Carrie Dann: Will Voters Show up for Republicans When Donald Trump Isn’t Atop the Ballot?

First Person is a series of quick videos from the Cook Political Report editors exclusively for our premium members.

This week, Carrie discusses a comprehensive new analysis of voter data from the Pew Research Center that estimates that even if every voter in America had turned out in 2024, Donald Trump still would have won according to new 2024 analysis.

Transcript:

Everyone. I'm Carrie Dann, the managing editor of The Cook Political Report. And today is a very exciting day if, like me, you're a data nerd. The Pew Research Center put out a report that they put out after every election since twenty sixteen called its validated voter report.

Now this is a really complicated process. It takes months and months of painstaking work. But what makes this so important is what Pew does is it matches its participants in a huge nationwide survey with voter files so they can actually verify whether voters voted in the twenty twenty four election or not. That means that we have this amazing granular data about who turned out in twenty twenty four, how that compares to previous cycles.

And perhaps most interestingly to me in this report, what nonvoters did because they're surveying all kinds of people, and they can ask people, did you vote? And then they can check it. Here is what I found the most exciting about this report, and it's something that really just turns political articles of faith on their head. Right?

In every election that I've covered and certainly before that as well, there was one maxim in American politics that always seemed true, which was that in a presidential election, the more people who voted, the better Democrats did. That was because Democrats were more likely to turn out people who don't always, you know, vote in every election. Right? Younger people, people who are a little bit disaffected, minority voters.

Democrats always wanted to get out the vote. High turnout elections. Great for them. Turns out in twenty twenty four, the opposite was true.

This is the extent to which Donald Trump has really remade American politics and his own coalition. So the popular vote in twenty twenty four. Right? Donald Trump had fifty percent of the popular vote.

Kamala Harris had forty eight percent. What Pew was able to do is go back and look at what nonvoters said they would have voted for. Right? So they didn't turn out, but Pew asked, hey.

Who would you have voted for? And here's what's kind of amazing about this. Forty four percent of those nonvoters said they would have voted for Donald Trump, and only forty percent said they would have voted for Kamala Harris. This is the opposite of what happened in the two previous elections.

Nonvoters tended to say, I would have voted for the Democrat. Now they're more likely to have said, I would have voted for Donald Trump. What that means, and this is sort of earth shattering to me, what that means is that if every single eligible voter in America had turned out in twenty twenty four, Donald Trump still would have won. So how did Donald Trump do that?

He remade the Republican coalition into something that unlike what we've ever seen before. You've heard this stuff before. Right? He was able to make gains with young voters, make gains with minority voters.

He was able to pull independence towards him and away from Kamala Harris. But this dataset really is amazing because it can look back at previous elections and the current ones and see how that coalition has changed. Now if I say seventy eight percent, that seems like a very large number. Right?

That is the percentage of Donald Trump's twenty twenty four coalition that was white voters. But compare that to the previous five elections, that number was a lot closer to the high eighties. So Donald Trump's coalition has gotten significantly more diverse even in comparison to his victory in twenty twenty twenty sixteen and then the voting electorate in twenty twenty. His the Republican coalition is just becoming simply less white and more diverse.

The opposite, and this is also amazing, is happening for Democrats. For Democrats, the coalition that turned up for Kamala Harris was actually a little bit less diverse than in previous years. And there's no group that better encapsulates what's happening with the Republican coalition than Hispanic voters. Pew did this huge deep dive into that particular group because not only were they the group that moved the most dramatically towards Trump in twenty twenty four, they're also really important for the twenty twenty six election.

All in all, this data shows that that gain that Trump made with Hispanic voters was pretty sticky. There were more Hispanic voters who voted for him in twenty twenty than showed up four years later than Hispanic voters who voted for Biden in twenty twenty and decided maybe not to show up for Kamala Harris. This is so important for twenty twenty six. Out of the forty races that the Cook Political Report, rates as either lean or toss-up, ten of them have a big Hispanic population.

This dataset is gonna be on my mind every day until the November election next year. I bet it'll be on yours too because there is one overarching question that rules the twenty twenty six midterms. Will voters show up for Republicans when Donald Trump isn't at the top of the ballot. You can follow it all on cook political dot com.

Check it out.