CNN data guru Harry Enten was stunned by the massive victory of President-elect Donald Trump had against former Democrat presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Republicans captured the White House, the Senate and are on their way to possibly keeping the House of Representatives giving the Party a mandate.
“Talk to me about how his support in this election compares to the past,” CNN anchor Kate Bolduan said to the analyst.
“You know, I think the breadth of the improvement that Donald Trump had — Holy Toledo! All right. Trump gained ground in 49 states and the District of Columbia compared to 2020. I went back to the record books. When was the last time a party gained in so many different places? You have to go all the way back to 1992, when Bill Clinton improved upon Michael Dukakis’s performance in 49 states, plus the District of Columbia. The bottom line is, no matter where you look on the map, Kate Bolduan, no matter where you looked, Donald Trump was improving where he did four years ago except for Washington state. It is no wonder that at this particular point, he looks like he’s going to be the first Republican to win the popular vote since George W. Bush back in 2004,” the analyst said.
“And to pull that off, he gained ground where with groups that Republicans do not generally count as part of their winning coalition or really at all. How much ground did he gain?” Bolduan asked.
“Again — Holy Toledo! It’s just like, oh, my goodness gracious! These are the types of groups that you would never have thought that Donald Trump would have gained so much support among eight years ago when he first won against Hillary Clinton,” the analyst said.
“Trump scores the best GOP showing among 18- to 29-year-olds in 20 years. You have to go all the way back to 2004. How about among Black voters? It was the best performance for Republican candidate for president in 48 years since Gerald Ford back in 1976. And among Hispanic voters, the exit polls only go back since 1972, but Donald Trump’s performance on Tuesday was the best for a Republican presidential candidate in exit poll history,” Enten added.
“He literally goes all the way back to history and breaks history. This is what we’re talking about, Kate Bolduan. Groups that you never thought that Donald Trump would do well among, even for a Republican candidate, that is what he did. If the 2016 election was about Donald Trump breaking through with White working class voters, this election was about breaking through and going to that Democratic coalition and tearing it apart,” he said.
Republicans did something for this election that they avoided in the previous one, and it appears to have been a deciding factor in creating not only a red wave but also a red tsunami.
Party leaders, including then-President Donald Trump, spoke against early voting in the 2020 election, but in 2024, they encouraged it, and it paid massive dividends.
The decision to encourage early voting assisted the GOP in securing low-propensity voters and giving President-elect Trump a historic victory that made him only the second person in history to be elected to two non-consecutive terms as President of the United States, the other being Grover Cleveland, who served from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897.
Pollster Scott Rasmussen appeared on the “John Solomon Reports” podcast on Wednesday, where he explained how the new strategy assisted Republicans in a historic victory, Just The News reported.
“I heard from a lot of Republicans who said, you know, ‘I don’t like early voting, I don’t think we should do this, but we have to win if we want to change the rules.’ So, you know, I don’t think this is an issue that’s going to go away, but it has changed the game,” he said.
“This idea of early voting is a relatively new phenomenon,” the pollster said. “When I started polling, it just didn’t exist except for absentee ballots. And in 2020, because of the pandemic, it took on a new form in ways that we never could have imagined just a couple of decades back.”
