Election Update 2024

Election Update 2024

Park MacDougald


Making sense of the presidential election.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Editor’s note: This feature will chronicle the transfer of power from President Joe Biden to President-elect Donald J. Trump. It will be updated daily. 

Did Obama Have a Plan?

The more votes trickle in, the more impressive Donald Trump’s achievement on Tuesday looks. As of our writing on Thursday morning, he was winning an absolute majority of the national electorate (50.9% to 47.6%) and leading Harris by 4.7 million in the raw vote total. He has won every swing state that has been called and is leading in the two, Arizona and Nevada, where ballots are still being counted. In Nevada, for instance, more than 90% of ballots are in, but an “overnight mail dump” in Clark County gave Democratic incumbent Jacky Rosen a narrow lead over Republican challenger Sam Brown in the state’s Senate race. In Arizona, population 7.4 million, 69% of the vote had been counted as of 10:00 a.m. on Thursday. Florida, three times larger, had posted full results by about 9 p.m. on Tuesday. Still, Kamala Harris has already conceded, and Democratic hopes now rest on the House of Representatives and a small handful of Senate races.

But the result does raise a question: What if the election had been close? Let’s step back to where we were a few days ago. In the run-up to the election, Barack Obama, representatives of the Harris campaign, and top Democratic surrogates such as Bernie Sanders had all issued warnings to their supporters and the media that the winner would most likely not be clear for days:

Indeed, on the Sunday before the election, Bloomberg ran an article on the Democrats’ fear of Trump “prematurely” declaring victory on election night—something that would only be possible, Bloomberg noted, “if there was a substantial error in polling.” Harris campaign chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon issued a video statement warning that Trump could declare victory but telling Harris supporters not to be “fooled” or “worried.” In a Monday briefing with reporters, Dillon reiterated that Trump would attempt to declare an illegitimate victory and said that results for Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—at least one of which Trump needed to win the electoral college—would not be available until Wednesday.

That was paired with a suite of what we might call information operations run through the media in the immediate run-up to Election Day. On Saturday, the “gold standard” pollster Ann Selzer released a poll showing Harris leading deep-red Iowa by 3 percentage points, and in a manner that appeared to validate the Harris campaign’s thesis of the race: that Trump would suffer mass defections among older and college-educated white women, including registered Republicans (in the event, Trump won Iowa by 13.2 percentage points, for a 16-point polling miss). Harris operative and Obama veteran David Plouffe began pumping the media full of bogus stories about a massive last-minute swing to the vice president, on Friday writing on X that late-deciding voters were breaking “by double digits” for Harris and on Monday telling reporters that based on early vote data—which, as we explained here, looked uniformly positive for Trump—Harris could win all seven battlegrounds. On Election Day, handpicked hacks like Politico’s Jonathan Martin were fed vague, unsourced stories about gobsmacking turnout in heavily Democratic Philadelphia, which was sure to net Harris the margin she needed. And after early Election Day reports suggested low Democratic turnout in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Milwaukee election officials announced Tuesday afternoon that a machine for processing absentee ballots had been left in “insecure conditions” and that the count would have to be restarted from scratch. Absentee ballot results were not delivered until 3:24 a.m. on Wednesday.

None of this mattered for the presidential race. Trump dominated so thoroughly in Pennsylvania that independent analysts were calling it by about 10 p.m. on Tuesday, and the networks followed at about 2:00 a.m. Wednesday, allowing Trump to declare his Election Night victory. But the Milwaukee numbers, which couldn’t save the state for Harris but did flip the Senate race back to Democrats, still proved suspicious, at least according to the anonymous analyst @TonerousHyus (aka “Latinx Adjacent Doctor PhD”).

As Dr. Latinx and his online interlocutors point out, turnout as a percentage of the electorate in Milwaukee has declined in every election cycle since 2008, and the city’s population has declined as well. Moreover, urban turnout was down virtually across the board in 2024 relative to 2020; in Philadelphia, for instance, raw votes dropped by 46,000 from 2020 to 2024. In Milwaukee this year, however, the county reported 89% turnout—up 11% from 2020—and an increase in raw votes relative to 2020, despite the number of registered voters declining by about 25,000. Out of Milwaukee’s 324 wards, 160 reported more than 100% turnout relative to 2020, with more than two dozen reporting 200% turnout and four reporting at least 400% turnout (again relative to 2020). Milwaukee Ward 254 reported 600% of its 2020 turnout, despite Harris underperforming with Black voters across the country. And here’s how turnout looked in parts of the Oak Creek neighborhood:

Wisconsin allows same-day voter registration, which means that turnout over 100% is theoretically possible if officials accept ballots without immediately updating the registration figures as well. That said, these figures are, on their face, very difficult to believe. Dr. Latinx, who was an excellent guide to interpreting the early vote and modeling the electorate, now estimates that the city might have produced about 30,000 fraudulent ballots, though he claims he is still collecting his findings into a white paper that he will submit to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The current margin in the Senate race, which has been called for Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin, is 29,229.

Obligatory note of caution here, which is that there could be innocent explanations for these numbers: data reporting errors or, as some X users have suggested, a massive increase in turnout among Trump voters in Milwaukee. But considering the rhetoric that emerged from the Democratic camp in the run-up to the election—the expectation-setting about days of vote-counting, the “prebunking” of Trump’s claims to victory, and the seeding of bullshit stories of historic urban turnout—we should at least consider the possibility that there was a plan in place to “fortify” a second consecutive election—and that what prevented that outcome was a Trump victory so early and so decisive that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. 

Wednesday, Nov. 6

The Trump Landslide

On Tuesday night, Donald John Trump recaptured the presidency in what may be the greatest second act in American political history. While some states are still counting votes, it seems likely, as of our writing, that he will sweep all seven battleground states and become the first Republican since George W. Bush in 2004 to win the popular vote. The Republicans have already recaptured the Senate and are favored (92.4% chance, according to Decision Desk HQ) to retain their majority in the House of Representatives, though many of the competitive races won’t be called until later this week. But we know enough now to say that last night’s election delivered a decisive popular mandate for Trump and a decisive repudiation of the Democratic Party machine built by Barack Obama.
The election played out essentially how we suggested it might in our Oct. 30 Big Story. Our only regret is telling you not to bet the house on it, because if you’d done that, you would have made a fortune. We cannot, unfortunately, claim any special insight into the numbers; we merely had the luck or good sense to follow the right people, among them anonymous early-vote analysts such as @DataRepublican, @TonerousHyus, and @earlyvotedata on X, as well as allegedly “low-quality” or “right-wing” pollsters such as Rich Baris, Mark Mitchell, and the team at Atlas Intel. For months now, they have been saying that mainstream pollsters and pundits predicting a Harris victory were full of it. They were right. The late Harris surge in the polls was a mirage. The stories that recently appeared in outlets such as Politico about massive last-minute swings to Harris among independents, Hispanics offended by a comic’s Puerto Rico joke, and educated women—all of it was bullshit, invented out of whole cloth by Harris campaign operatives and repeated by some journalists, including Jonathan Martin, as if it were fact. In the end, none of it was real. The election wasn’t even close.

How did Trump do it? We’ve seen some suggestive exit polls showing, for instance, Trump winning more than 40% of the Jewish vote in New York City; that sounds right, but we’d caution that exit polls are notoriously unreliable. County data, on the other hand, is rock solid. So consider the following map from The New York Times, which shows virtually the entire country shifting massively toward Trump and the Republican Party since 2020:

And consider this chart, also from the Times, which breaks down vote shifts by county type:

To put that in simple terms: Pretty much the entire country shifted toward Trump. That includes deep-blue strongholds. The New York Post reported Wednesday morning that Harris was leading New York by a little more than 11% with 95% of votes counted—the worst performance by a Democrat in the Empire State since Michael Dukakis in 1988. Trump cracked 30% in New York City—also the best performance by a Republican since 1988, driven by a 35% improvement in the Bronx relative to 2020 and improvements of 20% and 16.5% in Manhattan and Queens, respectively. Finally, Trump blew the doors off of several heavily minority counties across the country, flipping Florida’s Osceola County (home to a large Puerto Rican population) and Texas’ 97% Hispanic Starr County. He won the latter by nearly 16% after losing it by 5% to Biden—a 21-point swing in four years. It was, as Ryan Girdusky observed on X, the first time Starr County had voted for a Republican since 1892.

We’ve seen some talk of a “realignment election,” with the Republicans broadening their appeal among the multiracial working class while the Democrats become more entrenched in affluent white suburbs. We’ll have to wait for more detailed demographic breakdowns to say for sure, but what the above table suggests to us is something different: a “whole of society” (to borrow a term) rejection of Kamala Harris and her party. Punchbowl’s congressional reporter, Max Cohen, cited a Democratic House source this morning who summed up the result nicely: “This was a total and complete repudiation of the Democratic Party. People are not buying what we’re selling. Period.”

Indeed. In the wake of this election, there will no doubt be calls for unity and restraint from the people who spent the past half-decade attempting to undo the results of the 2016 election, censoring speech, weaponizing the federal government and intelligence agencies against their political opponents, prosecuting Trump and his allies and supporters, and more recently running a full-spectrum propaganda campaign to demonize him and his supporters as fascists and Nazis. They gambled their credibility and any right to a presumption of good faith, pushing America’s institutions to their breaking point in their effort to win. And they lost—“bigly,” as the president-elect might say.

We, too, would like to see national unity, and a healing of the scars of the past decade. But first, there needs to be justice.


Park MacDougald is senior writer of The Scroll, Tablet’s daily afternoon newsletter.


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