Derek shares his big-picture theory for Trump’s victory. Then, Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson explains how Trump shifted practically the entire electorate to the right.
Links:
Derek’s article that inspired his open:
“How Donald Trump Won Everywhere”
The Washington Post voter shift map:
“Analysis | How counties are shifting in the 2024 presidential election”
The graveyard of the incumbents:
“Democrats join 2024’s graveyard of incumbents”
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
In the excerpt below, Derek and Kristen Soltis Anderson discuss the results of the 2024 presidential election, as well as America’s apparent red shift and how the results defy a simple demographic explanation.
Derek Thompson: So I just took up a bunch of oxygen in my open explaining what I think happened on Tuesday night. You are not only closer to the ground in terms of understanding the polls and how to read them, you also published an article in The New York Times the week before the election sticking out your neck a bit and explaining why you thought Trump had a better-than-even chance to win. So I think the way we should start here is that I should shut up and give you the floor.
Tell me two things off the bat: One, what did you see before the election that made you think this was leaning toward Trump? And two, looking at the map at the most macro level, what strikes you most intensely about the returns as we understand them today?
Kristen Soltis Anderson: So I don’t want to take too much credit because I really was adamant that I did not want to make a prediction. Anytime friends would text me and say, “What’s your gut say?” I’m like, “My gut is not a process. I’m not responding to this text.” But in some of our polling, we found Trump doing better than expected. In Pennsylvania, we showed the battlegrounds perhaps a little closer than some of the other major media polls had shown. And I think part of that was that we were really showing men swinging pretty heavily toward Donald Trump. We were showing that the gender gap cut both ways. We were showing Donald Trump consolidating more support among voters who are not white, particularly Latino voters.
And if those trends came to pass, and if Donald Trump was adding more Latino voters, more non-college-educated voters, more men, even at the same time that he might have been losing more educated voters, these sort of upscale suburban voters, the math just in terms of what these battleground states looks like, was going to be favorable to him.
The other thing that I think was an interesting hint for us: We asked a question in our last poll, “Who do you think your neighbors are voting for?” And this one has been bandied about as a potential way to detect a shy Trump or shy Harris vote. And you may recall there were ads run trying to make the case that there’s going to be this shy Harris voter. That there’s this woman who owns a Republican sparkly MAGA hat, and she’s going to walk into the voting booth, but—wink, wink—she’s going to vote for Harris. And it turned out that instead, the voter that was shy was the woman whose book club was going to go knock on doors for Harris over the weekend and she said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m so busy.” Because she was voting for Trump.
And so in our polling, we found by an 11-point margin people were more likely to say they thought Trump was going to win over their neighbors. Side note: There is a guy who made $50 million betting on Polymarket because he was doing his own private surveys asking that kind of question and finding that same thing. He bet on Trump because of that. So I don’t want to take a big victory lap here, but I do think that the vibes were moving toward Harris at the end, but it was all based on data points that, to me, didn’t seem terribly credible, or it was harder to weave that narrative together.
Thompson: What struck you most intensely about the return? Let’s keep it at the macro level first, then we can dive into some demographic specifics. But what was the most surprising takeaway from Tuesday night for you?
Soltis Anderson: I think when we look at analyzing elections, we’re always looking for interesting nuggets that say, “Ah, this thing explains it, that thing explains it, the gender gap grew, et cetera, et cetera.”
What was notable about this election is you can’t say, “Ah, it was men that did it.” Or, “Oh, it was this voter group or that voter group that did it.” Everywhere moved right. Trumpy counties moved right. Biden counties moved right. Cities moved right. Suburbs moved right. Places that are very white moved right. Places that are super diverse moved right. If you look at The New York Times’ map of how much did each county swing, I mean, really, Washington state didn’t move, but I mean almost everywhere else in the country, there were these really seismic shifts to the right. And it’s not explainable by any one individual demographic group.
Thompson: I’ve been telling a demographic story for the last year, and I understand that it’s probably too early to validate any of those theories. For example, I’ve been talking to people like Richard Reeves about the fact that it seems like men in particular, young men in particular, young non-white men, seem to be moving right. Do we know enough to say anything demographically, like, it seems like Hispanics shifted right more than other groups, it seems like the rightward shift that you just described as being essentially national was led by men rather than women, or educated voters rather than non-educated voters? Is there anything we can say for sure about the demographics of this shift yet or do we just have to wait for higher quality exit polling?
Soltis Anderson: Well, if we’re looking at the exit polls that we have now, which as you noted are imperfect, they get refined as more and more ballots get counted and we know that there’s still lots of ballots outstanding in places like California. But with the imperfect data we have now, it looks like men and women both shifted toward Trump. But the shift toward Trump among men was pretty extraordinary, and especially among younger men. If you look at the exit polls, you find that men under the age of 45 outright voted for Donald Trump. And young women, that was another group that I think people really thought, there’s no way they’ll move. They moved too. I mean, younger voters seem to move much more than seniors.
Seniors, oddly enough, didn’t actually move that much at all. They were a very slightly Trump-leaning group. I suspect when we get higher quality data, we will actually see that senior women voted for Kamala Harris. That was the one thing that was the big narrative over the pre-election weekend, “Ann Selzer’s poll in Iowa shows that senior citizen women are breaking for Harris in huge numbers.” I actually think when the dust settles you will find that senior citizen women broke for Kamala Harris, and maybe even by double-digit margins. But it was so overwhelmed by this sea change we saw among Gen Z voters, particularly Gen Z men and particularly Latino men. When you look at the demographic divides between Latino voters by gender, you see that outright Trump won Latino men by 12 points in the exit polls. And Latino women swung, I think, 17 points on the margin toward Trump too. They still voted more for Harris.
But it is hard to tell a story that is just focused on one demographic because when you scan through the exit polls, it’s just like, oh, this group did and this group did, and this group did. I think younger voters and Latino voters are the most interesting story. But you also had Trump winning white suburban women. I mean, there’s just so many things that defied the pre-election narrative and defy a simple demographic explanation.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Kristen Soltis Anderson
Producer: Devon Renaldo
Subscribe: Spotify
