The Democratic base is a shifting concept.
Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/The Washington Post via Getty Images
What actually happened in 2024?
We are many months removed from the hottest of takes, and talk of the presidential election almost seems passé — unless you are revisiting Joe Biden’s physical and mental collapse. The clash between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is old news. Trump won, Harris lost, and MAGA now reigns. There is so much chaos emanating from the Trump White House each day that picking through 2024 data in any serious manner can feel like a fool’s errand.
But it’s important, still, to know what happened and why — for both the political parties and our democracy broadly. Catalist, the Democratic research firm, has released its expansive study of 2024, and it’s far more accurate and lengthy than the various exit polls dumped out in the aftermath of November. Through Catalist, the election can be properly understood. And its study contains both self-evident truths and genuine surprises for those who regularly take stock of American political currents. (Intelligencer’s Ed Kilgore has written about some trends around voter participation in the report, but it’s a data-rich survey that yields many additional insights.)
Trump won for a variety of reasons. He made far greater gains with men than women, widening the gender gap by a full 9 percent. A significant share of young voters swung to the right, with voters under age 30 dropping from 61 percent Democratic support in 2020 to 55 percent in 2024. The urban-rural divide is large, but Democrats bled out more support, relatively speaking, in big cities than small towns. If non-white voters still support Democrats in far greater numbers than Republicans, there has now been a decline in Black, Latino, and Asian backing for Democrats in three straight elections. Young men in particular gravitated to Trump, with support among young Black men dropping from 85 percent to 75 percent, and backing among young Latino men plummeting from 63 percent to 47 percent. At the same time, white college-educated voters backed Democrats at a slightly lower rate in 2024 than 2020, dipping from 54 percent to 51 percent.
What to make of all of this? The 2024 cycle, overall, was not necessarily devastating for Democrats or an enormous triumph for Republicans, but there’s enough evidence now to suggest that the “demographics is destiny” arguments touted by giddy, Obama-era Democrats in the 2000s aren’t coming to pass. Black, Latino, and Asian voters aren’t guaranteed Democratic voters, even though they were bedrocks of the Obama coalition. Turnout surges also don’t uniquely benefit Democrats anymore: The overall 64 percent turnout in 2024 was very high by historical standards, nearly matching 2020-level turnout, and Trump managed a popular-vote victory. A decade ago, it was believed that whenever turnout rose, Democrats almost automatically won.
If Republicans can find much to like in the Catalist data, there are warning signs for future elections. Younger voters, men, voters of color, and infrequent voters all drifted toward Trump, but we don’t know yet if other Republicans will be able to count on the same coalition. Just as Hillary Clinton, Biden, and Harris could not sustain the full breadth and depth of the Obama coalition, it’s plausible that Trump successors like J.D. Vance could struggle to engage the voters who don’t care as much about politics. Trump is a megacelebrity and singularly charismatic; he is a politician many voters, men especially, can be a fan of. Can the same be said of Vance or any future GOP contender? Harris performed best with voters who consistently participate in elections, and that bodes well for the midterms in 2026. Trump’s voters are less likely to show up when he’s not on the ballot, and it’s possible that an engaged electorate, combined with growing backlash against Trump’s policies, could trigger a blue wave in the House.
“Demographics are not destiny,” the report reads. “Campaigns, parties, and voter outreach organizations marshal resources to try to build winning coalitions across geographies and demographic groups.” This is a boring point, but one that remains quite true. Neither political party can be especially self-satisfied heading into the next presidential election. The Trump coalition is no more stable than Obama’s and could collapse under different circumstances. Democrats, meanwhile, really do have to sweat culturally conservative non-white voters remaining Republicans for life. The days of running up enormous margins among Catholic Latinos in the Rio Grande are over. Democratic campaigns, in general, can’t take non-white voters for granted, or hope that racking up celebrity endorsements will be enough. We saw that Bad Bunny backing Harris didn’t send Puerto Ricans in droves to her campaign. Beyoncé wasn’t boosting Black Democratic turnout, either.
For now, Democrats might enjoy a slight edge because Trump is less popular than he was in January. His tariff policies could fuel inflation, and interest rates remain high. Americans, in general, are pessimistic about the economy, and the Republicans can’t blame it on Biden anymore. DOGE, from a politics standpoint, was a disaster, and Republicans couldn’t get Elon Musk out of the White House fast enough. A 2026 message for Democrats is taking shape: Protect health care, lower the cost of living, and save the government from the arsonists. If it’s not yet enough, maybe, for a presidential election, it can, at the very minimum, make Hakeem Jeffries the next Speaker of the House.
