The NPR Politics Podcast - Roundup: Demographics, Voter Trends, & Political Alignment

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

Republicans gained among voting groups largely seen as part of the Democratic base. What's behind the shift, and is it a fluke or a realignment? This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, voting correspondent Miles Parks, political reporter Elena Moore, and senior political editor & correspondent Domenico Montanaro.The podcast is produced by Jeongyoon Han and Kelli Wessinger, and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Amy and I'm here with my family at Hobbiton in New Zealand. I'm about to go have a pint at the Green Dragon. This podcast was recorded at 1237 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, November 22nd. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I will still be waiting for some dwarves to invite me on a quest to find some gold. This is so exciting. Kelly, our producer, said she was going to give me a Lord of the Rings timestamp at some point down the road and I've just been waiting for it. It finally happened. Let's go.

That's pretty cool. Hey there. It's the NPR politics podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. More than two weeks after Election Day, we are still learning about exactly what happened and it is challenging some early assumptions. Today on the show, voter turnout and demographics. Domenico, with almost all of the votes now counted, can I just ask, was this a red wave up and down the ballot? You know, How big was Trump's win in the end?

Clearly Donald Trump was able to sweep the seven big states that everyone had been talking about. He won them by a little bit wider margins than the polls had indicated coming in. So he clearly had a sweep in a time when we're hyper polarized and partisanship is very deep and we're very divided. He was able to win and it looks like he'll be close to a majority of the votes, which he's never been before to win the popular vote. So when it comes to Trump, that's about as good as he could have hoped for. Now, when you look further down the ballot, it wasn't necessarily the case because it looks like Democrats will probably pick up

one seat in the House, which means everything is basically as it was. Lauren Henry And Miles, you have been paying particular attention to voter turnout. What are you seeing there? Miles O'Brien Well, so this was a really high turnout election by historical standards. It was down slightly from 2020, but 2020 was the highest turnout election in modern history, whereas the 2024 election was the third highest in the last hundred years, which is really interesting to me because Donald Trump, as Domenico mentioned, did sweep.

Republicans have control of the House and the Senate and win control of the presidency. And that really contradicts what had been kind of conventional political wisdom, that in high turnout elections, that would inherently favor Democrats. That has turned out to not necessarily be the case. Yeah. And I think it's interesting because the Trump campaign when we'd been talking to them throughout this year had made the argument that because these low propensity voters who are part of his base, white voters without college degrees in particular, people who don't necessarily

always show up to turnout in elections, some people would say, well, don't focus on those voters because if you do, know you might be wasting millions of dollars and they're not gonna vote anyway. Well, what happened was they gambled on those low-propensity voters. They turned them out with the message that Trump had. There's a lot of them in the country obviously and that's exactly what happened. I mean Trump won by a record share in the rural areas for example. The exit polls showed he won 64% in rural areas breaking his record from 2016 of 61%

So, you know, he was able to turn out a lot of the people who were open his message and a lot of them first-time voters So are we seeing a change in the way we've been thinking about elections all along, you know, traditionally we thought High turnout favors democrats low turnout favors Republicans because Republicans are reliable voters. But in 2022, Democrats overperformed in a lower turnout election. And now in this election, President Trump did very well. So is the answer here not about high turnout, low turnout, but whether Trump is on the ballot? You know, he may be a unique figure in American politics.

You know, what we saw in the Senate races, for example, a lot of people thought maybe we saw some ticket splitting because we saw the Democratic candidate wound up winning, but Harris wound up losing. Was that because we had Republican voters who were voting for Trump and then voting for Democratic Senate candidates? No, in fact, when I talked to our pollster, Lee Murinoff, he coined this phrase called bullet voting, where it seems that people

went into the ballot, voted for Donald Trump at the top of the ticket, and left everything else blank because we saw a lot of Republican candidates actually underperform what Trump got. So, Donald Trump may very well be a unique candidate, a unique figure in American history, and it's going to be a real test for whoever winds up being on the ballot in 2028 for Republicans to be able to hold the same voters, that same coalition together, because we are in the middle of a political realignment where we've seen white voters without college degrees move in big numbers, working class voters moving big numbers toward Republicans. And we've seen voters who make over $100,000 a year and have hired educations move toward Democrats. Is that the kind of thing that's going to hold with Trump off the ballot? We don't know.

When you're in the middle of a political realignment, there's a lot of volatility and we're going to see where things settle in the next election. I do think that's an important point that, I mean, the whole thing about political truisms is like they're only true until they're not anymore. And I think that was always a little frustrating to the people I talked to who study voting. And there was always this idea that high turnout favors Democrats. That is not something that is set in stone. That is something that is based right on the low propensity voters, these voters who are traditionally less college educated, poor generally, and those voters have tended to vote Democratic. That doesn't

mean they will always vote that way, right? And so as political trends change, all of this stuff is still gonna be up in the air. And I think that is like an important point to make. These trends will only stay true if those trends stay true as well. But Miles, you have been doing reporting on what this means downstream,

which is what does it mean for the approach that the parties have taken to voting or to making voting more accessible? A lot of Republican policies over the last many years have been about election security, about requiring voter ID, in essence making it harder to vote. And at least in part that had to have been based on the idea that higher turnout favored Democrats. Absolutely. And that is not an uns had to have been based on the idea that higher turnout favored Democrats. Absolutely. And that is not an unspoken thing really anymore. I mean, all of these policies have been in the name of election security. But as I've talked to Republicans over the

years and you know, we heard this in 2020 where Donald Trump did say explicitly he thought that higher turnout elections would hurt Republican candidates. But I was also talking to the former Republican Secretary of State of Alabama. This is a very conservative man, his name's John Merrill. And when he got into office a few years ago, he told me that he would have conversations where he would talk about wanting to register new voters. And he was met with outright skepticism

from other Republicans. They tell me, I don't like that. I don't think it's a good thing. I'm like, why would you say that? And they're like, because you're going to get more blacks and you're going to get more Democrats. Again, it's not usually said out loud exactly that explicitly, but that has been the kind of subtext for a lot of this policy. I have no idea how that's going to change now that

as Domenico mentioned, low propensity voters, these are the kinds of voters who research has found to be most helped by policies that make voting easier are low propensity voters, these are the kinds of voters who research has found to be most helped by policies that make voting easier are low propensity voters. The high propensity voters are gonna vote no matter what the rules are, but if the rules are more accessible, that's really gonna help those low propensity voters. And those voters really turned out for Trump this time around. Well, and Trump and Republicans worked really hard to get those voters registered. Yeah, they absolutely did. I mean, when you talk to the Trump campaign throughout the year, you know, they were focused on what's known as zeros, ones, they absolutely did. I mean, when you talk to the Trump campaign throughout the year, you know, they were focused

on what's known as zeros, ones, and twos. Their campaigns rank us zero to five based on how likely we are to vote. If you voted in every election and voted the same way, if you vote a Republican every single time in every election, including midterms and special elections, believe me, you're a five, and they're gonna try to bank your vote early.

If you're a zero, one, or two, those were voters who in the past, a lot of the campaigns may have given up on to say that those folks just weren't worth the money. And this time around the Trump campaign worked really, really hard to get those zeros, ones and twos out. They gambled and it paid off for them. Miles, do you see any policy changes as a result of this shift or is it too soon? It's too soon right now. But as I talked to people the last couple of weeks, that's the question I've been asking, is like,

is the Republican Party just for self-preservation going to change their tune on some of this access stuff? And I was really struck by something Charles Stewart, who's a voting expert at MIT, told me. And he basically said, it's helpful to think of the Republican Party in different factions. He was like the mainstream sort of what he called the consultant or strategist wing of the Republican party. They have already started embracing this stuff.

You saw this with how the campaigns embraced vote by mail and early voting this time around in a way they didn't in 2020. But what he said is that the Trump right, the MAGA right, they're going to struggle a lot more with some of this access policy stuff because it contradicts ideologically with a lot of their positions. Just this general sense that widening the electorate, widening demographics is going to conflict with a lot of their kind of long held beliefs, which I thought was really interesting. We are going to continue that conversation in a second, but first we have to say goodbye to Miles. Thank you, Miles.

Bye guys. Thank you. All right. We will be right back after a quick break. And we're back and NPR's Elena Moore is with us. Hi, Elena. Hey, Tam. So you and Domenico have been digging into the demographics of how people voted in 2024.

And for a long time, though maybe not that recently, Democrats talked about demographics being destiny, that as the country gets younger and more diverse, their vote share would increase. But clearly that did not happen in 2024. Alaina, you spent this year focused a lot on new and young voters. So let's start with what happened with them. Yeah. I mean, well, the biggest headline there is that Trump just won a larger share of voters under 30, both nationwide and in a ton of these swing states that we all have memorized in

our brain and will just live there forever, you know, and these weren't small movements. These are like double digit margin shifts towards the Republican Party, towards Trump, compared to 2020. And this is all based off exit polling, where on election day, thousands of people are surveyed. We used Edison research for some of this. An example of how drastic the shift was for young voters is in a place like Michigan. Trump won young voters in Michigan. Wow. That is in itself shocking.

He won them by a small margin, three points. But from our perspective, four years ago, Joe Biden won that group by more than 20 points. And these are the kind of examples that we saw in lots of states. That's the most drastic, but especially in these blue wall, formerly blue wall states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, these, this key voting block that helped, you know, get Joe Biden elected four years ago, really did not show up in the same capacity for Kamala Harris. Yeah, I know the Harris campaign on election night and in the lead up to it was like, oh, but we've got lines at college campuses. This is great. We're going to hit our numbers.

And I guess they hit the number of young voters they were expecting, but the result was definitely not what they were expecting. Kite Hickman You know, exit polls are not turnout numbers, but they do show approximate share of the electorate. And honestly, younger voters didn't really drastically change that much as the share of the electorate in a lot of these swing states, with the exception of maybe like Nevada, where it dropped closer to five points, which is solid. We will have to see as we look more into county levels and precinct levels to see how things might have changed.

But overall, this chunk of the vote was still a young vote. It just went more split. And let's talk about some other parts of what we would think of as the Democratic base or maybe the Obama version of the Democratic base. Black voters, Latino voters, Asian American voters, they all trended away from Democrats as well. Do we know why? I mean, I think it's a few things, right? I think as Domenico and yourself, you both talked about this, there may have been an issue disconnect here. I mean, we know economic and immigration issues were a huge, huge topic for people all across the country of all different backgrounds, and it drove their votes. And exit polling kind of backed that up. We saw that voters nationwide trusted Trump at higher rates to handle both of those

issues and even on the issue of abortion, which we know Harris really leaned into especially with black and brown voters, especially with young voters. She won trust on abortion just 49 to 45 in nationwide exit polls. And that's like, I think really striking because I think when you look at these big shifts, you know, Latino voters in almost every swing state really, really shifted away from Democrats. Some pretty large drops with Asian voters too in some states. For black voters, it was a little bit more consistent, but in a state like Wisconsin, a key state Harris needed to win, there were huge drops.

And I think you have to link some of that to a policy disconnect, not a candidate, a policy disconnect, not a candidate, a policy disconnect. Yeah, one thing that caught my eye was the shift among Asian American voters, especially in Nevada. Domenico, can you walk us through that? Yeah, I mean, you know, I think Nevada is a great place to highlight because Asian Americans make up about 9% of the eligible voting population. This time, they weren't that high.

They were only about 4% of the share of the electorate. However it's like a boomerang when you look at our graphic on this. In 2016 Democrats won Asian American voters by 26 points. In 2020 Democrats won them by 29 points. This time around, drumroll, Donald Trump won them by 23 points. I mean, that's a 52 point swing in one election. Now look, these exit polls, like all polls, have margins of error, but a 52 point swing is definitely outside the margin of error. And I think it has to tell something to Democrats about what their messaging has been to groups that have voted for them in the past and this time around apparently we're not you know fired up to go vote for them. An interesting thing about the story Domenico and I did was

we didn't just look at 2020 to 2024 we looked back all the way to 2008 and the key in 2008 like you said Tam is it was really 2008, 2012, like we saw this base really, really come out for Barack Obama, young voters, voters of color. And the interesting thing about tracking these changes is we saw these gradual trends continue, like with Latino voters moving farther away from the Democratic Party, but it also highlights how stark some of these shifts were to 2024. in fact like to Trump's messaging in some ways

Right, like you see the gradual Latino shift, but you also see very very quick You know moves to the right among some young voters in states among some black voters in states You know, I'm saying it's more than just you know trends changing. This is a unique 2024 result in some ways. What about older voters? Where did they land? They were traditionally thought of as Republican voters. Right, exactly. I think it was really striking because in a bunch of states, older voters actually moved

farther towards the Democratic Party, actually in a majority of them, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia. And I found that really striking in part because for a lot of older folks, I'm talking about seniors, you know, those 65 and older. And for a lot of people, I mean, they've lived through these last, you know, two decades of political drama in a way that these younger voters that we've, I've spent a lot of time covering haven't I mean young people today are Really kind of split in like, you know

There's a group of young people who's there You know their first election that they could vote in was Donald Trump in 2016 and there's a group that were like 10 When Trump was elected and are voting for the first time and this younger generation has a wildly different This younger generation has a wildly different recollection of Donald Trump compared to older voters. And it's been really interesting to see how that comes into their vote. And so older voters, like younger voters, are not monoliths.

And I feel like it's just going to be the thing I keep looking at election after election. And we'll see how the second term affects everyone's views. Domenico, can I ask you the same question I asked before in the first half of the pod, which is, is this just a Trump thing or is this a Republican thing? Is this a shift that is somehow linked to him? Well, we know what the truth is in politics, that you need to have the right candidate

with the right message at the right time to be able to run and win. And what we've seen is that in this election, people were really saying that they felt that the economy wasn't very good. They weren't happy with democratic leadership. They weren't trusting Democrats on a whole range of issues. So, Kamala Harris was swimming upstream to begin with. So, I think it would have been difficult overall.

And I think it depends on what the environment is. If it was a Republican in the White House, when economic views were this bleak, then I think that it would have been a little bit more difficult for a Republican incumbent to win. So, you know, look, I think that people learn the wrong lessons out of every election. They sound real simple, and it makes it seem really easy to wrap your head around.

But in 2004, white evangelical voters came out in big numbers for George W. Bush and people were writing books about how we were headed toward a permanent red majority. Well, an economic decline and a civil war in Iraq led to Barack Obama winning and everybody saying that we were in a permanent liberal majority with a post-racial society Well, that didn't exactly happen either 2016. Obviously trump was able to win after obama was re-elected You know, so these messages continue to be wrong over and over again. I mean, you certainly didn't see generational change where they moved away from a You know a political dynasty.

You had Joe Biden, he's almost 80 years old, who ran and won in 2020, largely because of COVID and what people saw then is Trump's mishandling of it. So we don't know what the environment's gonna be in four years, and we don't know what kind of message or kind of charisma that some of these candidates will have to be able to win over these voters. So we're gonna see what happens after, settling of this political realignment.

All right, we're going to take one more break and then it's time for Can't Let It Go. And we're back. It's Friday, so it's time for Can't Let It Go, the part of the pod where we talk about the things from the week that we just cannot stop thinking about, politics or otherwise. I guess I'll go first. Thanksgiving is coming. Much cooking will happen, but there are warnings out there that we should beware of our black plastic spatulas. Have you guys heard this? No. Why? So apparently black kitchen utensils, plastic ones, may actually be made from recycled e-waste. Oh. Experts are warning that they may include concerning levels

of toxic chemicals, including flame retardants, which can leak into food during cooking. This warning was first reported by The Atlantic in late October, but now lots of outlets are picking it up. It is based on real scientific studies. Well, but as we cook for Thanksgiving, we should probably be aware of that. Honestly though, I'm not worried. There's worse things that are going to happen to me.

Domenico, what is your can't let it go? My can't let it go is I was a little surprised. I wasn't intending to watch this football game last night between the Browns and Steelers, but it was on on Thursday Night Football and it was snowing and it looked like a throwback game to the Ice Bowl days in the 1960s and they had kind of artistically, you know, shoveled the lines and they even outlined the numbers. So it was so pretty. It felt like the football version of Rockefeller Center or something.

It was really kind of cool and it felt like winter's coming in a cozy kind of way, you know? It is funny. I feel like depending on where you grow up, your relationship with snow, like I go from like singing the Home Alone John Williams soundtrack, Seeing Snow, to stepping over like black slush around New York City, which I'm sure you can both empathize with being in DC. So I feel like it's nice to see the beginning of it for sure. It's very magical.

Yeah, I'm okay watching it on TV and would rather never ever be cold again. Humbug. Alas, not going to happen. No humbug. I want to be happy in the sun. No humbug. Elena, what can't you let go of? I cannot let go of the fact that it's Wicked Day and Wicked is out and it's so exciting

because this is like one of the best musicals ever. So the movie comes out and I'm just obsessed with this very niche nerdy thing. Cynthia Arrevo who's playing, you know, the quote unquote wicked witch, she is an amazing singer. She's a long time Broadway singer. She's a longtime Broadway actress. She's a Tony Award winner. And like I am just specifically obsessed with the way that she riffs on the final note of Defying Gravity. We've

like all know this song and you can hear the original riff in the Tony performance that Idina Menzel did on CBS. Menzel did on CBS. That note is iconic. And Cynthia Erivo has made it like double iconic by like upping the like amazing chops it takes to sing that here. Listen to this. And this was her on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. My sister and I have been sending voice messages back trying to do the new Cynthia Arrevo sound because the original one like my voice cracks but I can hit the OG note.

Again, not for public use but the Cynthia Arrevo is so hard and she's amazing and I can't wait to see it and she's the goat. That's a wrap for this week. Our executive producer is Mithani Maturi, Casey Morrell edits the podcast. Our producers are Jung Yoon Han and Kelly Wessinger and thanks to Krishna Dev Kalamur. I'm Tamara Keith, I cover the White House. I'm Elena Moore, I cover politics. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.