12 thoughts on how Trump won

Who voted for him and did he forge a new multi-racial coalition?

Okay, we are starting to have more data to break down how and why Trump was able to win a second term. In this post I’m going to dive into what this data can tell us about which people voted for Trump (lots of different types), how the Harris campaign performed (actually pretty well), and whether it’s true that Trump has put together a new multi-racial coalition (only somewhat, maybe). I’ll also explain why the coalition that Trump put together in this election is fragile.

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Let’s do this in bullet points:

1. The first thing you can say about Trump’s victory is that it was due to a pretty uniform shift to the right across the nation. He improved in urban counties by about 5.6%, in suburban counties by about 4.5%, and in rural counties by about 4%. His slightly greater improvement in cities and suburbs is probably due to the fact he had more room to grow there, and because they saw more inflation over the last four years. Many rural areas were already so red that they were basically tapped out of new voters for him to win over.

2. As I discussed previously, this kind of fairly uniform swing is indicative of an election in which the issue is general malaise among the electorate. Now that we have more information, it actually looks like the Harris campaign did a pretty good job of swimming against the tide. In the states in which it actively campaigned, the swing to the right was somewhere between 3 and 5% less than the national average. Campaign professionals will sometimes tell you they only expect a campaign to move a race by something like 1%, so that’s a good performance. It just wasn’t enough.

3. There was also an ominous sign for Republicans in this election: Trump’s winning coalition is not at all well-distributed for an Electoral College win, which could mean an erosion or even reversal of the pro-Republican bias in the Electoral College. Let me explain why.