“According to the exit poll, 35 percent of voters nationally rated the “state of democracy” as the most important factor to their vote. Eighty-one percent of these people voted for Harris and just 17 percent for Trump. But the economy was the next-most-influential issue. Among these voters, Trump led 79 percent to 20 percent. In the end, abortion did not rate as highly as Democrats might have hoped; only 14 percent rated it as their biggest concern.
It’s possible that inflation contributed to the growing divide between high-income voters and low-income voters. According to the exit poll, Democrats increased their vote share by 9 points among voters living in households that make more than $100,000 dollars a year. Among households making less, which account for about 60 percent of voters, Republicans gained 12 points on margin.”
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“In addition to economic headwinds and deteriorating margins with their base, it looks like Democrats also simply had bad turnout. So far, around 137 million ballots have been counted for the 2024 presidential race. Predictions of final turnout are hovering somewhere in the neighborhood 152 million votes. That would be a decrease from the 158 million who voted in 2020 and would be equivalent to about 61 percent of eligible voters. That would be a decline from 66 percent in 2020.”
https://abcnews.go.com/538/donald-trump-won-presidency/story?id=115556511
“an analysis using data from the States of Change project, sponsored by, among others, the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress, indicates that, even if black turnout in the 2016 election had matched that of 2012 (it dropped from 62 to 57 percent), Clinton would have still lost. On the other hand, if she had managed to reduce her losses among white noncollege voters by a mere one-quarter, she’d be president today. That’s an issue of persuasion, not turnout.”
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“In 2016, the age cohort that really killed Democrats was voters ages 45 to 64, who had split evenly in 2012 but leaned Republican by six percentage points four years later.”
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“it’s a mistake to assume that Democrats would benefit disproportionately from high turnout. Trump is particularly strong among white noncollege voters, who dominate the pool of nonvoters in many areas of the country, including in key Rust Belt states. If the 2020 election indeed has historically high turnout, as many analysts expect, that spike could include many of these white noncollege voters in addition to Democratic-leaning constituencies such as nonwhites and young voters. The result could be an increase in Democrats’ popular-vote total — and another loss in the electoral college.”
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“Stanford political scientists Andrew Hall and Daniel Thompson, for example, studied House races between 2006 and 2014 and found that highly ideological candidates who beat moderates for a party nomination indeed increased turnout in their own party in the general election — but they increased the opposition turnout even more. (The difference was between three and eight percentage points.) Apparently, their extreme political stances did more to turn out the other side to vote against them than to turn out their own side to vote for them.”