One thing that is certain about the 2024 election cycle is that it will be studied, debated, and analyzed for years to come in terms of what went wrong for Democrats and what went right for Republicans, especially President-Elect Donald Trump and his spectacular political comeback.
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It was something few of his critics saw happening even as the polls at first showed a media-driven momentum shift to Vice President Kamala Harris after she became the Democrat presidential nominee, and then a close race, with Trump breaking through in early October, not long after his campaign ran ads on Harris’ extreme position on taxpayers footing the bill for transgender surgeries for convicted, incarcerated criminals – including illegal immigrants.
One person who didn’t allow himself to be influenced by the various (bogus) narratives being spun about Trump’s campaign and its chances was CNN data analyst Harry Enten who, as we reported, repeatedly pointed out how Trump was making inroads with traditional Democrat voting blocs at rates not seen by past Republican nominees, and how that ultimately could be the gamechanger that decided who won on Election Day.
Among them were young voters, female voters, black and Hispanic voters, and Asian-American voters as well.
On Thursday, Enten did another deep dive into the numbers, looking beyond the areas Trump won to big blue cities like San Francisco and Chicago that he lost but where he still gained significant ground, finding some pretty staggering double-digit percentage increases across the board, with the driving forces behind them in those cities being illegal immigration and crime:
“You remember back in 2017, you know, the liberal cities were ‘the resistance,’ the core of ‘the resistance.’ What happened in 2024? You think of a major city in the United States. Donald Trump put up the best Republican performance for a Republican nominee for president in at least 20 years, if not the entire 21st century,” Enten said. “We‘re talking about Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, across the map Donald Trump put up historically strong numbers for a Republican candidate for president in places that truthfully, if you would have asked me 8 years ago, I would have never thought possible.”
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After pointing out how Democrat attitudes on battling crime had dramatically changed from 2014 to 2024 – and to Trump’s advantage at that – Enten then pointed to New York City in particular as an example of the dramatic shifts in support for Trump:
“You know, look, obviously we‘re sitting here in New York talking about this, in Manhattan, where there was a swing. But when you look at the map of New York City, the biggest city in the country, the big swings right, yes, it was in Manhattan, but it was also in other parts of the city,” Burnett said. “And that gives you a real sense of who was driving the ship.”
“Yeah, exactly right. It was in The Bronx, it was in Queens, it was in Brooklyn, and if you break it down by racial areas, you look at the assembly district that has the most Asians in it, you see a massive shift, a massive shift,” he said. “Look at this. Donald Trump gaining 27 points versus where he did four years ago. The highest Hispanic percentage in an assembly district, a 25-point shift. Highest Black percentage for an assembly district, a 6-point shift. What’s going on is if 2017 or 2016 was the election of the White working class moving over to the Republican ranks, the 2024 election was Trump doing historically well with minority voters.”
Watch:
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Though down-ballot candidates sometimes have to play it a bit differently in their specific races due in part to demographics, going forward Republicans seeking public office (or reelection to one) should use the Trump campaign’s strategy as a blueprint of sorts for how they run their respective campaigns. One way they can do that is to not assume that all voters in particular voting blocs are on the same page on the important issues because clearly, times – and voter priorities – are changing.
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