10 cold hard facts about the 2024 election
Absorb it now 📰, bookmark it for 2027. 🔖
Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election by about 252,000 votes — her combined deficit in the three preeminent Blue Wall States of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. That means if about 126,000 Trump voters had instead chosen Harris across those three states, the vice president would’ve won the Electoral College while still losing the popular vote to Donald Trump by 3.4 million votes. This is not to downplay the striking national shift in Republicans’ direction, but to underscore how the keys to the White House remain a thin three-state solution in which a margin over 2% represents victory with ease.
Harris’ best battleground performance came in Wisconsin — a .9% loss — where she astonishingly captured more votes than Joe Biden despite the state being more rural and populated with non-college educated voters. The assumption that Wisconsin was her weakest state turned out flat wrong — and that’s being attributed to the strong state party infrastructure that contained a rightward drift with a relentless ground game and communication effort. It’s just that Trump’s message lured out even more voters for a 30,091 vote win.
New Jersey was closer than Arizona … yes, you read that correctly. In my home state Harris’ win margin sits at 5.5% compared to Trump’s 5.7% victory in The Grand Canyon battleground, which received hundreds of millions of dollars of targeted attention. I received credible inklings Arizona was cooked back on Oct. 13, but Ruben Gallego’s narrow Senate victory in an otherwise abysmal Democratic year will provide a template for the party’s pathway out of the desert. The formula: A working class identity fused with independent inclinations. And being Latino can’t hurt. But the nearly 6-point loss at the top of the ticket in Arizona will tee up the question of whether its 11 electoral votes are actually in play for Democrats going forward. Or whether that money is more necessary to lock down Dirty Jersey.
“Big cities, Hispanic centers, and Native American lands swung most toward Trump in 2024. The reddest communities — aging farmlands, evangelical hubs, and working class country — swung less, as did still-blue college towns and LDS