Now that states have begun to wrap up their vote counts, we can talk with more authority about the results from 2024. There’s been a fair amount of introspection already from Democrats, combined with the usual gnashing of teeth that accompanies a losing national campaign. One thing, which is important for elections analysis, that seems to be overlooked in the effort: The results were a near-perfect repeat of the 2021-23 election returns.
We can start with the popular vote. In 2022, House Republicans won the national popular vote by about 3 percentage points. There are still a lot of votes left to be counted, but this time around House Republicans look as though they will win by roughly the same margin.
We also see similarities if we dig down into the individual states. I’ve picked four states to look at more closely, all of which have received some degree of scrutiny for their supposedly surprising results in 2024. They are New York, New Jersey, Texas, and Virginia.
I’ll use two different approaches to examine them. First, I employ a map that demonstrates the shift in vote share from either 2021-2024 or 2022-2024 at the county level. Second, I use a “histogram” of county shifts. These are just regular bar-plots that show count data – in this case, the number of counties that moved a certain number of points between elections.
Let’s start with one of the most surprising results: New Jersey. The Garden State has been a Democratic stronghold since the mid-1990s, with Democrats almost always winning it by double-digit margins. As of this writing, the Democratic ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz is poised to win the state by around 6 points.
But New Jersey had a surprisingly close gubernatorial race in 2021 as well. The Republican candidate, Jack Ciattrelli, lost to incumbent Democrat Phil Murphy by just 3 points and change. Moreover, the way that Ciattrelli lost looks a lot like the way Trump lost. This is shown in the following map:
There are some differences in the coalition, but they’re fairly small. Trump did a bit worse than Ciattrelli in South Jersey, and a bit better in the greater New York City area. The only truly substantial change came in Hudson County, which Murphy won by the traditional 50-point margin and Harris won by only 28. That’s real change, and it illustrates Trump’s strong showing among Hispanic voters, about which more later. But overall, as the histogram shows, most of the changes in Democratic vote share from 2021 to 2024 were pretty minor.
What about Virginia? Glenn Youngkin won the state narrowly in 2021, and Trump lost it by around 6 points this year. Looking at the map, we again see a fairly uniform swing against Republicans, which shows up in the histogram as well:
Generally speaking, there was a fairly consistent shift here. The overall coalitions that took root in 2021, however, remained the same.
Texas was supposed to be the Democrats’ next frontier in the Electoral College. The state would have been exceedingly close in 2020, but for Trump’s surprising gains with Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley. That factor was supposedly a function of Democrats’ inability to conduct door-knocking campaigns or get-out-the-vote efforts.
In 2022, Greg Abbott won reelection in the state. He managed to hold on to many of Trump’s gains in South Texas, while improving somewhat in suburban areas. Abbott’s 11-point win was largely mimicked by Trump’s 14-point win.
Trump did make further gains in the heavily Hispanic Rio Grande Valley, and in core urban areas like Harris County, Dallas County, and Bexar County. The “RGV” gains were particularly marked, as Trump became the first Republican to carry some of these border counties in over a century (the last Republican to carry the area currently in Starr County was Benjamin Harrison in 1892; Trump won them by 16 points).
Once again, the histogram tells a similar story. Democrats showed modest gains throughout the state, although the shifts along the border were more pronounced.
Finally, in 2022 former Rep. Lee Zeldin very nearly won the governorship of New York. Trump fared worse, losing the state by around 12 points. Again, though, the shift is fairly uniform across the state, with Trump running a little bit better in heavily Hispanic areas of New York and worse in upstate.
So what do we make of this? The general consistency of the 2024 results with the 2021-22 results should give Democrats pause. To write this win off as specifically “Trump’s” coalition would be much easier if the results were dramatically different from those found in previous elections. But they weren’t. The only stark difference was among Hispanic voters, who are part of an overall trend toward the GOP.
This is a problem for the “Trump-specific” coalition narrative. If it were really a one-off phenomenon, Democrats could simply write the year off. But because this trend is repeating itself, the Trump-centric storyline becomes difficult to justify. What we see in 2024 is a situation stabilizing after the upheavals of 2016, 2018, and 2020. There was a surge in 2022, then a consolidation in 2024.
The other takeaway is that much of the analysis of 2022 was simply wrong. In particular, because 2022 and 2023 were fairly disappointing nights for the GOP, commentators concluded that the GOP would have difficulty winning in 2024. This downplayed the effect of candidate quality in certain Senate races, and didn’t square with the possibility – backed by the pre-election polling – that Republicans were poised to win the national vote, as well as the popular vote in most swing states.
