Here is the New York Times article on lower education for Trump voters.
Key to Trump’s Win: Heavy Losses for Harris Across the Map
By Ashley Wu, Lazaro Gamio, Robert Gebeloff, Elena Shao and Michael C.
Bender Nov. 19, 2024
It may seem like a clear story: Donald Trump won the election by winning
the most votes. He improved on his totals, adding about 2.5 million more
votes than four years ago. But just as consequential to the outcome were
Kamala Harris’s losses: She earned about 7 million fewer votes compared
with Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s performance in 2020.
Ms. Harris failed to find new voters in three of the seven swing states and
in 80 percent of counties across the country, a New York Times analysis
shows. In the places where she matched or exceeded Mr. Biden’s vote
totals, she failed to match Mr. Trump’s gains.
We can’t yet know how many Biden voters backed Mr. Trump or did not
vote at all this cycle. But the decline in support for Ms. Harris in some of
the country’s most liberal areas is particularly notable. Compared with Mr.
Biden, she lost hundreds of thousands of votes in major cities including
Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, and overall earned about 10 percent
fewer votes in counties Mr. Biden won four years ago.
Mr. Trump, by contrast, found new voters in most counties, with
significant gains in red states like Texas and Florida and also in blue states
like New Jersey and New York.
Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of
Virginia, acknowledged that Biden voters who swung toward Mr. Trump
played a part in Ms. Harris’s loss, but pointed to low Democratic turnout
as the larger factor.
“They just weren’t excited,” Mr. Sabato said of Democratic voters. “They
were probably disillusioned by inflation, maybe the border. And they
didn’t have the motivation to get up and go out to vote.”
The national rightward shift is a continuation of voting patterns seen in
the last two elections. Even in his 2020 defeat, Mr. Trump found new
voters across the country. (Both parties earned more votes in 2020 than
in 2016.) And although Democrats outperformed expectations in 2022,
when some had predicted a “red wave,” they lost many voters who were
dissatisfied with rising prices, pandemic-era restrictions and immigration
policy.
At the local level, three distinct patterns help illustrate the overall
outcome in 2024:
1. Where both candidates gained votes, but Trump gained more.
In hard-fought Georgia, both parties found new voters, but Mr. Trump
outperformed Ms. Harris. For example, in Fulton County, which contains
most of Atlanta, Ms. Harris gained about 4,500 votes, but Mr. Trump
gained more than 7,400.
In addition to his gains in the Atlanta area, Mr. Trump won new voters in
every other part of Georgia. He flipped the state back to Republicans after
Mr. Biden’s win there in 2020. He similarly outran Ms. Harris where she
made gains in Wake County, N.C., Lancaster County, Pa., and Montgomery
County, Texas.
2. Where Trump gained a little and Harris lost a little.
In Milwaukee County in swing-state Wisconsin, Ms. Harris lost 1,200
voters compared with Mr. Biden’s total in 2020, while Mr. Trump gained
more than 3,500.
Ms. Harris still won the county at large, but her margins there and in other
liberal enclaves of Wisconsin were not enough to hold off Mr. Trump’s
victories in rural, blue-collar counties that voted Republican in 2016 and
2020.
Democrats’ inability to maintain their vote totals in battleground states
was also apparent in the crucial areas around Charlotte, N.C., Flint, Mich.,
and Scranton, Pa.
3. Where Trump gained a little and Harris lost a lot.
Mr. Trump won Florida’s Miami-Dade County, becoming the first
Republican to do so since 1988. But again, Ms. Harris’s loss was just as
much of the story as his gain: Mr. Trump won about 70,000 new votes in
the county, while she lost nearly 140,000.
Other counties that Mr. Trump flipped had similar vote disparities. In 21 of
these 77 counties, Mr. Trump received fewer votes in this election than in
2020, but the Democratic vote drop-off was much steeper. This happened
from coast to coast, from Fresno County, Calif., to Pinellas County, Fla.
Joel Benenson, the chief pollster for Barack Obama’s presidential
campaigns, said he thought Democratic turnout was hurt by the party’s
lack of a presidential primary. (Mr. Biden dropped out of the race in July.)
That process, he said, helps energize core voters who get involved with
volunteering, making phone calls and knocking on doors early in the year.
“That was a real challenge for Vice President Harris, who had a short
runway and would have benefited from a real primary season,” Mr.
Benenson said. “Republicans had a contested primary — even with a
former president, they didn’t just hand it to him.”
Mr. Trump was clearly able to harness enthusiasm beyond his base. He
made gains across almost all groups ranging in demographics, education
and income, including those that traditionally made up the Democratic
coalition. Ms. Harris failed to match Mr. Biden among the same groups.
Pre-election polls showed minority voters swinging toward Mr. Trump, and
he appeared to make gains with those groups. He picked up votes in
majority-Hispanic counties and in Black neighborhoods of major cities, a
preliminary analysis of precinct data shows. But he lost votes, as did Ms.
Harris, in majority-Black counties, especially those in the South where
turnout dropped overall.
Mr. Trump found new voters in more than 30 states, including in the
battleground states that were the sites of robust campaigning. His gains
were modest in most other places. Ms. Harris was able to improve on Mr.
Biden’s performance in only four of the seven battlegrounds and just five
states overall.
John McLaughlin, Mr. Trump’s campaign pollster, said the campaign was
focused on finding supporters who were not reliable voters and making
sure they turned out to the polls. He said that internal polling showed that
voters who cast a ballot in 2024 after not voting in 2022 or 2020
supported Mr. Trump, 52 percent to 46 percent.
“The strategy was very much like 2016, to bring out casual voters who
thought the country was on the wrong track,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “These
voters blamed Biden and Harris and generally had positive approval for
Trump.”
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