Almost three weeks after the 2024 elections, when almost all the votes have been counted, it has become clear that Donald Trump won his second term in the White House orchestrating a rightward shift in national voting patterns that broadly held in most of the 50 states, regardless of whether their electoral votes went to him or his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris.
The main force behind Trump’s victory was the strong support of his base, which is generally made up of white Americans without a college degree. However, his victory would not have been possible if the president-elect had not improved his performance among groups that tend to support Democratic candidates.
Trump won larger percentages of votes 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 immigration.
Many areas of the country with a large concentration of Black voters, which have historically favored Democrats, saw lower turnout than in previous years, creating an additional disadvantage for Harris.
The shift in Trump’s favor was evident in an overwhelming majority of communities across the country. An analysis of county-level data updated by cnn November 22 showed that in almost nine of 10 US counties, Trump’s vote share in 2024 had improved compared to 2020.
‘He did much better’
Drew McCoy, president of Decision Desk HQ, an organization that collects data on U.S. elections, told the Voice of America 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 overall, he did much better,” McCoy said, mentioning that the president-elect had improved among white voters, Hispanic voters and Asian American voters.
Meanwhile, although many had predicted a sharp increase in the gender gap in Harris’ favor, this never materialized.
Although women appear to have decisively favored Harris, McCoy said the margin was “basically flat” compared to Trump’s last two runs for president.
“It wasn’t the landslide victory among women that many people expected,” McCoy determined.
The shift in the Hispanic vote was especially notable, he said. For example, in the Rio Grande Valley, with a large Hispanic population, just north of the Mexican border, Trump’s share of the vote increased. In Florida’s Miami-Dade County region, which Hillary Clinton won by 30 percentage points in 2016, Trump won by 13 points.
Counting of popular and electoral votes
Trump became the first Republican candidate in two decades to win the popular vote.
As of November 25, the count of The Associated Press it showed Trump with exactly 50% of the vote and Harris with 48.4%, with the rest split between third-party candidates.
In total, Americans cast more than 151 million votes to elect a president, about 4 million fewer than in 2020, when Trump lost to Joe Biden. However, Trump received approximately 77 million votes, almost 3 million more than in 2020.
Each US state has a specific 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 outcome 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’s not a large percentage. Many presidents have won more than 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 the electoral votes.
Sweep in key states
In the months leading up to the election, the attention of the American public was focused on seven battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In 2020, Trump lost all of them except North Carolina to Biden. This time, Trump won them all, in some cases by larger margins than Biden enjoyed in 2020.
In Arizona, where Biden won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, Trump won by nearly 200,000 votes. Much of the change was due to a shift in the Hispanic vote toward Trump. It significantly cut into Biden’s lead, both in the more diverse Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, and in the predominantly Hispanic counties along the state’s southern border with Mexico.
In Georgia, Harris’ chance of victory depended on increasing 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, he fell short, winning by a narrower margin than Biden in the populous Fulton, Gwinnett and DeKalb counties.
In Michigan, many of the same dynamics that played out across the country remained in place, but Harris’ performance was further hampered by the presence of large support groups, blocs of American voters in several metropolitan areas.
The Biden administration’s support for Israel in its ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon It greatly angered many Arab Americans and helped hand the state over to Trump.
In some precincts in the Arab-American majority 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 .
Gambling in Las Vegas
In Nevada, about 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 the highest share of Black and Asian American voters in Nevada.
Biden beat Trump by more than nine percentage points four years ago, but Harris won by less than three, a gap that appears to have been driven by Hispanic and Asian American voters switching to the Republican candidate.
North Carolina Democrats may have hoped that the presence of a popular Democratic gubernatorial candidate on the ballot would give Harris a chance to win there. However, Trump improved his margin in the state, winning with 51% of the vote.
One of the things that hurt Harris in North Carolina was getting fewer votes than Biden in majority-black counties. For example, in majority-black areas like Bertie and Hertford counties, their margin of victory fell by six and seven percentage points, respectively. He 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, he obtained 50,000 fewer votes than Biden four years earlier. Trump won a much larger share of the vote in several communities with high concentrations of Hispanic voters than in 2020 and remained dominant in more rural areas of the state.
Finally, in Wisconsin, Trump triumphed by increasing his vote totals in counties across the country. In some counties in the rural southwest of the state, where the white population exceeds 95%, the Republican won up to six percentage points more than in 2020.
“A resounding success”
In the days and weeks leading up to the election, there had been considerable concern about whether the vote would be altered 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 doubt about the safety and soundness of the process.
Additionally, after 2020, when vote counting took several days in several key states, there were questions about how long it would take to name a winner.
Several weeks after the polls closed, groups monitoring the US elections told the VOA that, in terms of his administration, the election had been a resounding success.
David Becker, executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, called the election “a triumph of public service.”
“The elections ended up being safe and secure, even with massive amounts of misinformationeven with foreign adversaries like Russia circulating fake videos, including bomb threats and the firebombing of a pair of mailboxes in the Pacific Northwest. “All those things were handled and overall 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 issues. That’s just a remarkable success by the professionals who run elections across the country.”
Mark Lindeman, director of policy and strategy at Verified Voting, an organization that works to ensure the responsible use of technology in elections, agreed.
“The 2024 election went smoothly, thanks to a lot of preparation and hard work by election officials,” Lindeman said.
“In the last eight years, since 2016, the entire country has understood both electoral cybersecurity, the level of training and resources have improved substantially,” he concluded.
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