024 election, with almost all of the votes counted, it has become clear that Donald Trump won his second term in the White House by orchestrating a nationwide rightward shift in voting patterns that largely persisted across most of the 50 states, whether their electoral votes went to Trump or to his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

The main force behind Trump’s victory was strong support from his base, which is generally made up of white Americans without a college degree. His win would not have been possible, however, had the president-elect not improved his showing among groups who tend to support Democratic candidates.

Trump won larger shares of the vote in parts of the country with large Hispanic and Asian American populations, many of whom appeared to respond to his criticism of the Biden administration’s handling of the economy and of immigration. Many areas of the country with a large concentration of Black voters, who have historically favored Democrats, saw lower turnout than in past years, creating a further disadvantage for Harris.

The shift in favor of Trump was apparent in an overwhelming majority of communities across the country. An analysis of county-level data updated by CNN on November 22 demonstrated that in nearly nine of 10 U.S. counties, Trump’s 2024 vote share had improved over that of 2020.  

‘He did much better’

Drew McCoy, president of Decision Desk HQ, an organization that gathers data on elections in the United States, told VOA that Trump’s improvement with the electorate had been broad and cut across several demographic groups.

“We definitely have a lot of data on how Trump did, and across the board, he did much better,” McCoy said, mentioning that the president-elect had improved among white voters, Hispanic voters and Asian American voters.

Meanwhile, while many had predicted a sharp increase in the gender gap in favor of Harris, it never materialized.

While female voters appear to have favored Harris decisively, McCoy said the margin was “essentially flat” compared with Trump’s last two runs for the presidency.

“It wasn’t the blowout across the board with women that many people were expecting,” McCoy said.

The shift in the Hispanic vote was especially noticeable, he said. For example, in the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley, just north of the border with Mexico, Trump’s share of the vote surged. In Florida’s Miami-Dade County region, which Hillary Clinton won by 30 percentage points in 2016, Trump won by 13 points.

Popular and electoral vote tally

Trump became the first Republican candidate in two decades to win the popular vote.

As of November 25, The Associated Press tally had Trump with precisely 50% of the vote and Harris at 48.4%, with the remainder scattered among third-party candidates.

In total, Americans cast more than 151 million votes for president, about 4 million fewer than were cast in 2020, when Trump lost to Joe Biden. However, Trump won approximately 77 million votes, nearly 3 million more than he did in 2020.

Each U.S. state has a specified number of votes in the Electoral College, which is the body that officially elects the president. Each state allocates its votes to candidates based on the popular result in that state, in most cases on a winner-take-all basis.

Trump needed 270 electoral votes to win. He received 312, or 58% of the total available. Historically, that is not a large percentage. Many presidents have won well over 75% of the electoral vote. However, in the seven presidential elections held since 2000, only Barack Obama, in 2008 and 2012, won more than 58% of electoral votes.

Swing state sweep

In the months leading up to the election, the American public’s attention was focused on seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In 2020, Trump lost all of them, except for North Carolina, to Biden. This time, Trump won them all, in some cases by larger margins than Biden enjoyed in 2020.

In Arizona, which Biden won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, Trump won by nearly 200,000 votes. Much of the swing was attributable to a shift in the Hispanic vote toward Trump. He trimmed Biden’s advantage considerably, in both more diverse Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, as well as the heavily Hispanic counties along the state’s southern border with Mexico.

In Georgia, Harris’ chance for victory hinged on running up her margins in the city of Atlanta and its densely populated suburbs, which represent the core of Democratic support in an otherwise reliably Republican state. In the end, she failed to do so, winning by a slimmer margin than Biden did in populous Fulton, Gwinnett and DeKalb counties.

In Michigan, many of the same dynamics at play across the country remained in force, but Harris’ performance was further hindered by the presence of large Arab American voting blocs in several metropolitan areas.

The Biden administration’s support for Israel in its ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon greatly angered many Arab Americans, and helped hand the state to Trump. In some precincts in the majority Arab American city of Dearborn, where Biden received 88% of the vote in 2020, Harris not only lost to Trump, but came in third, behind Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Betting on Las Vegas

In Nevada, some 7 in 10 voters live in Clark County, in and around the city of Las Vegas. Nearly 1 in 3 voters in Clark are Hispanic, and the county also has Nevada’s largest share of Black and Asian American voters. Biden beat Trump by more than nine percentage points four years ago, but Harris won by less than three, a difference that appears to have been driven by Hispanic and Asian American voters switching to the Republican candidate.

Democrats in North Carolina may have been hopeful that the presence of a popular incumbent Democratic governor on the ticket would give Harris a shot at a pickup there. However, Trump improved his margin in the state, winning with 51% of the vote.

One of the things that harmed Harris in North Carolina was earning fewer votes than Biden in majority-Black counties. For example, in majority-Black areas like Bertie and Hertford counties, her winning margin fell by six and seven percentage points,  respectively. She also performed worse among college-educated white voters.

In Pennsylvania, which put Biden over the top in 2020, Harris also underperformed. In the city of Philadelphia, she garnered 50,000 fewer votes than Biden had four years earlier. Trump won a much higher share of the vote in several communities with high concentrations of Hispanic voters than he had in 2020 and remained dominant in the state’s more rural areas.

Finally, in Wisconsin, Trump triumphed by increasing his vote totals in counties across In some counties in the rural southwestern part of the state, where the white population exceeds 95%, he won by as much as six percentage points more than he did in 2020.  

Safe and sound

In the days and weeks leading up to the election, there had been considerable concern about whether the balloting would be disrupted in any way. Trump frequently claimed that fraud was likely, and there was also considerable evidence that non-U.S. actors were using social media to sow doubts about the safety and soundness of the process.

Also, after 2020, when the counting of ballots took several days in a number of key states, there were questions about how long it would take to name a winner.

Several weeks after the polls closed, groups that monitor elections in the U.S told VOA that in terms of its administration, the election had been an unqualified success.

David Becker, executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, called the election “a triumph of public service.”

“The election ended up being safe and secure, even with massive amounts of disinformation, even with foreign adversaries like Russia circulating fake videos, even with bomb threats and [the] firebombing of a couple of drop boxes in the Pacific Northwest. All of those things were handled, and largely, everything went very well,” he said.

“We had clear results, with a winner declared by the media less than 12 hours after the polls closed,” Becker said. “We had no certification challenges. That’s just a remarkable success by the professionals who run elections around the country.”

Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director for Verified Voting, an organization that works to ensure the responsible use of technology in elections, agreed.

“The 2024 election went very smoothly, thanks to a lot of preparation and hard work by election officials,” Lindeman said.

“Over the last eight years since 2016, the entire country has wrapped its head around election-related cybersecurity. And the level of training and the level of resources both have improved quite substantially,” he said.
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