A supporter crying as Harris concedes the 2024 US presidential election to Trump, who has made surprising gains among women, minorities, and youth. — Reuters
I PREDICTED, in writing, that Kamala Harris would win. I was dead wrong. Egg on face, no doubt.
At time of writing, there’s probably still too much to process, both emotionally and analytically. It will take some time to unpack everything well.
What I can do at this early stage perhaps is to start listing out some of the voting trends that might be considered quite different than what was expected or projected – what I got wrong, in other words.
For today, I will look primarily at demographic voting trends, as studied in the NBC’s exit polls and in comparison with 2020 results, which provides data regarding race, gender, and age.
It must be noted that these were conducted only in the key battleground states, and thus may not reflect national trends. Accurate numbers for that will likely only come in later.
Trump’s numbers obviously improved significantly compared with 2020. The question is, where did they improve?
His percentage of the white vote remained roughly steady. Going from 58% in 2020, to 57% in 2024.
Where did things change then?
Percentage wise, the biggest answer is among Latinos – making this one of the biggest surprises of the election. Trump’s share of the Latino vote in 2024 surged an astounding 14% compared with 2020.
It went up by 8% among Latina women, and up a whole 19% among Latino men.
To complete the context, support for Trump among blacks remained about the same, while support among Asians increased by 5%.
Support in the “’ther” category (the equivalent of “dan lain-lain” for us Malaysians) also went up a staggering 11%.
So what we are seeing here generally is a massive upswing in votes for Trump among non-white voters.
A natural reaction would be to be especially shocked about the Latino voting trends, given Trump’s anti-immigrant diatribes that seem mostly to reference immigrants from Latin America.
I suppose one of the more common (but unverified) attempts to explain this is legal immigrants having the sentiment that illegal immigrants are spoiling it for the rest of them. I’m not sure this is exactly how it’s going to play out in reality, but I suppose the voters have spoken.
As to more detailed explanations, there are none I would dare speculate on at this early stage.
Two other areas which may have confounded expectations was comparing the women’s vote, and the youth vote.
Trump, with all the accusations of misogyny, sexual assault, being anti-abortion, and so on, actually increased his overall vote share among women, by 3%, from 42% to 45%.
At time of writing, this may be one of the most confounding statistics of them all. Again, I simply have no answers at the moment.
I doubt I will have answers for the youth vote either.
Among voters aged 18-29, Trump went up an astounding 11%, from 31% in 2020 to 42% in 2024.
Astoundingly, the only age demographic in which Harris made any noticeable gains (about 2%-3%) compared with 2020 was in the age group of 65 and over! She seems to have performed worse than Biden in every other age group.
In the cases of both women and youth, obviously Harris still won the majority. But this huge change in trend is really what we all need to be looking at.
There are all the usual speculations – especially about how America is not ready for a woman president, about how Harris’ race was a factor, and so on.
There is a chance that perhaps Harris biggest disadvantage may not have been that she was a woman, a person of colour, or a late candidate. Perhaps it was that she was perceived to be a member of the elite establishment.
Personally, I feel that Trump is even more “elite establishment”, with his billionaire friends and silver spoon upbringing, but it is possible that voters feel differently.
Andy Kim is a newly elected Democratic senator from New Jersey, the first Korean American in the Senate. In a series of tweets, he thought back to an engagement from earlier in his political career, with voters who had voted both for him and for Trump.
He recalled how voters talked about their disaffectation from the current political system, and their distrust of all political “insiders”. According to them, both Kim and Trump qualified as a different brand of “outsiders”, even though they were in different parties. This might be another important factor to keep an eye on moving forward.
The other statistic I keep coming back to in the United States is voter turnout.
From at least 1976 to 2016, the biggest voting bloc in America was not those that voted Democratic or Republican, but those who did not vote as all.
In that time period, the lowest percentage of non-voters was 38% in 2008 for Barack Obama – still well over a third of eligible voters. The highest percentage of non-voters in that time was 48%, in 1992 for Bill Clinton – where nearly half of eligible Americans did not bother to vote.
In 2020, for the first time since at least 1976, there were (barely) more people who voted for Joe Biden (34%) than who did not vote (33%)
This year, the percentage of non-voters looks to be around 35%, a dip from 2020. That number has been in the 40s for most of recent decades, so it is improving, but it is still high.
In other words, either candidate could have won comfortably if they somehow found a way to appeal to even a small percentage of these eligible voters who did not vote.
How could they have done so? That is perhaps the billion dollar question.
It seems fair to say that neither candidate was able to find a formula or approach that could somehow inspire this key demographic.
Perhaps there are people who are actively trying to make Americans feel like it is not worth their time to vote.
Perhaps these should be the biggest areas of inquiry moving forward. Finding out how to inspire non-voters may take us into the very heart and soul of what truly matters for Americans.
Nathaniel Tan is strategic communications consultant. He offers solidarity hugs to all others affected by the results, and can be reached at nat@engage.my.
The views expressed here are solely his own.
