From the Center

While Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris last week was not widely predicted, his success in a race that was considered to be a dead heat was not all that shocking. The real surprise was the size and scope of his triumph: Trump won all seven of the key swing states, became the first Republican presidential candidate to win a popular vote majority in 20 years and the most electoral votes of any Republican since the end of the Cold War. 

His party also retook the Senate majority by a comfortable margin and appears on track to retaining control of the House of Representatives. It may represent the most impactful political realignment in this country since Ronald Reagan’s first election in 1980.

Books will be written about how Trump, who was running far behind Ron DeSantis in his own party’s polling two years ago, managed to achieve both such an extraordinary comeback and monumental victory. After every election, there are mountains of polling data through which to sift. But in the first days after this year’s voting concluded, there are three especially striking findings that stand out about how this may have happened.

1. Trump won a majority of the Latino male vote. This is why: I wrote in this space last week that if Harris won, the Trump campaign’s strategy of targeting young working class men would be widely second-guessed. But it worked. Trump’s efforts to turn out low-propensity men who had not attended college flipped that voting group from supporting Joe Biden by 15 points in 2020 to backing Trump by almost an identical margin this year.

These young men are frustrated at their lack of economic prospects, and they channeled their resentment to the candidate who they believed would respond to their anger. Trump’s message of tax cuts and tariffs was of such great appeal to them that it helped erase some of the racial and ethnic divisions that have defined U.S. politics for decades. Trump won almost one quarter of the black male vote and a majority of Latino men, a direct result of his support among the youngest voters in those communities.

2. Pro-choice voters divided their votes evenly between Trump and Harris. She couldn’t recover: Among the almost 2/3 of voters who believe that abortion should be legal in all or some cases, the two candidates were absolutely tied. That means that almost one-quarter of the nation’s pro-choice voters cast ballots for Trump, deciding that their differences with him on that issue were not as important as their feelings on issues such as inflation, the border and crime. 

The Democrats achieved great success in the 2022 midterm elections just after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs Wade earlier that year, which led them to believe that abortion could be a similarly defining issue for them in the presidential campaign. But while large majorities of Americans agree with them on the need to legally protect abortion in this country, Trump’s efforts to blur the difference between Harris and himself had the desired effect. The waves of pro-choice voters who Democrats believed would decide the election did turn out: they just didn’t vote in the way they’d been expected.

3. Voters didn’t like Trump, but they didn’t know Harris. There’s no question that 107 days is not enough time for a presidential candidate to develop a strong and trusting relationship with the American people. The timing of Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race put Harris in an extremely difficult position, giving her an almost-impossibly small window through which to communicate to prospective supporters. 

But Harris’ innate caution may have made the situation even more problematic. She did no sit-down interviews with mainstream media for the first month of her campaign, shrinking that messaging window even more. She never clearly articulated how and when she disagreed with Biden, and seemed to see media opportunities more as an ordeal to survive than the chance to advance an argument. Three-and-a-half months isn’t a long time for a presidential campaign to break through, but running like an incumbent with a comfortable lead made it even less likely that she would break through.

One week before the election, one-fourth of the electorate said they didn’t know enough about Harris’ economic agenda. So they turned to her opponent, who, despite whose numerous flaws, had told them clearly what he wanted to do.

Want to talk about this topic more? Join Dan for his webinar, “The Dan Schnur Political Report." And read more of Dan’s writing at www.danschnurpolitics.com.

Dan Schnur is a Professor at the University of California – Berkeley, Pepperdine University, and the University of Southern California, where he teaches courses in politics, communications and leadership. Dan is a No Party Preference voter, but previously worked on four presidential and three gubernatorial campaigns, serving as the national Director of Communications for the 2000 presidential campaign of U.S. Senator John McCain and the chief media spokesman for California Governor Pete Wilson. He has a Center bias.

This piece was reviewed and edited by Clare Ashcraft, Bridging Coordinator & Media Analyst (Center bias).