Most striking and telling stats of the U.S. election

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The big remaining questions are how unchecked U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s and the GOP’s power will be — and how boldly they intend to use their mandate.

The big moment

It’s useful before we start to catch up on where we stand, because the 2024 election is technically over but not completely decided.

Trump has, of course, won the presidency by what’s likely to be a wide electoral college margin. As of now, he has 292 electoral votes — more than the 270 required — but he is favored to wind up with 314 electoral votes. That would be the most for a Republican president-elect since 1988. He should also win his first popular vote, where he leads by more than three points.

Many races remain undecided for the House and Senate, which will say a lot about how much power the GOP has. Republicans will hold 52 to 56 votes in the Senate after flipping a number of seats. It’s actually possible right now that Democrats flip the House, but it’s unlikely. If they don’t, Republicans will have the presidency, the Senate, the House and a favorable conservative 6-3 Supreme Court majority.

That’s power.

Those House and Senate margins are important in the years ahead. And Democrats actually did significantly better down ballot than in the presidential race (their losses at the Senate level right now are attributable to a trio of red states).

But there is no escaping the fact that Trump just experienced a remarkable victory. To put that in context, let’s run through a number of striking statistics — and what they tell us.

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46 percent: The percentage of Latinos that Trump won, according to the most recent exit polls. It’s the highest number for a Republican presidential candidate in at least 50 years — eclipsing George W. Bush’s (disputed) 44 percent in 2004. Trump also won a majority (55 percent) of Latino men.

16 points: Trump’s margin of victory in Starr County, Texas, the country’s most heavily Latino county on the U.S.-Mexico border. He lost the same county in 2016 by 60 points. Trump surged in many heavily Latino counties near the border.

47 percent vs. 46 percent: Vice President Kamala Harris’s favorability rating in exit polls vs. Trump’s. It’s looking like Harris might actually have been the candidate more voters liked, but voters still chose Trump by a significant margin.

26 points: The margin by which Trump won the nearly 1 in 10 voters who didn’t like either candidate. It’s the third time he’s won these voters by a wide margin — he carried them by 17 points in 2016 and 27 points in 2020 — and it reinforces that his character problems are not a major issue for voters.

6 points: Trump’s current margin of victory in Dearborn, Michigan, the country’s first Arab-majority city. Harris is winning just 36 percent here, about half of Joe Biden’s 68 percent in 2020. Green Party candidate Jill Stein is taking 18 percent, despite taking just less than 1 percent statewide. Polls suggested Arab Americans could desert the Democrats over the Biden administration’s handling of the war in Gaza, and it clearly happened here.

8 points: Harris’s margin among women. That would actually be Democrats’ smallest margin since 2004 — despite their hopes that abortion rights and nominating a female candidate would mobilize women.

11 points: The “gender gap” between Harris’s share of men and women, with men more likely to favor Trump. That’s actually a somewhat normal gap, and it would suggest this wasn’t largely about men being unwilling to vote for a woman.

Tied: The vote (49-49) among voters who said abortion should be “legal in most cases.” In the 2022 midterms, Democrats won these voters by 22 points, 60-38. That underscores how little the abortion rights issue did for Harris and how Trump mitigated it by keeping the issue at arm’s length.

3.6 points: The average amount by which Harris’s margins underperformed Democratic Senate candidates in the five swing states that featured Senate races. It’s plausible that Democrats could hold most of those seats despite Harris losing. That fact, along with the House results, reinforces the idea that voters were willing to vote for Democrats — just not so much Harris in the presidential race.

91 percent: The percentage of counties with at least 90 percent of votes recorded that shifted toward Trump from the 2020 election.

8.1 points: The average shift toward Trump in urban core counties. While he gained mostly in rural areas in the past, this time the gains got bigger the more populous an area was (including in major suburbs).

11 points: Trump’s average gain from 2020 in the margins in Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and New York — some of the states that saw the biggest shifts toward him.