Brent Buchanan
Appearances
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
Miami-Dade has been really interesting because it has a highly Hispanic population, but it's more Cuban and Venezuelan, and that's not really replicatable across the rest of the country. What I was looking at was, if you remember from the New York City Madison Square Garden rally where you had that comedian that opened for Trump,
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
you know, make a joke about Puerto Ricans living on an island of garbage. And maybe I'm getting that specific reference wrong, but the Puerto Ricans make up the majority of the Orlando area of Hispanics, which is a very different population of Hispanics than Cubans and Venezuelans in Miami-Dade County. So when I saw that he was doing well there, I knew that
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
the mainstream media narrative that Trump was going to be hurt by Hispanics because of that comedian's comment was simply just chatter within the bubble in the elitist class and not actually something that was going to hurt him with voters. And then you could also go over to Maycomb County
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
Michigan, which is a very working class county, that continued to shift towards Republicans, and that's a highly unionized county. And so that also would tell you that, okay, if Trump is winning union voters who've been moving his direction And they're showing up in significant veracity that this is going to continue across the rest of the swing states and really the country as a whole.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
And I think what's most fascinating in all of this is there was really three elections occurring. There was elections in the swing states, which didn't have huge shifts from the prior election. I mean, you did see a big difference in like Arizona, for example, where Biden barely won it. Trump got over 5% of this time. I think that was more a normalization of the state than anything else.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
But then you had elections in red and blue states and places like Florida and Texas got even redder and places like New Jersey. Trump got that to a single digit race. And so where money was spent, significant money was spent. The elections were closer, even though Republicans did well. And where money was not spent, Republicans just blew it out of the water.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
And that was a combination of two things. One, Republicans showing up strongly, but also Democrats staying home.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
It definitely did. And what's interesting about the top priority question is that it became very politically polarized. And if you remember how the Harris campaign closed, they basically closed the same way that Biden tried to frame the end of the 22 midterms elections. And that was Trump is a threat to democracy. And so we have to defeat him to protect our democracy.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
And so that was an issue that really showed up in a lot of our polling. It was somewhere in the top two or three leading up to the election. In our final exit poll on election day, it ended up being the number two issue, almost tying with inflation and economy. But if you said threats to democracy was your number one issue, Harris won those voters by 69 points.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
And if you said inflation economy was the issue, Trump won those voters by 60. Illegal immigration, Trump won those voters by 89 points. Wow. You know, of course, Harris wins the abortion voters. And then when you look at all the other issues, you know, kind of the minor issues strung together, Trump barely lost those. So it was very much these like kind of two...
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
Republican leaning issues and Democrat leaning issues that were hyper partisan, but I really believe that that was just simply turnout mechanisms and Republicans did a better job turning out voters who cared about inflation and economy plus illegal immigration than Democrats did turning out voters who said abortion and threats to democracy, which to me are their luxury issues.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
If you're way at the top of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you can care about threats to democracy and abortion. But if you're trying to make ends meet and care for your family, you care about inflation and economy and illegal immigration, and that's what won at the end of the day.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
Huge. And I think it's not necessarily the thing that helped with the election. I think it is a symptom of a deeper problem for the Democrats. And that is they have gone off into this woke ideology where, you know, you've got to believe all these things or you're a bad person when Republicans are like, well, we we kind of like. normal. We like normalcy. And that's really out there.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
And Democrats have just gone so much into this politics of identity. And the majority of the country is rejecting that. So we did a survey post-election for the American Principles Project, which took a lot of the research that y'all did and then turned it into advertising. And we tested several of the key campaign themes, one being to that Kamala Harris is for sex changes for children.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
Another one was that she wants to give your tax dollars to have prisoners get sex changes. We tested the men and women's sports, and we tested the they, them, Trump is for you messaging. What was really fascinating about this, and I think it is one of the reasons that the diploma divide that has existed with white voters, where if you're non-college white, you're shifting hard right,
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
that has now gone into the non-white population. What we found out is that among Hispanic voters who said that sex changes for minors made an impact on their vote, 52% of them said it made them more likely to vote for Trump. Of Black voters who said that men and women's sports was a concern for them, 45% said it made them more likely to vote for Trump. So I think...
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
These cultural issues potentially had a bigger impact in moving non-white voters to Trump, while the economic issues were more at play for continuing these white non-college educated voters moving to Trump. And that's a really unique story coming out of this election.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
Overall, he gained ground because in all 50 states moved to the right. Some of the states barely moved to the right, like I think Washington state, for example, was 0.2% more Republican. But then New York state was 12% more Republican. California was 7% more Republican than the last election.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
But when you break out some of the individual demographic groups, Gen X was the largest generational shift towards Trump. In 2020, they were Republican plus one, Trump plus one. In this election, they were Trump plus 13. You know, seniors kind of stayed the same. Gen Z moved towards Trump. Millennials actually moved against Trump. There were some other shifts in...
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
the college educational attainment, where if you had a college degree and you're white, you got more democratic. But that was probably the only group you can point to and say, this got worse for Trump, but it's been a 20-year trend. And so I don't think we can say this is just Trump's fault.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
I would say there's a whole lot more things to look at and say that Trump is now taking that diploma divide into the non-white community. One thing I'll point out is that, you know, Kamala Harris, when she ran for Senate in California, ran as an Indian American. And in this election, she ran as a Black American.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
And college-educated Indian Americans actually were one of the groups that shifted furthest to Trump. And so, like, if that does not define how poorly she did in this election, that she screwed up the one group that should have moved towards her, college-educated Indian Americans. Trump was able to get to those folks, and it was really the economic concerns for them.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
Well, it's not a huge population in the country. So it's kind of a hard group to dig into. You know, Vietnamese and Indians and Chinese all go into that bucket of Asian Americans. But if you were a non-college educated Asian American student, you started to shift towards Republicans that hadn't really existed in the past.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
And so I think Democrats are walking into future elections asking themselves, who is our coalition? Because they're essentially now the party of the coastal elites and the white college educated coastal elites.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
Well, it was still, you know, women lean more towards Harris and men lead more towards Trump. But I think the bigger story is the fact that historically in every single presidential election going back for half a dozen presidential elections, women made up 54 percent of the voters. And in this election, women only made up 53% of voters.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
And you're probably saying, well, Brent, why are you saying that 1% is a big shift? But that is a huge breakout trend. And Trump made a strong play for the bro vote on the podcast he went on, the way he did his advertising, and kind of how the imagery of those advertisements, maybe in the music of the advertisements was really geared towards men. And it didn't turn off women.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
Women 55 plus, for example, voted for Kamala Harris, but they only voted for her by three points. Under 55 only voted for Harris by 14 points. Those are really small margins compared to what we saw in 2020 on this gender and age divide.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
And I think it's one of the unsung stories of this election in that Trump really bypassed the mainstream media and went to all these alternative media sources that happened to speak more to men. You know, Joe Rogan is mostly a male audience. Theo Vaughn is almost exclusively a male audience. And they're also amplified on YouTube.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
When you looked at some of the key counties within the swing states, you could see that he was doing so well within those counties that what made those counties good for him could be replicated across the other swing states, including places like Arizona and Nevada, which were still counting votes or just beginning to end the polls at 10.02 p.m.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
And when you go look at where people consume their information and how they voted in the presidential election, the alternative media sources, if you're getting your news from those places, you are much more likely to have voted for Trump. Donald Trump. So when we ask this media consumption question, one of them is, do you get your media from streaming apps like The Daily Wire?
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
We didn't say like The Daily Wire, but that would fall in the category of a streaming app. If you get your news from a streaming app, you voted for Donald Trump by 26 points. Wow.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
Yeah, they did a really good job moving Kamala Harris's image from upside down, really badly upside down, like Joe Biden, to, you know, only slightly upside down. But they could never get her further than that because they could only reach a certain audience.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
So of people who told us in our exit poll that they get their news from national television like ABC, NBC, CBS, they voted for Harris by 39 points. newspapers, if that's where you get your information, you voted for Harris by 48 points. But then if you get your news from talk radio, it's Trump plus 40, Facebook, Trump plus 22.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
So you start to see that they're losing their grip on their ability to move anything past a certain point. And I think we're just going to continue to see that degrade and degrade as folks realize that they're not giving them truthful information and they're telling people what to think and they're not giving them all the facts as they tell people what to think.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
And that's why we're having this segmentation of folks who are listening to podcasts like this, who are subscribing to streaming services. And I believe we're going to find more and more of that as people seek out the truth for themselves.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
No, I think the progressive wing of the Democratic Party will never learn the lesson from this election because they're the same people who ran ads that essentially said, you voters are stupid. If you knew this information, you'd vote the right way, which meant for Kamala Harris and Democrats.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
And they believe that the reason that they're not winning is because enough people don't know what they know. And they don't know how to say it without being condescending to the majority of the country. So what I think we saw in this election was that this trend of wokeism and progressivism, voters finally stood up and said, this is enough.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
Republicans need to realize that this is not a normal election for us. Donald Trump is a unique individual that can communicate with folks in a certain way, and that is why you saw in a lot of races him get more votes than anybody else on the ticket that was a Republican. And the lesson for Republicans out of this need to be Don't be scared to jump into the cultural issues.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
Talk about economics in a way that normal people understand. Don't tell them the economy is good when they feel the economy is bad for them, which is basically what Democrats did. And you have to go into these communities and start building relationships with folks because we just can't take for granted that these non-white voters who moved to Republicans are going to stay with us.
Morning Wire
Decoding Trump's Win: 2024 Election Analysis | 12.15.24
They moved to Trump. They did not move to Republicans. And there's a whole lot of work to still be done in building real relationships, not just Election Day relationships with these folks.