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The Republican Party was in desperate straits in the weeks following the 2012 presidential election. There were several reasons. One, its losing nominee, Mitt Romney, was a poor candidate whom a significant part of the GOP base, and an even more significant part of the overall electorate, did not want. Two, its opponent, President Barack Obama, appeared to have found the secret to assembling a permanent winning coalition. And three, Republican leaders worried, sometimes publicly and sometimes privately, that the party was on the wrong side of some key issues, especially immigration.
Just four years later, with Donald Trump's out-of-the-blue 2016 victory, everything changed. Republicans had a strong candidate. The Obama coalition was crumbling. And the GOP, under Trump, began to change positions on some important issues.
Four years after that, even though Trump lost to Joe Biden, some of the trends that favored Republicans continued. And then came 2024, when the weakening of the Democratic Party accelerated under Biden and then Kamala Harris, and Trump won a historic comeback victory.
A new report shows this extraordinary change — from Republican despair in 2012 to triumph in 2024. It is not told from a GOP perspective. The report is by the progressive Democratic data-crunching firm Catalist, which sought to understand Democratic losses. But whatever the perspective, the analysts examined voter file information, precinct-level data, voting history, polls, and other numbers to come up with the most comprehensive picture yet of who voted how in 2024.
What is particularly valuable is that Catalist then put the 2024 information in the context of data from the 2012, 2016, and 2020 presidential elections. That way, we can see which direction each party was moving with individual groups of voters. Spoiler alert — it's a feel-good story for Republicans.
The trends are striking. Just go through the Obama coalition — especially black, Hispanic, and young voters. In 2012, when Obama was on the ticket, 96% of black voters voted for the Democratic candidate. In 2016, the first year Trump was on the ticket, black Democratic support ticked downward to 93%. Then it fell to 89% in 2020, and then to 85% in 2024. Among black men, support for the Democratic candidate fell to 79%. Support levels were even lower among young black voters.
The trend looked a little different but was still impressive among Hispanic voters. In 2012, 68% of Hispanic voters chose the Democratic candidate. In 2016, that number went up to 70%. But then it fell to 63% in 2020 and 54% in 2024. That's quite a drop. And again, the levels were even lower among young Hispanic voters.
The move was similar among Asian voters — 74% Democratic in 2012, 70% in 2016, 65% in 2020, and 61% in 2024.
Among young voters, the Catalist report included data only from 2020 and 2024, but among voters aged 18 to 29, support for the Democratic candidate fell from 61% to 55% in that time.
Apart from demographic categories, Catalist also looked at several groups of voters by voting frequency — those who had voted in every one of the last four elections, those who had voted in three of them, in two, in one, and those who had not voted in any of those four contests. In 2024, only the most loyal Democrats, voting in four of four elections, stayed with Harris in great numbers.
"Harris lost vote share among … younger voters, men, voters of color, and infrequent voters," Catalist wrote. "Trump did particularly well among these groups of voters, even in comparison to other Republicans in recent years."
Remember, the Catalist analysts are progressive Democrats. They focused their report on the Democratic Party's decline from 2012 to 2024. But those Democratic losses were Republican gains. The story is as much the GOP's increasing appeal to formerly Democratic voter groups as it is the Democrats' loss. And the change in the Republican Party's standing among voters was enormous.
After Romney's 2012 defeat, the Republican National Committee commissioned an "autopsy" — a report on what went wrong and how to fix it. Read today, the document's plaintive tone is striking. "Public perception of the party is at record lows," it said. "Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country."
The GOP prescription was to join with Democrats on the issue of immigration. "We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too," the report continued. "We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our party's appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only."
In one of the delicious ironies of history, the GOP accomplished its goal of broadening its appeal to minorities and younger voters by aggressively ignoring the advice of the party's top officials and by embracing a candidate some of the party's leaders rejected. Renewal came in the form of Donald J. Trump.
Trump led the party to win more votes from black voters, Hispanic voters, Asian voters, young voters, and voters who rarely, if ever, voted. And he did it while emphatically rejecting comprehensive immigration reform, which the 2012 GOP leaders believed would be their salvation. Trump rejected some other cherished Republican orthodoxies, too.
Most importantly, though, Trump succeeded among Republicans and then nationally by being a strong leader. It is safe to say he is a unique individual, both as a leader and as a man. There's no telling whether GOP gains will last beyond Trump's time in office. But for more than a decade, Trump has been building a Republican coalition that accomplished things the earlier GOP leaders thought impossible.