Nearly three weeks after the 2024 election, when almost all votes have been counted, it has become clear that Donald Trump won his second term in the White House by orchestrating a rightward shift in voting patterns at the polls. national scale, which has largely persisted in most of the 50 states. whether their electoral votes went to Trump or his Democratic opponent, Vice President 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 college degrees. His victory, however, would not have been possible if the president-elect had not improved his standing among groups that tend to support Democratic candidates.
Trump won a larger share of the vote in areas of the country with large Hispanic and Asian-American populations, many of which appeared to respond to his criticism of the Biden administration’s handling of the economy and immigration. Many areas of the country with a high concentration of black voters, which have historically favored Democrats, saw lower turnout than in previous years, creating an additional disadvantage for Harris.
The shift toward Trump was evident in an overwhelming majority of communities across the country. An analysis of county-level data updated by CNN on November 22 showed that in nearly nine out of ten U.S. 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 VOA that Trump’s improvement with the electorate has been broad and cut across several demographic groups.
“We certainly have a lot of data on how Trump did, and overall he did a lot better,” McCoy said, mentioning that the president-elect had improved among white voters, Hispanic voters and Asian American voters.
Meanwhile, while many predicted a sharp increase in the gender gap in Harris’ favor, it never came to fruition.
While female voters appear to have favored Harris decisively, McCoy said the margin was “essentially flat” compared to Trump’s last two presidential elections.
“It wasn’t the widespread explosion on the women’s side that a lot of people expected,” McCoy said.
The shift in the Hispanic vote was particularly noticeable, he said. For example, in the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley, just north of the border with Mexico, Trump’s vote share increased. In the Miami-Dade County, Florida, area, where 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, according to the Associated Press tally, Trump had precisely 50 percent of the vote and Harris had 48.4 percent, with the rest split among third-party candidates.
In total, Americans cast more than 151 million votes for the president, about 4 million fewer than in 2020, when Trump lost to Joe Biden. However, Trump won about 77 million votes, almost 3 million more than 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 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, this percentage is not high. 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 vote.
Swing state scan
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 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 this change is attributable to a shift in the Hispanic vote in favor of Trump. It significantly narrowed Biden’s advantage, both in more diverse Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, as well as in densely Hispanic counties along the state’s southern border with Mexico.
In Georgia, Harris’ chances of victory hinged on her increasing margins in the city of Atlanta and its densely populated suburbs, which represent the core of Democratic support in an otherwise reliably Republican state. Ultimately, she fell short, winning by slimmer margins than Biden in the populous counties of Fulton, Gwinnett and DeKalb.
In Michigan, many of the same dynamics at play across the country remained in effect, but Harris’ performance was further hampered 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 cede 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.
Bet on Las Vegas
In Nevada, about seven in 10 voters live in Clark County, in and around the city of Las Vegas. Nearly one in three voters in Clark is 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 because Hispanic and Asian American voters shifted to the Republican candidate.
North Carolina Democrats may have been hoping that having a popular Democratic gubernatorial candidate on the ticket would give Harris a chance to take a vantage point 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 winning fewer votes than Biden in majority-Black counties. For example, in majority-black areas like Bertie and Hertford counties, his margin of victory 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 received 50,000 fewer votes than Biden four years earlier. Trump won a much higher vote share in several communities with high concentrations of Hispanic voters than in 2020 and remained dominant in the state’s most rural areas.
Finally, in Wisconsin, Trump triumphed by increasing his vote totals in some counties in the rural southwestern part of the state, where the white population exceeds 95%, he gained by as much as six percentage points of more than in 2020. .
Safe and sound
In the days and weeks leading up to the election, there were widespread concerns about whether the vote would be disrupted in any way. Trump frequently asserted that fraud was likely, and there was also ample evidence that non-U.S. actors were using social media to sow doubt about the security and robustness of the process.
Additionally, after 2020, when ballot counting lasted several days in a number of key states, questions arose about how long it would take to decide a winner.
Several weeks after polls closed, groups that monitor elections in the United States told VOA that in terms of administration, the election had been an unqualified 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 election was ultimately held safely, despite massive amounts of misinformation, even with foreign adversaries like Russia circulating fake videos, even with bomb threats and firebombing a few boxes depot in the Pacific Northwest things were handled and overall it 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 have had no problems with certification. This is simply a remarkable success by the professionals who run elections across the country.”
Mark Lindeman, policy and strategy director of Verified Voting, an organization that works to ensure responsible use of technology in elections, agrees.
“The 2024 elections went very well, thanks to a lot of preparation and hard work by election officials,” Lindeman said.
“Over the past eight years, since 2016, the entire country has focused on election-related cybersecurity. And the level of training and the level of resources have both improved significantly,” he said.
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