In a recent New York Times deep dive, David Shor, a data scientist from the Democratic-leaning consulting firm Blue Rose Research, just dropped some hard-hitting facts about the 2024 election and why Democrats lost.
Shor’s analysis – backed by his firm’s autopsy of voter shifts during the last election – validate many of the longstanding demographic shifts Americans for Limited Government Foundation has warned about among young, minority, and independent voters.
For many Democrats, Harris’ crushing loss in 2024 was inexplicable. As Ezra Klein noted, “I’ve been spending some time recently with top Democrats as they think about how to rebuild after the 2024 loss. And in the 20-some years I’ve been covering politics, I have never heard Democrats so confused: about who they are — aside from their opposition to Donald Trump — as well as how and why they lost.”
Shor’s firm is still crunching the data, but they do have 26 million survey respondents from 8 million people combined with election results at the county and precinct-level that have begun to paint a picture of what went wrong for Democrats in 2024.
The largest takeaway from Shor’s research – which is a finding Americans for Limited Government Foundation has been hammering home for years – is that a great number of new Trump supporters have come from outside the typical GOP tent.
Young voters – especially men – moderate Hispanics and Blacks, and voters who skip the nightly news and get their information from decentralized sources contributed significantly to President Donald Trump’s win in 2024.
Shor’s data shows that white voters didn’t form the bulk of the swing toward Trump – they largely supported him in 2016 and 2024 alike. The shift between elections was most pronounced among minority voters who are becoming a part of Trump’s coalition.
Shor’s numbers speak for themselves, paining a deep deficit for Democrats among moderate minority voters. Democrats experienced a staggering twenty-three-point decline in support from moderate Hispanics between the 2016 election and the 2024 election. While Shor estimates that in 2016 Hillary Clinton won a sweeping 81 percent of moderate Hispanic voters, Biden won just 70 percent, and Harris clocked in at a meager 58 percent among moderate Hispanics.
Shor’s data shows an eight-point decline among even liberal Hispanic voters for Democrats between 2016 and 2020, and a seventeen-point decline for Democrats among conservative Hispanics. But as the data indicates, the largest decline for Democrats occurred among moderate Hispanics.
While the decline for Democrats among moderate and conservative Black voters was less pronounced than the plummeting Hispanic numbers, those groups shifted away from Democrats too. Shor estimates that Democrats suffered a three-point decline among moderate black voters and an eight-point decline among conservative Black voters between 2016 and 2024. Moderate Asian voters shifted eleven points away from Democrats, and conservative Asians shifted eight points away from Democrats.
This steep decline for Democrats – especially Hispanic moderates – shatters the left-wing narrative that Trump appeals broadly to “racist” whites. As Shor stated in interpreting his firm’s data, “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”.
So, racial depolarization was a large piece of the puzzle or put another way – minorities saw value to Trump’s working-class America First message and responded accordingly to elect him.
Another takeaway from Shor’s data is related to the youth vote, which we know President Trump made great strides with between 2020 and 2024. While the gender gap for voters over age 40 is relatively stable and consistent, with Democrats earning around ten percentage points higher support from women than from men, the gender gap for young voters swells to nearly twenty percentage points, according to Shor’s research. In commentary Shor stated that the gender gap has exploded among Gen Z. “Eighteen-year-old men were 23 percentage points more likely to support Donald Trump than 18-year-old women, which is just completely unprecedented in American politics”, Shor stated.
Interestingly, Shor’s data also shows that Americans who tend to get their news from TikTok – a group which skews younger and less politically engaged than those who get their news from Broadcast TV or other online hubs – were more likely to swing toward Trump between 2020 and 2024. Users who singled out TikTok as their main source of news swung nearly six points away from Democrats between 2020 and 2024, according to Shor’s data.
The political parties are shifting and realigning based on modern principles – and a great many young and minority voters see the new populist coalition within the Republican Party as a safer home for independent thought, America First values, and building a robust middle-class. The increasingly out-of-touch Democratic Party is further isolating itself from moderates, minorities, and younger voters, a trend that once set in motion will be very difficult to reverse.
Manzanita Miller is the senior political analyst at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
Reproduced with permission. Original here: Moderate Hispanics, Young Men, and TikTok – Surprising Takeaways From a Democratic Pollster on Why Trump Won
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