How Trump won — and how Harris lost — the 2024 election

Democrats’ recriminations started immediately, but Trump’s victory was decisive enough that there may have been little Kamala Harris could have done.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Democrats were counting on fed-up women to elect America’s first female president. Instead, dissatisfied men helped return Donald Trump to power. 

The president-elect's two eldest sons helped him pick a running mate who once decried “childless cat ladies,” while his youngest son, Barron, encouraged his father’s pivot to podcasts in an effort to reach other young men, a typically reliably Democratic voting bloc that split evenly this year.

“I think the gender gap is going to be the story of the next 20 years. Truly,” Democratic strategist Caitlin Legacki said. “There are a lot of men who feel like they’re being left behind, that society doesn’t have a place for them. And if we don’t want a civil war breaking out along gender lines, we’ve got to figure that out. That is the biggest widening gap in American society.”

The entire country shifted right, like other Western democracies in the inflationary post-Covid era. And with the electorate in a foul mood, Vice President Kamala Harris struggled to separate herself from a deeply unpopular incumbent who waited too long to step aside and whose aides had undermined her for years.

Trump, meanwhile, made strides in his promise to assemble a multiracial working-class coalition, winning 45% of Latinos and 55% of Latino men —  records for a Republican presidential candidate — while making gains in blue states and pushing his margins among non-college-educated and middle-income voters to new heights, according to NBC News exit polls.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/how-trump-won-harris-lost-2024-election-rcna178840

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