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Hi, this is Amy, and I'm here with my family at a Hobbiton in New Zealand. I'm about to go have a pint at the Green Dragon. This podcast was recorded at 12.37 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, November 22nd. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I was still be waiting for some dwarves to invite me on a quest to find some gold.
This is so exciting. Kelli, 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 Mountain, our 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?
You know, 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 I think it was basically as it was. And Miles, you have been paying particular attention to voter turnout. What are you seeing there?
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 100 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 is turned out to not necessarily be the case. Yeah, and I think it's interesting because the Trump campaign when we've 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, then, you know, you might be wasting millions of dollars and they're not going to 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 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? 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 Mirringoff, 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 move in 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, poorer 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 going to 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 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 it 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 is John Merrill. And when he got in the 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. And 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 Dominico mentioned, low propensity voters, these are the kinds of voters who research has found to be most helpful.
by policies that make voting easier are low propensity voters. The high propensity voters are going to vote no matter what the rules are. But if the rules are more accessible, that's really going to 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 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 going to 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.
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And we're back. And in pairs, Elena Moore is with us. Hi, Elena. Hey, Tam. So you and Dominico 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. Elena, 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 we'll 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 a 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 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.
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, you know, county levels and precinct levels to see how things might have changed.
Overall, this chunk of the vote was still a young vote. It just went more split. 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, you know, exit polling kind of backed that up. You know, we saw the 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, Latino voters in almost every swing state really, really shifted away from Democrats. Some pretty large drops with Asian voters, two in some states. For black voters, it was a little bit more.
consistent, but in a state like Wisconsin, a key state here is 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. One thing that caught my eye was this 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, drum roll, 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. And 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, those 65 and older. And for a lot of people, I mean, they've lived through these last two decades of political
drama in a way that these younger voters that we've, I've spent a lot of time covering heaven. 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
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 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 Kamaharis 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 in 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. 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 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 going to 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 going to see what happens after this, you know, 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.
This week on our podcast, Here and Now Anytime, have you had a frustrating conversation about politics with someone you disagree with lately? Most Americans have, according to a Pew survey from before the election, so I'm gonna guess that number has only gone up. We're kicking off a series on Finding Common Ground, called Conversations Across the Divide. Listen now on Here and Now Anytime, wherever you get your podcasts.
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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? You know, 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, it's very magical. Yeah, I'm okay watching it on TV and would rather never ever be cold again, but alas, not gonna 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 Arevo, who's playing the quote-unquote Wicked Witch, she is an amazing singer. She's a longtime Broadway actress. She's a Tony Award winner. And I am just specifically obsessed with the way that she riffs on the final note of Defying Gravity. We all know this song, and you can hear the original riff in the Tony performance that Adina Menzel did on CBS.
That note is iconic, and Cynthia Arevo 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 Rivo sound because the original one like my voice cracks, but I can I can hit the OG note. Not again, not for public use, but the Cynthia Rivo is it's 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 Muthani Maturi, Casey Morelle. And it's the podcast.
Our producers are Jung Yoon Han and Kelly Wesinger, and thanks to Krishnadev Kalimer. I'm Tamara Keith, I cover the White House. I'm Elena Moore, I cover politics. And I'm Domenico Monson, our senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast. Oh, like it's so hard.
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