While the Democratic Party seems to be lost on a deranged wilderness journey at the moment, some of their leading data gurus are trying to piece together a reliable picture of why Donald Trump won and Kamala Harris lost. To their shock and alarm, it turns out that some of the ironclad truths they thought they knew about American politics no longer apply. David Shor -- one of these smart lefties, who was quasi-'canceled' in 2020 for suggesting lawless rioting was unhelpful to the Democrats -- did a deep dive into a vast trove of data. In a podcast conversation with fellow 'progressive' wonk Ezra Klein, he identified several trends and pieces of statistical evidence that explain the 2024 election's outcomes. Some of this is retreading ground we've covered, but the complete picture is even more stark. A few points stand out:
(1) Democrats lost support among people of color, part of a clear move away from the Left by working class people: "In 2016, Democrats received 81 percent of the Hispanic moderate vote, while in 2024 they received 58 percent. That’s only 6 percent more than the 52 percent of white moderates that they received in 2024. The main story here is just a continuation of the trends that we saw four years ago. Throughout the entire Trump campaign, we’ve observed this racial depolarization," he said. Some additional points on this:
The most important political trend of the last 30 to 40 years, both here and in every other country in the world — at least in Western countries with elections — has been this story of education polarization. Basically, we’ve seen highly educated people move to the left, while working-class people have moved to the right...the Democratic Party used to be a coalition between liberals, moderates and conservatives. And as liberals became the dominant coalition partner, it makes sense that the conservatives and moderates in the coalition — who were disproportionately nonwhite, given that this ideological polarization happened among whites 20 or 30 years ago — would start to shift.
(2) Less engaged and non-voters skewed more pro-Trump. Indeed, if all eligible voters had shown up and participated, Trump would have won the election by a greater margin:
In 2020, according to [NYT] data, people who didn’t vote would have been a little bit more Democratic than the country overall had they voted. But over the next four years, people who didn’t vote shifted from being a somewhat Democratic-leaning group to a group that Trump won by double digits...The story of this election is that people who follow the news closely, get their information from traditional media and see politics as an important part of their identity became more Democratic in absolute terms. Meanwhile, those who don’t follow politics closely became much more Republican...It’s not just that the New York Times readers are more liberal than the overall population — that’s definitely true. It’s that they’re more liberal than they were four years ago — even though the country went the other way. And so there’s this great political divergence between people who consume all the news sources that we know about and read about versus the people who don’t. As a result of these changes, we’re seeing the reversal of a decades-long truism in American politics. For a long time, Democrats have said, and it’s been true, that if everyone votes, we win and that higher turnout is good for Democrats. But this is the first cycle where that definitively became the opposite.
"If only people who had voted in 2022 had voted, Harris would have won the popular vote and also the Electoral College fairly easily. But if everyone had voted, Trump would have won the popular vote by nearly five points," Shor said. This is a massive sea change in our political conventional wisdom. If it holds, it could continue to benefit Democrats in lower-turnout elections, while hurting them in the Big Game eletions. Klein asked Shor about the theory among some Democrats that their voters stayed home, so the party didn't really lose to Trump, so much as they lost to 'the couch,' so to speak. Shor swatted that down: "It’s just not empirically correct, I would say. If you just look at the demographics of the people who voted for Biden last time and stayed home this time, they’re generally less educated, fairly politically disengaged and much less likely to watch MSNBC and more likely to watch Fox. Frankly, they resemble the voters who trended away from us." Klein followed up, asking, "so if you had forced them out to vote, they may have just voted for Donald Trump?" Exactly, Shor responded.
(3) Trump won immigrants, another tectonic shift. Given how Democrats have spoken about immigration for years, and demonized Trump on that front, there's not much to be added to this:
There’s a very clear correlation between how many immigrants there were in a county and how much Trump’s vote share increased. In counties like Queens, N. Y., or Miami-Dade, Fla., Trump increased his vote share by 10 percentage points, which is just crazy...When we look at the precinct election results, we see that in immigrant communities of all races — particularly Hispanic and Asian communities. But Trump even increased his vote share in Haitian precincts in Florida. Our best guess is that immigrants went from being a Biden plus-27 group in 2020 to a group that Trump narrowly won in 2024. This group of naturalized citizens makes up roughly 10 percent of the electorate...our best guess is that [immigrants] swung 23 percentage points against the Democratic Party...In the battleground states, Trump’s vote share swung by maybe half a percentage point, or one percentage point, and that was enough for him to win. But if you look at the four biggest states where immigrants are concentrated, New York, California, Texas — Trump did extremely well. It wasn’t very efficient for him, but in terms of people changing their mind, it was a massive percentage of the story.
(4) The youngest voters are swinging right, and the youngest male voters are swinging very right. Read this, then re-read this:
This from @davidshor stopped me in my tracks this morning. pic.twitter.com/Xgw9yPTlob
— tré easton (@treeaston) March 18, 2025
Referring to a chart tracking Kamala Harris’ support by age, race and gender, "one thing you can notice is that among 18-year-olds, women of color are the only of the four that Harris won. Trump narrowly won nonwhite men." Trump won white men, white women, and non-white men among the very youngest voters in 2024. Only nonwhite women went for Harris. Astounding. Shor admits to being stunned: "This is the thing I am the most shocked by in the last four years — that young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the baby boomers, and maybe even in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years." He also noted that the gender gap has widened in a major way among young people, not just in the US, but in Western politics broadly. I'll leave you with this back and forth between Klein and Shor:
KLEIN: Democrats are getting destroyed now among young voters. I do think that, even as the idea of the rising demographic Democratic majority became a little discredited in 2016 and 2020, Democrats believed that these young voters were eventually going to save them. They thought that this was a last gasp of something and that if Donald Trump couldn’t run up his numbers among seniors and you had millennials and Gen Z really coming into voting power, that would be the end of this Republican Party. That is just completely false, and it might be the beginning of this Republican Party.
SHOR: I have to admit, I was one of those liberals four years ago, and it seems I was wrong. The future has a way of surprising us. The flip side of this is that Democrats made a bunch of gains among older voters, and I’m sure that they’ll be happy that they did that two years from now, in the midterms. But if we don’t do anything about this, then this problem could become very bad.
Republicans should not get over-confident over all of this. Things change and pendulums swing, sometimes quickly, as this data represents. Especially if people don't feel the economy tangibly improving over the next year or so, fortunes could reverse rapidly. Nothing is permanent. But Democrats have a real problem here, and based on their own unglued extremism and frantic incoherence, they're not on a path to rapid recovery.
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