Henry Olsen’s analysis reveals Trump’s 2024 win hinged on loyal Republicans and white working-class voters, plus a historic Latino shift—Colombians, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexicans, and Dominicans—tipping Arizona, Montana, and Alaska, with more GOP than Democratic identifiers for the first time since 1928. Persuasion over demographics drove Hispanic voters, while Democrats faltered mobilizing young women despite abortion-focused campaigns. If Republicans deliver on immigration, economic growth, and cultural conservative policies like dismantling DEI, a lasting realignment could shrink progressive influence, unlike past leaders who didn’t reshape party identity. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clayton with this week's interview with Henry Olson.
Henry Olson is senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
He hosts a podcast, excellent podcast on elections called Beyond the Polls, and his stuff has appeared everywhere.
I love to talk to Henry because he is the best numbers guy I know.
And the reason he's the best numbers guy I know is he's the most honest and unbiased numbers guy I know.
He will tell you the truth whether he likes it or not.
And that's exceptionally, exceptionally rare.
I have depended on him behind the scenes a number of times to tell me what's going on.
And I wanted to let him share his wisdom with you about what just happened.
Henry, it's great to see you.
Thank you for coming on.
Well, it's great to see you.
What an interesting election it was.
I'll say.
And as almost always, you got it right beforehand.
You knew what was going to happen.
And you have seen Trump coming.
You actually saw Trump coming before Trump was Trump, before there was a Trump candidacy.
You knew exactly what was going to take over the Republican Party a long, long time ago.
So I really want, I'm watching the left kind of try and figure out what happened.
And they're just not, they don't own a mirror.
They haven't got the ability.
So let's just start with some of the numbers.
You know, we keep hearing from the New York Times, oh, it's men did this and all this.
What do the numbers tell us?
Who was at the heart of this victory for Trump?
Who was at the heart of this victory were the groups of people who were with him four years ago, which is the Republicans who didn't jump ship in 2016, plus the white working class who had flocked to him in 2016.
And that's now such part of our background that we forget how revolutionary that was, that people who had voted for Democrats for decades, who were counties had only been won by Republicans in massive landslide years, are now solidly Republican.
So they formed the base.
And they were joined this year by a lot of people of color, particularly Latinos that we see massive swings to the right in heavily Latino areas, regardless of national origin, Colombians, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Mexicans, Dominicans, you have it.
They voted more Republican than they voted ever, along with some Asians and some blacks and Native Americans.
If you go looking at Native American areas, whether it's in Arizona or Montana or even in Alaska, you will find a significant shift to the right.
And that's why Donald Trump won is he won, kept his vote from last time, got a small gain among whites, but very small, and primarily swung people of color, largely people who don't have a four-year degree.
Wow.
And what about the gender divide?
It was no larger than usual.
That what you've got is a certain subset of men like populist figures.
They liked Ronald Reagan.
They liked Donald Trump.
A certain subset of women like female identitarian politics.
They've been Democratic for decades.
And that's what creates the gender gap in this country, the dual movement in that direction.
And nothing really changed is that we did not see a massive outpouring of women.
We did not see a massive outpouring of the young.
All the emphasis on abortion and democracy rallied the Democrats, but did not rally the independents and certainly did not rally people who were non-traditional voters.
And that's what the Democrats have been banking on.
There is one fundamental thing about this election that remains underreported, and that is this is the first time since 1928 in a presidential election that more people went to the polls saying they were Republicans than Democrats.
Wow.
Wow.
And do you see that as do you think this is a permanent shift?
I mean, it seems to me like the Republican Party is reordering itself along lines very much predicted by you.
I mean, you said many, many years ago that you thought that Republicans had forgotten Reagan's loyalty to the working class, and that was where they had gone wrong.
And this is obviously a reorganization.
But I hear some people saying, well, this is all Trump.
It's all his personality.
The guy's obviously a gigantic figure.
Is that true?
Do you think is this a temporary shift?
Or is this something that Republicans can look forward to?
Well, you know, first of all, this is a long time coming, is that Democratic partisan identification has been going down and Republican partisan identification has been going up for all of the last eight years.
It's hastened in the last three years.
But all that time, if you were listening to the mainstream media, look at the Republican Party blowing itself up.
Look, we're standing for democracy.
Democrats were going down and Republicans were going up.
Secondly, this is the sort of thing that's happening around the world, which is that working class people are leaving the left and joining the right.
A smaller number of former people from the right who are well off are joining the left.
The net math is that a populist conservative coalition is possible almost everywhere if the two sides want it.
But you have to have success.
What I think you've got is the possibility of a multi-decadal shift.
What you have to do then is deliver on your promises.
Trump has to be able to say in four years, I eliminated illegal immigration.
I created a working economy.
I brought peace to a world that is at war or at conflict.
And I have pushed back the woke virus so it's no longer infecting your community and it's in retreat.
He does those four things.
Hell yes, to use the phrase often bleeped out, but not on your podcast.
That yes, it could be very well that the Republicans' four-point advantage this time becomes an eight or a nine-point advantage in 2028, but you have to have success.
So let's talk about that a little bit.
One of the things that always, people are always saying it's the economy stupid.
And obviously inflation, it was amazing to me, amazing to me to watch the media lecture people about how good the economy was as if people don't know whether they can afford a dozen eggs or not.
As if we turn on NBC to find out whether we can afford a dozen eggs.
But when people say it's the economy stupid, I always feel it's a little bit reductive.
I mean, people have lives.
Some of the stuff, they talked about the effectiveness of Trump's transgender ad.
How do you think this distributed?
How do you think the issues were distributed among people?
If you look at the polls, inflation and the economy are easily number one and number two.
That often tends to be the case.
I think what you tend to find is that low information, you know, the sort of person who listens to this podcast is not the average voter.
You know, in this week's podcast, my podcast, I go down and I talk about public opinion on all these controversial nominees.
And when you get to Pam Bondi, you know, who's not as controversial, the attorney general picked, you want to know what percentage of pure independents have an opinion of her?
29.
71% of pure independents have no opinion about whether they like or dislike Pam Bondi.
And that's what you get is that when people have low interest in, but they do vote, low interest in and low news consumption of politics, they will default to the things that are in their daily lives.
So I think that overstates the importance of the economy.
The Democrats ran a campaign at the beginning.
Remember when JD Vance was weird?
Well, guess who's weird for the average non-politically obsessed voter?
It's the Democrats.
They, them, rather than us.
It was a wonderful summation of they're weird, we're normal.
And normal doesn't mean ideologicals.
One of the things that conservatives are going to have to come to grips with is they've got a lot of people in this party who are not allergic to government action, who may be Christians, but they rarely attend church.
You know, the sort of people who weren't Republicans in the old days, and they have to find a home for them.
And if they don't, that chance for a multi-decadal realignment will be lost.
But simply being the not weird party, the I care about what you care about party, went a long way.
And Democrats don't want to hear this, but a majority of Americans don't think Donald Trump is weird.
Conservatives And Government Action00:03:05
Yeah, that's really interesting.
And part of that, too, I mean, one of the reasons, this was an election that I actually got right even before I read your column, because I sat there and I thought, you know, the flow of information is on our side, that we are debunking their lives faster than they can create them.
How important do you think?
I mean, people are talking about this, although they're talking about it now.
But how important do you think the new media was in this election?
Media is incredibly important because what it does is it means that the low information voter can find information in different places.
The high information voter is always going to find that information.
You know, like when there's three major networks, they're going to be the people reading National Review in 1964, going to their local, you know, going to the John Birch Society and getting a copy of None Dare Call It Treason.
You know, that was information, alternative media in 1962.
What you've got now is the gatekeepers don't control the information flow anymore, and it infuriates them.
For the first time since the 1930s, they have competition.
You know, remember the day, well, you and I don't remember the days.
Remember reading about the days when newspaper, you'd have four newspapers in Washington and 11 in New York City, and you could have competition for ideas and news.
Well, we went through a period where that wasn't really the case.
And now we're back in that period again.
And that means that people like Trump, people like the Vaikhak Ramaswamy, people like most Republicans have alternative ways of reaching the audiences who are open to them.
And that means that the power of the media to set the narrative is gone, completely gone.
If you want to stay in beautiful shape like me, you got to get yourself a Lumen.
It's the world's first handheld metabolic coach.
It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath.
The app lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs and gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and even stress management.
I've always wondered why some days I feel energized and other days I'm dragging, even when I'm doing the same things.
That's where understanding your metabolism comes in.
It's really the center of everything your body does.
And any meaningful health journey takes commitment.
But what I love about Lumen is how it helps guide those daily decisions.
When you're ready to make lifestyle changes, Lumen is there with personalized insights every step of the way.
Here's what I do.
I get up, you get up like in the morning, you just breathe into it and you get a personalized nutrition plan on this app and gives you idea for your day and what kind of nutrition you need.
And you can even track your metabolism before and after workouts and meals to understand exactly what's happening in your body.
Now, usually after workouts, I'm passed out, but after meals and in the morning, it's great.
So if you want to stay on track with your health this holiday season, go to lumen.me slash clavin to get 15% off your lumen.
That's l-u-m-e-n.me slash clavin for 15% off your purchase.
Lumen makes a great gift too.
And I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, I know how to spell lumen.
Anyone can spell lumen, but how do you spell clavin?
Here's a little ditty to help you remember.
Believe in Change00:15:13
There are no easy 30%.
You mentioned before that, you know, conservatives are going to have to get used to the fact that this is a broader coalition.
In order to win, you can't just have conservatives.
I mean, we make up, what, like 20% of the country, something like that?
I mean, 35, but 35.
Okay, well, that's better than I thought.
But still, I mean, we cannot have a government that they did this to Trump a little bit before, where the conservatives just freeze the government until they get what they want.
As conservative as I am, I understand that we have to, to have a coalition, you have to have a coalition.
Where do you think the center of the Republican Party is going to end up in the next, just taking the next four years, where do you think the center will end up?
Well, you know, assuming a success, what we're going to do, if this is the sort of historic success that often comes in elections like this, what we'll be talking about is an R plus six to R plus nine electorate in 2028.
We'll be talking about Republicans going from 35 to 38 or 40 percent of the electorate on election day.
And so what I'll be doing is telling you what I think that 38 to 40 percent will look like, which will be different than what the primary voter looks like.
That 38 to 40 percent is going to be centered on the center of American life.
It's going to be somebody who has probably dropped, the median person will probably have dropped out of a four-year college, as opposed to somebody who got an associate's degree or somebody who's graduated from a state university.
That'll be a median income below the average of American, below the American median.
The American median is $80,000 for a household.
The Republican majority will be $65,000.
It'll be somebody who is white because 70% or something of America is white, but it'll be less white than it has ever been for a Republican Party.
If the Republicans are R plus eight in 2028, they will probably have a majority of the Latino vote.
Very slim, but they'll probably have a majority of the Latino vote.
And religiously, this will be a group of people whose center is declaring themselves as Christian and going to services on Easter.
Yeah, you know, what they'll do is they will look like America.
Yeah.
That's what America, you know, the Democrats like to say, we look like America.
Well, no, you actually look like the Harvard class, you know, after diversity and DEI.
You know, like, here's your feminist and here's your black liberal feminist.
And, you know, a Republican majority party is actually going to look like America.
And that means it's not going to look like the Republican primary electorate of 2008.
Which is what?
Which is more like Republican.
The Republican primary electorate of 2008, 2012 was majority college, I believe, not majority non-college.
It's now majority non-college.
It was much more explicitly and behaviorally Christian.
And it was also one that will continue to be well behind the Democrats in national name identification.
Obama won in a D plus nine year.
You know, so yeah, you could elect your purists, but you had less than 30% of people who would tell pollsters that they're Republican on general election day.
You know, so the reason I focus on this is that for all of our lives and our fathers' lives and our fathers' fathers' lives and mothers and mothers' mothers lives, the Republican Party has been advancing uphill.
It wins elections by convincing people whose natural tilt is to the Democratic Party that they should go Republican.
And back in the worst days, you know, it meant the Me Too Republicans that conservatives ran against, but it meant you had to learn how to speak Democrat in order to win.
Ronald Reagan, a former Democrat, excelled at it and made many of them Republicans.
Donald Trump, a former Democrat, excels at it as well.
The 2024 election was the first one since 1928 where to win, Democrats had to learn to speak Republicans.
They don't know how to do it.
And if Republicans are successful, Trump is successful, they will then have to go through the learning curve that the Republicans went through between 1932 and 1948, which was how do we speak Democrat when we spent all of our lives speaking Republicans?
And the fact is they were out of power for 20 years because they couldn't figure out how to do it.
You know, people who say, well, it's all Trump.
Well, of course it has something to do with Trump, but it's never all one person.
And the person usually cements party loyalties.
And we see this, you know, it's not like when Trump's not on the ballot, suddenly all these people who became Republicans in 2016 revert back to being Democrat.
No, they vote Republican when Trump's not on the ballot.
They're Republicans now.
They weren't in 2010.
They are now.
And so it's like with Truman.
Republicans, that man, FDR, was off the ballot.
Surely we revert to natural Republicanism now.
No, the Republican candidate got 43%.
Same thing with the Democrats after Reagan.
We've got that effect little New England guy who isn't very courageous, George Herbert Walker Bush.
And Mike Dukakis lost by seven points because it wasn't just about the man.
It was about the changes in ideas.
And a successful four years means that the Republicans will have built what they have not had since Babe Ruth was hitting cleanup.
Henry Lewis Gehrig was cleanup.
But yes.
So I heard another poll reader say, well, no, the Republican Party is not changing because the lower ballot, the Republicans lower down on the ballot did not do as well as Trump did.
And this was all about Trump.
So you're disagreeing with that, though.
You're saying that this is a- I should disagree with that.
Look, there tends to be a lag time when people are changing parties.
They'll split their tickets.
And what we saw this time was more ticket splitting than we've seen in the last eight years.
You know, in 2016, when people thought Trump was going to lose, you had Republicans vote for Clinton, but vote Republican at the bottom of the ticket.
In 2018, a lot of them decided, no, no, no, I really don't like this new Republican Party.
And they became Democrats.
So what we had in 2024 was this lag.
People who are Hispanic who voted for Trump for the first time, not the people who voted for him in 2020, but there are a lot of voted for him the first time.
Some of them didn't vote Republican.
A successful two years means more of them will vote Republican in 2026.
More of them will vote Republican in 2028.
With a successful four years, we'll go back to a more ticket splitting, reduced ticket splitting, more partisanship as people decide, am I comfortable in this party I just took a chance on?
So all Trump?
No.
Largely Trump.
Trump has put together a coalition that was there for the taking for years, that the entire rest of the Republican Party refused to see back in 2012 and 2016.
And he's done it with unorthodox methods, but an amazing amount of skill.
But yes, it's enduring after him.
So this is obviously just a guess question.
I'm not expecting you to hit the nail on the head with this, but I'm just wondering, you know, you were talking before Trump.
You were talking about the fact that America was no longer as religious as it had been and the Republicans were sort of playing to it as if it were and those people just weren't there anymore.
And now you're talking about a Republican Party that looks like America and America looks less religious than it used to be, which is, I think, undeniable, right?
But do you think the shift to the right continues into a shift to conservatism itself in the same way that the shift, the Clinton shift to the Democrat Party continued on into leftism?
Yeah, well, the thing about the Clinton shift wasn't really a shift.
That what happens a lot of times is you have triangulators.
Tony Blair in Britain, Eisenhower was a triangulator.
You know, I'm not traditional Republican.
I'm not a Democrat.
I'm something in the middle.
But because it's a tactical shift, it doesn't actually hold.
You know, Bill Clinton was somebody who did a tactical shift and they won a couple elections, but he didn't actually leave any legacy.
He didn't change the Democratic Party.
In fact, he radicalized it because the element in the Democratic Party that didn't want to shift at all opened up into revolt.
And we've been dealing with 28 years of the increasingly strong revolt of the left that started with the resignations in 1996 over Clinton signing the welfare bill.
So Clinton didn't really change.
And what Trump seems to be promising is a change, not a tactical shift.
You know, time will tell.
If it proves that Trump is simply another Clinton, another Eisenhower, then all of this will fade.
But what I'll say is that Eisenhower won elections, but he didn't accomplish a partisanship.
He won elections, but Democratic edge and partisanship grew, not shrunk during his presidency.
Clinton won elections, but he didn't break out of the partisan boundaries that Ronald Reagan set after his winning reelection of 1984.
So they interpreted their age, but didn't change their age.
What Donald Trump is doing right now is changing the age, and that's fundamentally different than what happened in Clinton and Eisenhower.
You know, one of the weirdest, I mean, to that point, one of the weirdest phenomenon I've seen after the election was like the day before the election, all of the leftist craziness, the DEI and the transgenderism and, you know, the idea that Israel somehow had a right to exist, but not a right to actually fight back against attacks, all this kind of crazy stuff that had grown up on the left was absolute sacred written.
You know, it was the day before the election, it was like completely ensconced in the media and anyone who didn't believe it was a bigot or hated Arab people or whatever it was.
The day after the election, it was all like, yeah, we were joking.
You know, we didn't believe it.
We didn't believe it at all.
It was like, I keep saying it's like daddy came home.
You know, yeah, we were just messing around, drawing on the walls, and now we're going to stop.
This thing about DEI, which seems so offensive to me, the transgendering of children, which seems to me Hitlerian, I mean, not to mince words.
Is this gone now?
I mean, we look, I see companies dumping DEI who yesterday, I mean, like two weeks ago were telling us it was the absolute wonderful thing and now they're throwing it out the window.
Is this something that we're going to see now?
Is this just going to go away or is the left, I mean, it seems like the left is never going to go away, never going to stop pushing this stuff, but maybe they've just lost.
I guess that's what I'm asking you.
Have they just lost or is it just a setback?
Well, you know, some of Some of what had been going on was people going with the flow.
And it looked like the left was winning culturally.
So people who don't care about culture and people who care about looking, you know, being acceptable in the eyes of those that set public opinion started to move in that direction.
What they found to their shock was that the people they thought said public opinion actually don't represent public opinion.
But that doesn't mean that DEI and all that stuff is going away.
What it means is that the left has to fight harder.
And what we know is that there's a lot of people who are really true believers of that.
These are people who will listen to this and say, okay, well, we'll abolish the words DEI, but we'll do 80% of what we wanted through another means and so forth.
And they'll launch the resistance.
And a lot of this will depend on is Donald Trump serious about combating this.
Is he serious about having somebody in charge of the civil rights law who will bring lawsuits for discrimination on the basis, because DEI is basically discrimination on the basis of progressive favorite characteristics.
That violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Will the Civil Rights Department bring lawsuits against these?
If they don't, they'll know that they can escape.
If they do, then, but this requires a Republican Party to adopt some of the tactics of the left, which is to say not to be allergic to the use of political power to enforce cultural norms, in this case, cultural norms that are consistent with American, instead of just standing by the wayside and saying, well, you know, it's really nice if you're all American, all these people who really don't care.
They believe they represent the future.
They'll listen and say, well, that's very nice.
Stop us if you can.
Well, if Donald Trump is serious, he'll stop them.
And then we'll start to see a real retreat.
If not, what we'll just see is a temporary setback.
But within the Democratic Party, I will be interested to see whether somebody actually is willing to fight.
You have the question of Beth Moulton, who makes his statements, I believe, on transgenderism, and his local Democratic Party is talking about primary, you know, congressman in Massachusetts.
The thing is that what the Democratic establishment has been unwilling to do for 20 years is fight the growth of radicalism within its party.
And it's gotten to the point now where they have to fight.
They have to say no action.
You know, Amy Klobuchar is asking 2000, you know, basically what's the difference between a socialist and a Democrat and not wanting to offend Bernie Sanders.
You know, she doesn't provide a coherent answer.
You're going to have to provide a coherent answer.
You know, is that if you're, and this is the sort of thing that Democrats in the 1940s were willing to do.
They had a fight with their left, and their left either left or, you know, basically moderated for quite some time in order to be relevant.
And the Democrats have to have that fight.
And I'm not convinced they want that.
Yeah, it doesn't look like it.
Yeah.
They want the benefits of having had the fight without having the fight.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's an excellent description.
Now, I hate to ask you this question because I get angry mail about it all the time, but I can't help it because I feel like I should.
Dinesh D'Souza, a guy I genuinely like and often respect, had to recently issue an apology for his film 2000 Mules, which was based on a false premise.
And I'm sure he was lied to about it, but he bought into it and he had to apologize for that picture.
Before I did an interview with him, which I felt kind of dissected the movie, I was very polite, but it did sort of take the premise of the movie.
But I wrote to you and you showed me why the big steel narrative simply was not in keeping with the numbers.
After this last election, there was some talk, where did these people who voted for Joe Biden go?
Where did they disappear to?
Voter Persuasion and Turnout00:02:49
They didn't just shift.
A couple of million of them seem to have just vanished, maybe more than a couple.
I mean, a group of voters seem to have vanished.
Is that in keeping with your reading of the polls, too, that these voters didn't shift over, they just stayed home?
Or no, what happened?
There's a couple of things.
First of all, in the seven swing states, turnout was not that, you know, that in many of these states, Kamal Harris got more votes than Joe Biden.
It's just that Donald Trump got many more votes than he got before, and he won all of them.
That is consistent with a 2020 was a fair and honest election.
And Donald Trump turned out new voters and persuaded some old ones.
That you take a look at Donald Trump does much, much better in Hispanic neighborhoods in Pennsylvania than he did in 2020.
And that means he persuaded people.
He got higher turnouts in a lot of these rural areas.
You know, is that you go into these areas that aren't growing in population, you know, he got an extra half a percent or 1%.
You know, 500 votes here and 1,000 votes here tunes into a 70,000 vote majority or something because there are so many small places where just little increases count out.
So where the Democrats didn't turn out to vote were safe Democratic areas.
And what I think what you had there was, first of all, there's population decline in a lot of them.
So we should expect fewer votes to be cast.
And a lot of those people moved to red states, which were also safe.
And they just, my vote's not going to matter.
My vote's not going to count.
So they decided not to vote.
But largely, this is a persuasion election.
And there is no, everything that happened in 2024 in these swing states was very consistent with the electoral map of 2020, which was consistent with the rural map of 2016.
You can explain what happens because by population change, voter persuasion, and small changes in voter turnout.
Interesting.
I've only got a second left, but could you just very quickly tell me what you mean by a persuasion election?
What I mean is that people who four years ago thought Joe Biden was the better choice than Donald Trump, the same people decided that Donald Trump is a better choice than Kamala Harris.
Interesting.
Take a look, particularly in these Latino communities.
There's no way to understand what happened on the border, what happened in Redding, Pennsylvania, what happened in Hispanic neighborhoods in Milwaukee without saying that one out of every 10 of those voters, to be very rough about it, one out of every 10 of those voters, or in some places, two out of every 10 of those voters, said, you know, four years ago, I was a Democrat and today I'm a Republican.
I'm going to vote for Trump.
That's a persuasion.
Persuasion Elections Explained00:00:46
Yeah.
Henry Olson, if you have, if you love politics, his podcast is called Beyond the Polls.
He writes that he's a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy.
You see his stuff in the New York Post, Washington Post, New York Times.
You're all over the place.
It's always great talking to you.
You really tell it straight and it's very refreshing.
Thanks a lot, Henry.
It's great to see you.
Thanks for having me back, Drew.
Well, it's really true that I always get angry, Mel after I talk to Henry Olson, not just because of big steel stuff, but because people would prefer to think what they think than to think what is actually shown in the statistics.
But Henry, no matter what he thinks, no matter what he believes, he will always tell you what the numbers say.
And I really appreciate that kind of honesty.
And if you want more scorching honesty, the Andrew Clavin Show is on Friday.