Donald Trump Wins The Presidency
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Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyPolitics podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and it is 1.20 in the morning on the East Coast, and we're just sitting down to record our late-night reaction edition of the 2024 election. As we sit down, the Senate was just projected for Republicans.

Georgia and North Carolina were already projected for Trump. As of this very moment, we don't have any projections in the northern battleground states, but it's looking quite good for Trump in Pennsylvania. And he may well end up sweeping those northern battleground states in general. You may have more information by the time you're listening to this. In fact, you may have a projection for the presidency overall. But we wanted to sit down now before the night slips away from us so we can get in your feeds.

Whether this is the podcast that you wanted to be listening to this morning or not, we're going to try to do what we always do on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, which is provide context for what happened, what is happening and why it all happened.

you know, why it looks like Trump is on path to win the presidency yet again. And here with me to do that are my trusted colleague, senior researcher Mary Radcliffe. Welcome to the podcast, Mary. Good morning, Galen. Good morning, Mary. It's good to see you in person. I know. We're meeting here for the first time in real life.

Folks may not actually be able to believe this because we have such good chemistry from afar, but this is actually our first time meeting in person to cover this election together. It is truly a pleasure. We are actually all in a conference room together in New York. Also here with us is Elliot Morris, director of data analytics. Welcome to the podcast, Elliot. Hey, thanks for having me, Galen. And also here with us is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Welcome, Nathaniel. Hey, Galen. It is great to be here in person with all of you.

I am going to start with a version of a question that you have heard me ask for nearly a decade at this point, which is why does it look like Trump is on path to win a second term?

There's a bunch of different ways to answer that question. We can answer it from a narrative perspective as a country. We can answer it from a demographic perspective. We can answer it from an issue perspective. We'll get into some of all of that. And I just want to say here that we're not going to be able to cover it all tonight. It's quite early in the morning. Our brains are a little bit broken from covering this election for so many hours already. And there's going to be a lot to say in the coming days and weeks. So let's caveat everything here that there is

more to come. But Mary, I want to start with you because you've been poring over the exit polls and county level data all evening. What's your take on why it looks like Trump will end up winning this election?

What we've seen in the data coming out so far is something of a validation of some of the trends we've been discussing in polling coming up to this election. For months, we've seen what appears to be from the initial data, some attrition for Democrats, particularly among Hispanic voters. We've seen perhaps some small gains for Democrats among white voters, but not

enough to overcome that attrition among Hispanic voters. I'll also say that it appears that some of these gains among white voters may not have been as strong in the upper Midwest as they have been in other parts of the country. So we are seeing some of this realignment that we've been talking about, particularly among white college educated voters.

So that it's sort of continuing what we've seen over the past few years where rural voters are sort of shifting more red, more urban and suburban voters are maybe shifting a little bit more blue, but really just pushing those trends forward. We saw this in 2016. We saw it again in 2020, and we're seeing it now. And the particular makeup of the electorate in each of those years, the particular voters that show up,

has just tweaked the election just this much in either direction in each of those three presidential years. Yeah, I saw you doing some math in your spreadsheets over at your desk throughout the evening, and I came over to talk to you about what we were seeing in the exit polls. And I want to caveat that whatever we say about the exit polls here may get reweighted later on, and we will also get more data from voter verified surveys in the months to come. But

At least right now, it looks like Latino voters shifted a full on 13 points on margin toward Trump.

And white voters shifted three points on margin toward Harris. And you were trying to figure out how does this all net out? I mean, is that sort of a wash or not? And I should also mention that it looked like Asian voters also shifted a bit to the right. That's a small portion of the electorate. But how did it all net out to you?

Again, all those same caveats. This is preliminary exit polling data. So this may all look very different when we get to the final numbers. If we do some basic projections with that preliminary exit poll data, it looks like 49-49 exactly split nation, which I think is what we're seeing in the popular vote.

And it sort of explains if we're a 49-49 nation, all these states that are close to the middle really are on the knife's edge, could go either way. And we've been saying that

How many months have we been saying with a tied race is very likely one candidate sweeps all the swing states. And it appears that we are on track for such an outcome. Yeah, I think this is cold comfort for people who are not fans of Trump. But it looks like the polls had a good night. Is that fair to say, Nathaniel? Oh, yeah, very much so. Yeah.

It was very clear early on that we weren't going to see one of these scenarios that, you know, where there was a significant polling error in favor of Harris, certainly, obviously, given the result or a significant polling error in favor of Trump. You know, these seven swing states were all close enough that even a small polling error, even you don't even need much of a polling error. I think, you know, only in a couple of the swing states and the northern battlegrounds.

did our polling averages have Harris actually ahead? Although again, it was all within a margin of error. But yeah, the polls look like they will really nail the results. And that is encouraging for the polling industry, an industry that obviously has had trouble finding Trump voters and getting them to respond to surveys. And also at the same time, there was a lot of questions about whether they were adequately kind of assessing Democratic enthusiasm, for example, after Dobbs. And it

looks like they did an excellent job, although we should wait for all the votes to be cast before kind of doing all the math there. Elliot, I want to ask you, because obviously we're sitting down before we actually have a projection, but it's in part because it really looks like Trump is on track to win in Pennsylvania and perhaps all of the Midwestern battleground states. Can you tell us a little bit about why we expect that to be the case, what the trends are?

Yeah, while we're recording this, Georgia, North Carolina and Florida have already been called for Trump. They've been called for him by about two points, one to two points more than the final polls suggested. So if you just extrapolate based on that, then Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin should follow basically because they were so close.

The problem for Democrats is actually worse than that. If you look at the turnout numbers in the cities, especially where lots of minority voters, young voters live and who tend to vote for Democrats, turnout there is lower than it is anywhere else in the country. So we've been talking about these shifts in the overall vote numbers. Democrats are also just not getting as many votes out of those categories as they did in 2020, to Nathaniel's point, as they did in 2022. So the

The states haven't been called yet, but we really have no reason to believe the outstanding voters to behave significantly differently than where we currently have results. In 2020, we had a record-breaking turnout. It approached 70%. I think it was something like 68%. No one expected it to reach that height again this time. But where do you think we're going to land, Elliot, ultimately?

So, you know, we have to make a lot of predictions about how many votes are left in California at this point, but it looks like turnout will be somewhere around 150 million, maybe 155 million votes. But at any rate, significantly less than the 160 million that turned out last time and the 158 million that...

some experts projected based off of the early vote numbers. So that's actually quite damning evidence for the turnout operation for the Democrats here. Not only did they underperform 2020, they actually underperformed 2024 early vote data, which was already pretty bad for them. So going into tonight, and we'll talk about this too, the Kamala Harris campaign was saying

It's just about turning out our voters who haven't turned out yet. We can knock on enough doors. We can make enough calls. We can run enough ads where Mary lives in Allegheny County in Pennsylvania. And like those people show up there, there are voters. Not only did that not happen, it generated somewhat historic swings in the electorate for such a polarized electorate. The reality is that.

this election is still in broad terms close. And the narrative that we take away from an election that is two points on margin one way or the other can be dramatically different. So I don't want to get like too caught up in the moment and make sweeping claims about the country or the candidate or the issues because, you know, if things were slightly different, we would be having we could be having a wildly different conversation.

But when you say that Democrats didn't get the turnout that they needed, it also looked like they lost the persuasion game with key parts of the electorate.

the elements that you can look at that would cause something like that are the macro, the economy, global dynamics, et cetera. There is the domestic, the issues, the immigration, the economy, abortion, democracy, and then there's the individual. There's Kamala Harris and there's Donald Trump.

And I'm sure that you can allot plenty of the rationale to either of those. But is there something that sticks out to you this evening in the exit poll data or precinct level ships or whatever that's like, I think this is why this happened?

I mean, I don't even think it's in the data, which is a dangerous thing to say on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. I think it's like, keep it simple, stupid. It's the economy stupid? No. Well, sort of, yes. But like, it's everything stupid, right? We have seen across the world again and again incumbent governments going down to defeat and or just like crumbling in the polls like in Canada. The UK, obviously, a historic defeat for the Tories.

I think that there is tremendous dissatisfaction among voters with incumbent governments right now because of the weird recovery after the pandemic and a lot of inflation. And there is just this dissatisfaction around. And obviously, we see that in Joe Biden's approval rating. And obviously, he's not the candidate, but Kamala Harris is part of his administration. They are the incumbent party, the Democrats. And I think that voters are...

really fed up and they are eager for change. And Donald Trump represents that change, even though four years ago he was the incumbent and people were not happy with him and he was unpopular and they booted him out. And, you know, I mean, things can always change, obviously, in four years, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the pendulum sort of shift the other way if things fundamentally don't change, which is that voters just don't feel like their government is being responsive and or competent in the things that they care about.

Well, I think there's also has to be some element here that is in part driven by personalities. And the evidence I would cite for that is that Democrats actually seem to be doing quite a bit better in the race for the House than they are in the race for the White House, which means there's a significant contingent of voters out there that are voting for Donald Trump and Democratic House candidates.

Which means there might be something about Trump that's appealing to those voters that isn't appealing about sort of these down-ballot, more standard-issue Republican candidates that they're seeing in their House races. So I think there's probably a personality element at play here, too. Well, the other person involved in this is Kamala Harris. And, you know, I would be remiss if I didn't now say that it looks like Trump will end up winning two elections against the first candidate

major party female candidates for the presidency. And so you have to ask, is there a gender dynamic going on here as well?

I haven't looked into the data on that, so I'm not really sure what to say at this point. I would be really interested, especially once we have more cleaned up, validated voter surveys to take a look at how that gender dynamic came into play. But I will say that coming into this election, I mean, we just had a conversation about how good the polls were coming into this election, how it seems like they really nailed it.

And another thing that the polls were telling us is that voters actually like Kamala Harris better than they like Donald Trump. They have a much more favorable impression of Kamala Harris than they do of Donald Trump.

there's got to be something deeper than just who do we like, who do we feel good about. So maybe it is a gender dynamic. I think that'll be interesting data to explore. To that point, I mean, I was looking at recent Gallup polling that asked voters about these different dynamics. Is this person likable versus do you see this person as a strong leader or the like? And

It does seem like there was a bit of a gendered response when it comes to, yeah, she's likable, but he seems competent or he seems like he could fend off sort of threats to the country. And there was almost like shockingly, I don't know if it's shocking, but like very high percentage of American voters in the exit polls that said they feel like the nation is under threat.

Yeah, I think, though, we know that favorability doesn't necessarily determine the outcome of the election, especially in very partisan times. But I think that I don't really view this as Kamala Harris losing necessarily because I think she is viewed significantly more positively among the American people. And so I do think there have to be other things at play, which I think comes down again to her kind of ties to an unpopular incumbent party slash president.

In terms of the gender thing, I think obviously that is a major question that needs to be asked. I think we will dive into that starting tomorrow morning. I think there are a lot of interesting studies to be done on that. I also do want to point out that it is just a sample size of two. You had Hillary Clinton, who was historically unpopular. Kamala Harris isn't, but she's also dealing with these issues.

headwinds in terms of being part of an unpopular administration. And so I don't think you can say just because of two failed female candidates that a woman can't be elected president. But obviously, I think you can't discount the role that it may have played either. And that's something that we hope to answer in the coming weeks and months.

And to be clear, it's almost certain that Joe Biden would have done worse in this election. Yes, I agree with that. Well, if the polls are to be believed. And it looks like the polls are to be believed. So maybe they have been to be believed all along. I'm curious for you, Elliot, you've been quiet over there. Is there anything that stuck out to you in the precinct level data or the exit polls that's helping you understand this election at the moment?

Yeah, well, I was quiet because I was looking at the exit polling. And the thing I was looking at was just issue prioritization. In 2022, the polls indicated, you know, that democracy and the economy would be the biggest issues far overriding abortion.

In fact, in the results that year, I think we found lots of localized impacts from abortion referendums. This year is almost the opposite, where early polling indicated that abortion and the economy would be the biggest issues. In fact, it's democracy and the economy, at least according to the exit polls, which I should say at this point are not perfectly reflective, or they won't ever be perfectly reflective of democracy.

why people made the decisions, but they will still be updated. So these results will change as we get more votes. So obviously there's a risk of hindsight here. If Democrats are going to learn a lesson, you know, they'll probably over-index on like some explanation about how incumbents globally are suffering. And I think a lot of that is true, but they also

you know, may have just made some strategic mistakes in not embracing the fact that the economy was doing very poorly for lots of people, especially the 300,000 people who changed their minds in Pennsylvania and decided the course of American history.

I think they'll just have to think about how to do that sort of politicking again, because evidently, I think this is like three elections in a row where they haven't performed very well on that. Not well enough to the very smallest sliver of the electorate that decides such big, you know, such big things.

This is all complicated stuff, but some of this has been quite clear in my mind for a while. You hear in the news people wringing their hands like, why are Americans so concerned about the economy when the absolute numbers look so good?

Let's be real clear here. For the first three years of Biden's presidency, prices were rising significantly faster than wages. That only flipped in the final year. And on net, Americans are literally poorer today than they were at the start of Biden's presidency as a result of that. Clearly, there was a significant backlash.

They were shocked from the inflation. Americans are not goldfish. They don't restart their understanding of prices every year, even though we count inflation annually. They feel that 20% rise in prices since 2019 and clearly were unhappy about it. I mean, the other issue, I'm curious what you make of how it ended up in the exit polls in the end was immigration. I think we're

We know, talking about macro situations, globally, in the face of a migrant crisis, incumbent parties face backlash. And the Biden administration did practically nothing on immigration for the first three years. And only sort of months into an election year did they try to pivot. Once in the Gallup polling, we saw that 20%,

25% of Americans were saying that it was the most important issue facing the country, which was, I think, a record high. There were decisions that were made by Democrats, as you suggested, Elliot, that got them to this place.

Presidents are not fully responsible for what the economy looks like. But we would also be kidding ourselves if we didn't say that leaders made choices that had a big impact on the economy. The size of the American Rescue Plan was criticized pretty heavily at the time by economists who said it would be inflationary because what we needed to do was open back up the economy because people had lots of savings.

We don't need to litigate all of this necessarily at this hour, but from the global macro to the individual leaders making decisions to whatever, there's a lot of things going on here that will help people understand why what happened happened.

Can I tease one thing out about the immigration point? So again, according to the exit polling, 11% of people said it was their most important issue. That doesn't sound like a lot, but 90% of Republicans said it was the issue that's most important to their vote versus 9% of Democrats. So there's some big asymmetry there. Maybe just to underscore this point about differential turnout or what seems to be a differential turnout election, perhaps we'll get the validated voter data and we'll see if

If that's the issue that gets all those people in rural Pennsylvania out to, you know, make it mathematically impossible for Democrats to win, even with decent margins in Philadelphia and the suburbs, that turnout strategy works for them. Even if, you know, only 11% are saying it's their most important issue, that's actually more of a point on interpreting the exit polls than anything else.

Well, do we know it was differential turnout, though, or could it still be a persuasion? Yeah, I don't think it's entirely differential turnout. I don't know. I think this feeds into a larger hobby horse of mine, which is that, like, obviously we are just, I don't know, just a few hours away from polls closing, and we don't have a lot of information still, and I really am hesitant to draw any narratives about what happened there.

until we have better data. And so I think, yeah, whether obviously it is a turnout election or a persuasion election is very important to understanding this. And I just don't think we know that right now. To be clear, oftentimes the same thing that can persuade a voter can get a voter off the couch, right? I mean, feeling upset about or fear about one of these issues, whether it's the economy or immigration could get you to flip, could also get you to vote.

Yeah, of course. I'm not disputing that, I guess. I tend not to think about elections in terms of issues and like, frankly, what's motivating voters. I think about it, frankly, in kind of more bloodless terms in terms of which party has the advantage. And so I think there is a significant difference in, well, if there were just Democrats who sat at home and didn't vote, that is different for Democrats looking forward about how to proceed than if they actually lost voters to Donald Trump.

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It's time to talk about the House. I have not been watching the House all night. I'm sorry. My bias has been towards the presidency. How is it looking at this point? Does it look like Trump is going to have unified control of government if he ends up winning this, which is at the expectation? I think it's actually too early to say in the House. We've seen Democrats flip a couple of seats in New York.

Last I was looking at it, which was before we started recording. So who knows how things could have changed? We had Janelle Stelzen leading Scott Perry in Pennsylvania's 10th, although the 7th and the 8th in Pennsylvania were also looking pretty close, which are two other swing districts that are currently held by Democrats that could potentially flip to Republicans.

By and large, the picture in the House has been looking a little bit more favorable for Democrats than the picture in the White House. And I'm sure Nathaniel also has been following some of these House races and has some thoughts on this, too.

I was one of these people who assumed that the House and the presidency would go the same way, and I'm not sure that that is going to be the case anymore. I think Democrats are holding up decently, and obviously I think that is a very big difference if Democrats are able to hold the House because that creates kind of a firewall against Trump having full control of government. I think it will take multiple days to call the House because of the slow pace of voting in places like California, which has a lot of House seats, obviously.

But then I also think, and sorry, Galen, if I'm preempting the question, but I think the Senate is very important too. We know that the Senate has already been projected for Republicans, but I think the exact margin is going to matter there a lot. Currently, they are at 51 seats, Republicans are, in the Senate. And they are also leading in a few other races that could bring them above. So in Montana, as we record, they are leading by four points.

Looks like they're in pretty good shape in Michigan as well. So that would be 53 seats. And then currently they are leading by narrower margins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada. Those feel like they are within the realm where those late counted mail ballots could flip them back to Democrats. But I think, you know, just kind of eyeballing it, 53 seats seems like a decent guess for Republicans in the Senate. But I think that's something that I'll be watching over the next couple of days as well.

Speaking of things that are still yet to be determined, we don't know what the national popular vote is, and we will not know for days, if not weeks. Thank you, California. But I'm looking at the needle currently, and it is projecting a popular vote estimate of Trump plus 1.2. That would mark the second time in nine presidential elections that

where Republicans win the popular vote. We've already been talking about reasons for why Democrats could have performed poorly and Trump could have performed well in this situation. But is there anything more we want to say, sort of just given that significance?

It is significant. I think if, you know, and again, I do think we need to wait for California to count those ballots. But as of right now, Trump has 5 million more votes than Kamala Harris does. And like you said, that is hard for a Republican to do. And the fact that Donald Trump was able to do something that he wasn't able to do twice, that Mitt Romney wasn't able to do, that George W. Bush failed to do the first time, he did the second time. But it is hard for a Republican to win the popular vote. And I think that speaks to the fact that

Republicans had an advantage in this election that probably isn't because of Donald Trump, given that he is not favorably viewed as we were talking about. And I just keep coming back to the whole kind of unpopularity and dissatisfaction with the current Biden administration. But

I think it's notable because I think in 2016, that was such a close election. And obviously, it was unexpected. And Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote. And I think that there was probably a sense a lot of people thought, oh, Hillary Clinton's going to win, but I don't like her. So I'm going to cast this protest vote for Donald Trump because, you know, just to send a message. And I don't take him seriously. I don't think he's really going to win. So I can do this.

And he became elected president, obviously. I don't think anybody wasn't taking Donald Trump seriously this time. So I think Americans are going into this kind of eyes wide open, which is significant and I think says a lot about their dissatisfaction with the government and also whatever happens over the next four years. I think that that has implications for that as well.

Can we linger on that for a second? Because I know we have people outside of the United States who also listen to this podcast. I know because they've been contacting me throughout the past weeks in the run up to the election. And a question that you oftentimes get from people who live outside of the United States is what attracts Americans to Donald Trump? And my first answer is always, well, he's not popular. So you first have to start from the point that you just made, Nathaniel, which is that more people dislike him than like him in the country. But

You now have to say he's been politically successful despite offending a whole bunch of people, being impeached twice, being indicted and ultimately found criminally liable, all kinds of different things. He can be like a mean person and worse and sort of use violent rhetoric about all different kinds of people.

You think of a politician as somebody who wants people to like them, right? We used to think of politics as a popularity contest. Why has Trump been able to be successful despite all of that distasteful negative stuff?

I mean, quite frankly, I think it does show, again, how dissatisfied people are and how far they are willing to go to fix these problems and kind of how desperate they are for a solution. Again, I think they are going into this eyes open and I think they want at this point to some extent, at least some people want dissatisfaction.

a strong man who will, you know, perhaps disregard democratic norms if it fixes the issues that they care about, immigration, the economy. And I think that their frustration is so high that they are willing to embrace some things that maybe they wouldn't have embraced in the past. And

overlook some things in his personal background and his, you know, in terms of the criminal convictions in order to get those things done. And I think that is an important marker for history. Yeah, the question is not like, why is Donald Trump so popular that people vote for him? It's why do people vote for him? And it's for a lot of people, in spite of his unpopularity, politics in America is a

a game of minimizing your distance to an option. In our case, it's usually two parties. And Donald Trump, for a lot of people, represents a closer option for them. He does not have to be popular.

to them. He does not have to be likable. He does not even have to represent them on a lot of issues. He simply has to be closer to them on the things they care about the most, or at least not far away on the things that they care about the most. In an election that could be the product of global headwinds for incumbents or for a lot of Republicans, if again, this is a turnout thing in rural areas helping him, then

his very low spatial distance, the type of people who live in those places is enough. He doesn't have to be charismatic. He doesn't have to be popular. And actually, to a lot of people, he is those things. Donald Trump is not viewed very favorably, but I think it is often overlooked how entertaining he can be. Donald Trump is funny.

He simply is. And he's kind of an asshole. And I think people think, great, he's going to be an asshole to the right people to fix all of these things that I don't like right now. He's going to be an asshole for me to China, to Mexico, to companies that are shipping jobs overseas, whatever. He's going to be the asshole we need to get those people on track.

Sorry if I swore too much. No, never. We are now almost at two o'clock. So I think we're going to start wrapping things up. I also want to say for my part that you folks know that I had a birthday yesterday at this point, November 5th. I turned 34. We started this podcast right after I turned 25 years old. This has been nine years of my life.

And I just want to say to everyone who has been following along all these years, thank you so much for joining me on this journey. And I know the journey is not over. We're going to have probably another podcast on Thursday, but I do just want to take this marker because it

It feels like a big moment for me in some ways, how long I've been doing this, how old I am and what a baby I was when we all started this. Maybe the first time you ever heard my voice was when we did an audio documentary about the Howard Dean scream and why it sounded different in the room than it sounded on TV. I remember that. I remember that. Elliot has gone from listener to now panelist on the, you were in college back then or something. Don't put me on blast, Galen. Um,

But anyway, people have been sending me very nice notes over the past couple weeks about what this podcast means to them in anxious, uncertain times. And it has been a privilege to be allowed to be that person for you, be a Sherpa through the craziness of American politics. So thank you, listeners, for the past nine years. And with that now, thank you, Nathaniel, Elliot and Mary. Thanks, Galen. Thanks, Galen. You got it, buddy.

My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or a review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon. And yes, I did do that without a script.