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Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
00:16:03
Brent Buchanan of Cygnal Polling breaks down the key factors behind Donald Trump's historic 2024 election victory, revealing a seismic political shift and the evolving voter landscape. Get the facts first on Morning Wire.
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- [00:03]
John Bickley
In his third bid for the presidency, Donald Trump was able to overcome past.
- [00:07]
Brent Buchanan
Shortfalls to put together a decisive victory.
- [00:10]
John Bickley
Winning the Electoral College, the popular vote, and GOP majorities in both houses of Congress. In this episode, we speak to Signal Polling Group founder Brent Buchanan about what took place this year and if it signifies a truly seismic shift in the political landscape. I'm Daily Weyer Editor in Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's December 15th at and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
- [00:38]
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- [01:11]
John Bickley
Joining us now to examine how the political landscape has shifted in the US Is Brent Buchanan, founder of Signal Polling Group. Brent, thanks for coming on. Good to talk to you again.
- [01:21]
Brent Buchanan
Hey, it's great to be back.
- [01:22]
John Bickley
Look, we wanted to start by giving you some well earned credit in the weeks leading up to the election. You said we would know the result Wednesday morning. That ended up being true. On election night, you were here at Daily Wire headquarters and ready to call the election for Trump at 10:02pm no one's being that specific about it, but 10:02pm what made you so sure Trump had won?
- [01:44]
Brent Buchanan
When you looked at some of the key counties within the swing states, you could see that he was doing so well within those counties that what made those counties good for him could be replicated across the other swing states, including places like Arizona and Nevada, which we're still counting votes are just beginning to end the polls at 10.02pm what were.
- [02:09]
John Bickley
Some of the swings you saw early in the night? What kind of movement did you see in which counties that was so significant early on?
- [02:16]
Brent Buchanan
Miami Dade has been really interesting because it has a highly Hispanic population, but it's more Cuban and Venezuelan and that's not really replicatable across the rest of the country. What I was looking at was if you remember from the New York City Madison Square Garden rally where you had that comedian that opened For Trump, you know, make a joke about Puerto Ricans living on an island of garbage, and maybe I'm getting that specific reference wrong, but the Puerto Ricans make up the majority of the Orlando area of Hispanics, which is a very different population of Hispanics than Cubans of Venezuelans and Miami Dade County. So when I saw that he was doing well there, I knew that the mainstream media narrative that Trump was gonna be hurt by Hispanics because of that comedian's comment was simply just chatter within the bubble in the elitist class and not actually something that was gonna hurt him with voters. And then you can also go over to Macomb County, Michigan, which is a very working class county that continued to shift towards Republicans, and that's a highly unionized county. And so that also would tell you that, okay, if Trump is winning union voters who have been moving his direction and they're showing up in significant veracity, that this is going to continue across the rest of the swing states and really the country as a whole. And I think what's most fascinating in all of this is there was really three elections occurring. There was elections in the swing states which didn't have huge shifts from the prior election. I mean, you did see a big difference in, like Arizona, for example, where Biden barely won it. Trump got over 5% this time. I think that was more a normalization of the state than anything else. But then you had elections in red and blue states, and places like Florida and Texas got even redder. In places like New Jersey, Trump got that to a single digit race. And so where money was spent, significant money was spent, the elections were closer, even though Republicans did well. And where money was not spent, Republicans just blew it out of the water. And that was a combination of two things. One, Republicans showing up strongly, but also Democrats staying home.
- [04:29]
John Bickley
Now, pollsters like you often measure the most important issues to voters in the weeks and months leading up to the election. In this case, it was often inflation and immigration leading the pack. Did that end up lining up with exit polls?
- [04:41]
Brent Buchanan
It definitely did. And what's interesting about the top priority question is that it became very politically polarized. And if you remember how the Harris campaign closed, they basically closed the same way that Biden tried to frame the end of the 22 midterms elections. And that was, Trump is a threat to democracy, and so we have to defeat him to protect our democracy. And so that was an issue that really showed up in a lot of our polling. It was somewhere in the top two or three leading up to the election. In our final exit poll on election Day, it ended up being the number two issue, almost tying with inflation and economy. But if you said threats to democracy was your number one issue, Harris won those voters by 69 points. And if you said inflation, economy was the issue, Trump won those voters by 60. Illegal immigration, Trump won those voters by 89 points.
- [05:32]
John Bickley
Wow.
- [05:32]
Brent Buchanan
You know, of course, Harris wins the abortion voters. And then when you look at all the other issues, you know, kind of the minor issues strung together, Trump barely lost those. So it was very much these, like, kind of two Republican leaning issues and Democrat leaning issues that were hyperpartisan. But I really believe that that was just simply turnout mechanisms. And Republicans did a better job turning out voters who cared about inflation and economy plus illegal immigration than Democrats did turning out voters who said abortion and threats to democracy, which to me are. They're luxury issues. You know, if you're way at the top of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you can care about threats to democracy and abortion. But if you're trying to make ends meet and care for your family, you care about inflation and economy and illegal immigration. And that's what won at the end of the day.
- [06:19]
John Bickley
Now, we at the Daily Wire have paid close attention to the transgender issue for various reasons, including the investigations we've done in the past and really directing more attention to this issue. How much did you think that issue played into the election results?
- [06:34]
Brent Buchanan
Huge. And I think it's not necessarily the thing that helped with the election. I think it is a symptom of a deeper problem for the Democrats, and that is they have gone off into this woke ideology where, you know, you've got to believe all these things or you're a bad person. When Republicans are like, well, we, we kind of like normal. We like normalcy. And that's really out there. And Democrats have just gone so much into this, like, politics of identity, and the majority of the country is rejecting that. So we did a survey post election for the American Principles Project, which took a lot of the research that y'all did and then turned it into advertising. And we tested several of the key campaign themes. One being that Kamala Harris is for sex changes for children. Another one was that she wants to give your tax dollars to have prisoners get sex changes. We tested the, you know, men and women's sports, and we tested that they them Trump is for you messaging. What was really fascinating about this is, and. And I think it is one of the reasons that the diploma divide that has existed with white voters, where if you're non, college white, you're shifting hard right. That has now gone into the non white population. What we found out is that among Hispanic voters who said that sex changes for minors made an impact on their vote, 52% of them said it made it more likely to vote for Trump. Of black voters who said that men and women's sports was a concern for them, 45% said that made them more likely to vote for Trump. So I think these cultural issues potentially had a bigger impact in moving non white voters to Trump, while the economic issues were more at play for continuing these white, non college educated voters moving to Trump. And that's a really unique story coming out of this election.
- [08:26]
John Bickley
As you've laid out, this was a sweeping shift rightward. Did Trump actually gain ground everywhere or did he lose ground in any particular demographic?
- [08:36]
Brent Buchanan
Overall, he gained ground because in all, 50 states moved to the right. Some of the states barely moved to the right. Like I think Washington State, for example, was 0.2% more Republican. But then New York state was 12% more Republican. California was 7% more Republican than the last election. But, but when you break out some of the individual demographic groups, Gen X was the largest generational shift towards Trump. In 2020, they were Republican plus one, Trump plus one. In this election, they were Trump plus 13. You know, seniors kind of stayed the same. Gen Z moved towards Trump. Millennials actually moved against Trump. There were some other shifts in the college educational attainment where if you had a college degree and you're white, you got more Democratic. But that was probably the only group you can point to and say this got worse for Trump. But it's been a 20 year trend. And so I don't think we can say this is just Trump's fault. I would say there's a whole lot more things to look at and say that Trump is now taking that diploma divide into the non white community. One thing I'll point out is that, you know, Kamala Harris, when she ran for Senate in California, ran as an Indian American. And then this election she ran as a black American. And college educated Indian Americans actually were one of the groups that shifted furthest to Trump. And so, like, if that does not define how poorly she did in this election, that she screwed up the one group that should have moved towards her, college educated Indian Americans. Trump was able to get to those folks and it was really the economic concerns for them.
- [10:17]
John Bickley
You bring up Indian Americans. What about Asian Americans? How did they vote in general this year?
- [10:23]
Brent Buchanan
Well, it's not a huge population in the country. So it's kind of a hard group to dig into. You know, Vietnamese and Indians and Chinese all go into that bucket of Asian Americans. But if you were a non college educated Asian American, you started to shift towards Republicans. That hadn't really existed in the past. And so I think Democrats are walking into future elections asking themselves, who is our coalition? Because they're essentially now the party of the coastal elites and the white college educated coastal elites. And those people don't understand America.
- [10:58]
John Bickley
Now, there was a lot made by the legacy media of the gender divide going into the election. And from my understanding, it didn't quite play the role that we thought it was going to play. How did that end up shaking out?
- [11:10]
Brent Buchanan
Well, it was still, you know, women lean more towards Harris and men lead more towards Trump. But I think the bigger story is the fact that historically, in every single presidential election, going back for half a dozen presidential elections, women made up 54% of the voters, and in this election, women only made up 53% voters. And you're probably saying, well, Brent, why are you saying that? 1% is a big shift, but that is a huge breakout trend. And Trump made a strong play for the bro vote on the podcast. He went on the way he did his advertising and kind of how the imagery of those advertisings and the music of the advertisements was really geared towards men and it didn't turn off women. You know, women 55 plus, for example, voted for Kamala Harris, but they only voted for her by three points. You know, under 55 only voted for Harris by 14 points. Those are really small margins compared to what we saw in 2020 on this gender and age divide. And I think it's one of the unsung stories of this election in that Trump really bypassed the mainstream media and went to all these alternative media sources that happen to speak more to men. You know, Joe Rogan is mostly a male audience. Theo Vaughn is almost exclusively a male audience. And they're also amplified on YouTube. And when you go look at where people consume their information and how they voted in the presidential election, the alternative media sources, if you're getting your news from those places, you are much more likely to have voted for Donald Trump. So when we asked this media consumption question, one of them is, do you get your media from streaming apps like the Daily Wire? We didn't say like the Daily Wire, but that would fall in the category of a streaming app. If you get your news from a streaming app, you voted for Donald Trump by 26 points.
- [13:06]
John Bickley
Wow. So there's a lot of ways to sum up what just occurred this year. But part of it is a massive rebuke of the legacy media and revealing that they've been dethroned. Do you think it's fair to characterize the election that way?
- [13:20]
Brent Buchanan
Yeah. They did a really good job moving Kamala Harris's image from upside down, really badly upside down, like Joe Biden to, you know, only slightly upside down. But they could never get her further than that because they could only reach a certain audience. So of people who told us in our exit poll that they get their news from national television, like ABC, NBC, CBS, they voted for Harris by 39 points. Newspapers, if that's where you get your information, you voted for Harris by 48 points. But then if you get your news from Talk radio, it's Trump +40 of Facebook, Trump +22. So you start to see that they're losing their grip on their ability to move anything past a certain point. And I think we're just going to continue to see that degrade and degrade as folks realize that they're not giving them truthful information and they're telling people what to think, and they're not giving them all the facts as they tell people what to think. And that's why we're having the segmentation of folks who are listening to podcasts like this who are subscribing to streaming services, And I believe we're going to find more and more of that as people seek out the truth for themselves.
- [14:32]
John Bickley
What about the state of leftism post election? Did we just witness the end of the progressive wing of the Democrat party?
- [14:40]
Brent Buchanan
No, I think the progressive wing of the Democratic party will never learn the lesson from this election because they're the same people who ran ads that essentially said, you voters are stupid. If you knew this information, you'd vote the right way. Which meant for Kamala Harris and Democrats. And they believe that the reason that they're not winning is because enough people don't know what they know, and they don't know how to say it without being condescending to the majority of the country. So what I think we saw in this election was that this trend of wokeism and progressivism, voters finally stood up and said, this is enough. I'm not doing this anymore.
- [15:23]
John Bickley
Final question. Pretty open. What is a takeaway from this year that you think is not being emphasized or stressed enough?
- [15:30]
Brent Buchanan
Republicans need to realize that this is not a normal election for us. Donald Trump is a unique individual that can communicate with folks in a certain way. And that is why you saw in a lot of races him get more votes than anybody else on the ticket that was a Republican. And the lesson for Republicans out of this need to be don't be scared to jump into the cultural issues. Talk about economics in a way that normal people understand. Don't tell them the economy is good when they feel the economy is bad for them which is basically what Democrats did. And you have to go into these communities and start building relationships with folks because we just can't take for granted that these non white voters who moved to Republicans are going to stay with us. They moved to Trump. They did not move to Republicans. And there's a whole lot of work to still be done in building real relationships, not just election day relationships with these folks.
- [16:26]
John Bickley
Sage advice as always. Brent, thank you so much for joining us. That was Signal Polling Group's Brent Buchanan and this this has been a Sunday edition of MORNING WIRE.