The Briefing, Vol. XII, Issue 48
Nov. 24, 2024
This week:
- Democrats were vastly overconfident about their ground game
- How Republicans quietly got out their vote
- DeSantis faces a tough choice in Florida
President 2024
More on why Harris lost: High turnout, they say, is good for Democrats.
This is true, except for when it isn’t.
In a broad sense, this may have applied to Election Day 2024. We now have a better idea of how many votes were cast in this year’s election — probably about 151 million between the two major-party candidates, compared to more than 155 million in 2020. So turnout was down, and Republicans did significantly better, at least in terms of the national popular vote and the vote in all seven swing states.
Some have of course inferred from this that there was suspicious activity in 2020. But it may also be that three factors conspired to make that higher turnout possible in 2020:
- first, the unique circumstances of the COVID era and the resulting relaxed mail-balloting rules that many states adopted;
- second, Trump’s unwise decision in 2020 to discourage Republican voters from voting early or by mail;
- and third, the lack of Democratic enthusiasm in 2024 for Vice President Kamala Harris, given her lack of charisma and the deep unpopularity of the Biden administration.
Also, there is something we mentioned before Biden dropped out of the race in July, and it bears repeating: You can’t just take a campaign designed to elect one candidate and repurpose it to elect another. This is an important lesson that Republicans will have to carry forward to 2028, because Trump will not be eligible to run again. If JD Vance, Ron DeSantis, or Ted Cruz want to be president, they will have to build their own coalitions and staff their campaigns with people who passionately support them. They will not have the luxury of simply piggy-backing on what Trump accomplished.
Harris turnout: The lack of enthusiasm for Harris is accompanied by the huge drop-off in non-college, non-white voters, which exit polling shows did in fact occur since last election. In 2024, non-college non-whites comprised 19 percent of the electorate, down from 24 percent in 2020. Also significantly, Trump lost them this time by only 30 points, down from 46 points four years ago. Basically, after four years of Biden, and forced to accept Harris as the candidate, these voters rebelled, either not showing up or voting for Trump.
This shows up in the significantly lower vote totals overall in such cities as Detroit, New York City, Los Angeles, San Diego, Baltimore, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, and Miami. In all of these cities, Democrats lost most of the support. Trump gained significantly in some of them, but overall vote totals were down, and in some cases (like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago) way down.
More on why Trump won: Democrats were vastly overconfident about the efficacy of Harris’s turnout operation. They even taunted Trump for having a “threadbare” operation that had been “outsourced to untested third-party groups” such as Turning Point USA, Elon Musk’s America PAC (which incentivized voters to sign up with a daily million-dollar giveaway), and in Pennsylvania, Scott Presler’s Early Vote Action.
Democrats pointed to the millions of doors they were knocking on, and one strategist boasted that their operation had “been built over months, and we’re rooted in communities across all the battlegrounds…What the other side has pales in comparison.”
But it turns out the joke was on them. In more cases than they’d like to admit, they were either turning out Trump voters or unnecessarily knocking on the doors of those most likely to vote anyway.
Even as Democratic turnout lagged significantly behind 2020 levels, the 2024 Republican ground game proved to be exceptional and even innovative not just in turning out regular voters, but also (and especially) in registering new voters and boosting early and vote-by-mail turnout among low-propensity voters.
At the state level, it was already evident even before Election Day how well this had paid off, just based on Republican gains in voter registration and in the early vote tally by party in states such as Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Florida, where Republicans performed far better than in years past.
Trump Turnout: From there, the exit polls tell the rest of the tale. Nationwide, Trump won first-time voters by 13 points — a 45-point swing in his favor from 2020, when Joe Biden won them by 32 points. And in most of the states where there were large enough samples to measure it, Trump won or at least broke even with Harris among first-time voters, which is almost unheard-of for Republicans. In statistical terms (although not in historical terms), this shift in Trump’s favor was as big as his record performance with Hispanic voters (he lost them by just 6 points, a 27-point swing in his favor since 2020).
Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk described how his group was involved in the Trump campaign’s efforts, especially with younger voters in a post-election podcast interview with Patrick Bet-David. He described how his group registered thousands of young new voters at fraternities on college campuses (for example). Even at Trump rallies, they would routinely find hundreds of people who were not registered and sign them up to vote. On Election Day, since Arizona voters could drop their ballots at any polling place, they had buses driving their newly registered voters to whatever sites had the shortest lines.
Thanks to theirs and others’ efforts, men under age 30 went for Trump nationwide by 2 points, and he lost the overall under-30 vote by only 11 points — a 13-point swing in Trump’s favor from 2020. Trump actually carried the under-30s in the key battleground state of Michigan by three points, and he kept it close in Wisconsin (-1), and Pennsylvania (-11).
In Pennsylvania, Scott Presler’s field operation went crazy in the weeks leading up to the election. They drove up early-vote turnout in some rural counties by as much as 91 percent. This not only boosted Trump to a decisive win — which included the first Republican win of Bucks County since 1988 — but it probably singlehandedly unseated Sen. Bob Casey (D) and two Democratic members of Congress in eastern Pennsylvania in extremely close races. This is a testament to the idea that a good ground game can pull over the finish line even a candidate headed for a narrow loss.
Early Vote Action focused especially on registering low-propensity voters, including truckers and the Amish, and getting them to cast early ballots. The Amish, who had faced some harassment from the Biden-Harris administration over their sale of raw milk, are not accustomed to voting in large numbers, and there is even a stigma attached to it in their community. However, when told they can cast a ballot by mail, they are far more likely to do so.
Ohio: First-time voters comprised 7 percent of the electorate in the Buckeye State, and an astonishing 60 percent of them voted for Trump. Among all other voters, Trump won a solid but less impressive 54 percent. This reflects a tremendously effective voter registration and turnout operation — another sign that Ohio’s Republican Party is one of America’s best-run state party’s, perhaps second only to Florida’s GOP.
This is why Bernie Moreno (R) was able to run away with his Senate race and defeat Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) in such dramatic fashion by 4 points.
Texas: In the Lone Star State, 77 percent of first-time voters backed Trump, who also lost under-30 voters by just 2 points.
The devastatingly effective Republican voter registration and turnout drive, combined with unprecedented gains among Hispanic voters, restored the party to uncontested dominance in the Lone Star State. No Democrat even came close to a statewide win. This was how Ted Cruz, who seemed to be in a close race based on polls modeled on yesterday’s electorate, overpowered and destroyed his opponent, Rep. Collin Allred (D).
Marginal states: The last votes have been counted almost everywhere, and it is worth pointing out that the margins in the presidential race in New Hampshire (3 points), Minnesota (4 points), Virginia (5 points), New Mexico (6 points), New Jersey (6 points), Maine (7 points) and even Illinois (9 points) should be giving Democrats nightmares.
Note that, outside the seven battleground states, there are no comparable Republican red states that went wobbly in this year’s election. Ohio came closest with a mere 11-point win for Trump. So there will be only one party with a clear potential to expand the battlefield in 2028.
The question is whether Republicans can put any of these on the table next time.
Republicans will be working hard to mine Virginia and New Jersey for new Republican voters, especially as their governor’s races approach in November 2025.
Senate 2026
Florida: We haven’t really started the 2026 cycle yet, but already it is evident that there will be a special election in Florida. Gov. DeSantis (R) faces a tough choice when it comes to replacing Marco Rubio, Trump’s new secretary of State designate, in the U.S. Senate.
If DeSantis wants to enter the Senate, he can appoint a placeholder such as his chief of staff, James Uthmeier, then run himself when he is term-limited out in 2026. But DeSantis is under increasing pressure to appoint RNC co-chair and first daughter-in-law Lara Trump to the seat. His personal relationship with Trump may hang in the balance, as the two are only tenuously friends again.
DeSantis could legally appoint himself, but such moves almost always end in disaster. Such a thing has been tried by governors nine times — in eight of them, the former governor-turned-senator got voted out the moment the voters had the chance. The only time it worked was in the late 1930s.
Likewise, DeSantis probably cannot safely appoint his wife Casey DeSantis (R), as some have suggested. If she is going to take public office, she will have to run and win in her own right.
As for other alternatives, DeSantis cannot really appoint any member of his state’s House delegation without temporarily endangering the Republican House majority, since Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla), Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), and Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) will all be gone from the House in January. Until at least April 1, the earliest date when a general special election can be held to replace Gaetz and Waltz, Republicans will have only a one-seat majority at best.
