By Sowelu Naantena
It has been an intense two months since Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term, and the Democratic Party is still picking up the pieces and trying to understand what went wrong in the 2024 election. Data analysis takes time, and top analysts are just now releasing final analysis from the election. As we settle into this new reality, I wanted to take some time to analyze what this data is telling us about why Democrats lost this crucial contest by such a large margin. This analysis comes from the findings of Democratic data analyst David Shor of Blue Rose Research, one of the most highly regarded data analysts across the last 4 major elections.
Four Key Factors in the 2024 Loss
Shor’s analysis confirms much of what we suspected about how Trump won in 2024, but with important nuances that deserve a closer look. Four key points stand out:
First, Trump made significant gains among Black, Latino, and Asian American voters compared to his 2020 performance. These demographic shifts had major effects in several key swing states.
Second, Trump outperformed Kamala Harris among marginally engaged and traditionally unengaged voters, upending the long-held assumption that higher voter turnout always benefits Democrats.
Third, young voters, particularly young men, supported Trump in much higher numbers than in 2020, upending another common assumption that younger voters will always trend progressive.
Fourth, inflation was the “final push” issue for undecided voters, while Democrats focused heavily on the “threat to democracy” narrative that simply didn’t resonate as strongly with the electorate.
Let’s dig deeper into each of these factors.
Non-White Voters
Shor describes this as “delayed ideological polarization” among non-white voters. As he explains:
“If we look at 2016 to 2024 trends by race and ideology, you see this clear story where white voters really did not shift at all. Kamala Harris did exactly as well as Hillary Clinton did among white conservatives, white liberals, white moderates.”
“But if you look among Hispanic and Asian voters, you see these enormous double-digit declines. To highlight one example: In 2016, Democrats got 81 percent of Hispanic moderates. Fast-forward to 2024; Democrats got only 57 percent of Hispanic moderates, which is really very similar to the 51 percent that Harris got among white moderates.”
What Shor is describing is a massive shift. White voters have been heavily polarized along ideological lines since the 1990s, and now non-white voters are only now undergoing that same process. The result is that Democrats can no longer rely on the disproportionate loyalty from non-white voters that they enjoyed for decades.
Surprisingly, this trend is particularly notable among immigrant voters. Naturalized immigrants, who favored Biden by 27 points in 2020, swung to favor Trump by 1 point in 2024. That’s a remarkable 28-point swing TOWARDS the candidate who touted slowing immigration as a top issue. The foreign-born share of a county’s population was highly correlated with a shift toward Trump, suggesting that this immigrant voter shift was a major factor in the 2024 results.
The Media Consumption Gap
Another important piece of Shor’s analysis concerns media consumption and political engagement. People who follow news closely actually became more Democratic in their voting. The problem for Democrats was with less politically engaged voters who don’t regularly consume news.
As Shor explained: “People who are the least politically engaged swung enormously against Democrats. They’re a group that Biden either narrowly won or narrowly lost four years ago. But this time, they voted for Trump by double digits.”
This suggests that Democratic messaging about Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies likely never reached many of the voters who swung toward Trump. These voters were more focused on their immediate economic concerns, particularly inflation, than on abstract threats to democratic institutions.
“And I think this is analytically important,” Shor notes. “People have a lot of complaints about how the mainstream media covered things. But I think it’s important to note that the people who watch the news the most actually became more Democratic. And the problem was basically this large group of people who really don’t follow the news at all becoming more conservative.”
Young Voters
In the 2024 presidential election, a 65 year old white man was more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate than a 22 year old white man was, something that has not been seen in modern American politics. This is just a part of a massive age and gender divide amoung young people seen in 2024. According to Shor, “18-year-old men were 23 percentage points more likely to support Donald Trump than 18-year-old women, which is just completely unprecedented in American politics.”
Shor speculates that this is partly due to generational differences: “If you look at zoomers, especially male zoomers, there are some really interesting ways that they’re very different in the data. They’re much more likely than previous generations to say that making money is extremely important to them. If you look at their psychographic data, they have a lot higher levels of psychometric neuroticism and anxiety than the people before them.”
The Values Gap
Finally, Shor provides some definitive evidence that Democratic messaging about preserving democratic institutions fell flat with voters who were more concerned about practical improvements to their lives.
By an astonishing 78% to 18% margin, voters said “delivering change that improves Americans’ lives” was more important than “preserving America’s institutions.” This proves that Democrats’ focus on Trump’s anti-democratic tendencies was misaligned with voters’ priorities.
This finding is perhaps the most important in terms of showing Democrats how they should approach the Trump administration. Rather than focusing primarily on how Trump has broken democratic norms and institutions, Democrats would be served by highlighting how these breaks negatively affect the benefits and services Americans rely on.
What this means for 2028
Despite the Democratic loss, Shor sees significant vulnerabilities in the Republican approach. “Trump and Elon have really spent the first part of their term diving into the biggest weaknesses of the Republican Party. Namely, they’re trying to pass tax cuts for billionaires, they’re cutting essential services and causing chaos for regular people left and right, while trying to slash social safety net programs.” This means that Democrats have an opportunity to highlight the gap between Trump’s populist rhetoric and the reality of his policies, which often favor the wealthy and corporations at the expense of working people. This would require the Democrats to refocus on the economy and issues that impact the majority of voters day to day rather than focusing on social issues.
The 2024 election should serve as a wake-up call for Democrats. The party can no longer rely on demographic inevitability or assume that non-white voters will simply remain loyal regardless of economic conditions or ideological differences.
The path forward isn’t to double down on abstract warnings about threats to democracy (as important as those are), but to make a practical case for how Democratic policies will improve voters’ lives in tangible ways. The message should be about kitchen-table economics, not just institutional preservation.
Democrats also need to reckon with the new media landscape that is sorting young voters into gender-based information silos and find ways to reach less politically engaged voters who aren’t consuming traditional news.
The 2024 election marks the end of certain Democratic assumptions about demographics and voting patterns. The sooner the party adapts to this new reality, the sooner it can begin rebuilding toward future electoral success.