How Did Trump Win? // Turnout, numbers and the election

The celebrations by Republicans had hardly started when the Democrats began pointing their fingers in a thousand different directions, trying to explain why Vice President Kamala Harris lost her bid for the presidency in such an extreme way.
Getting a more complete picture of what happened on Election Day will take time. States release exact data about voters only after several months. Researchers will be combing through that and other data, trying to find information that will help them figure out the factors influencing the election, and pundits will make plenty of certain pronouncements that will likely be wrong.
Was it simply economics that made Trump popular? Are Americans biased and unwilling to vote for a Black-Indian woman? Did the far left swing the vote because of Gaza? Did the Democrats move too far to the left? Was it simply part of an anti-incumbent trend around the world, perhaps because of inflation? All sorts of theories will be thrown around by people paid to give their opinions, and the Democrats may well grasp at some of them.
But even if the exact reasons for Trump’s victory are unclear and may remain that way, looking at the data that we do have can give us some idea of what happened and what it may mean.

The basic numbers
Trump’s win was exceptional and in some ways total. He won every swing state, and the percentage of the electorate that voted Republican increased in every state—even those he lost—over the percentage of the vote he got in 2020.
He was also the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004.

Groups and their votes
One of the most striking things about the vote for Trump appears to have been his appeal to minorities in a way that was once thought impossible for Republicans. In the early 2000s, pundits and politicians believed that there was a demographic challenge that would make the Democrats unbeatable. As the percentage of minorities in the US grew, they said, the Democrats would get a larger and larger slice of the electoral pie.
This year’s vote appears to have shown that that is just not true. Exit polling showed that Trump outright won the vote of Hispanic men and that he increased the percentage of Hispanic women voting for him. He also doubled the percentage of Black men voting for him.
Beyond exit polling (which has inaccuracies), vote totals from areas with minorities showed that there were lower percentages of people voting for the Democrats than in 2020.