The 2024 election featured far more Republicans than Democrats in the electorate, reversing a longtime trend in party identification dating back to the New Deal in the 1930s.
Exit polls showed Republicans outnumbering Democrats by 5 points in the AP VoteCast Survey and 4 points in network exit polls, writes Republican Party pollster and political strategist Patrick Ruffini on his Substack webpage, The Intersection, on Tuesday.
Until the current election, Republicans only came out even with Democrats during the 1994 "Republican Revolution" and the period just after the 9/11 attacks.
Before late President Ronald Reagan revamped the GOP's image during the 1980s, Democrats had held the advantage in their party's identification, which sometimes reached a 2-1 margin during the 1960s and 1970s, Ruffini notes.
Reagan's landslide in 1984 narrowed the Democrats' advantage, even though Republicans won several national elections before then, including with late President Richard Nixon's win in 1972 by 23 points.
But in 2024, it was the first time Republican identifiers outnumbered Democrats, coming four years after 2020, when the Republican and Democrat turnout was roughly even.
Meanwhile, for the time being, there should be a 50-50 party split, when "good Democratic years will mean more Democratic identifiers in the electorate, and good Republican years will mean more Republican identifiers," said Ruffini.
It's not known, though whether the trend will continue to hold, but this time around it could, as party polarization is in play, he wrote. Democrats who identify as Democrats and vote for the party's down-ballot candidates while voting for Republicans on the federal level are becoming "extinct."
President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, is a "cultural icon" who rallied votes from young and minority voters to choose a Republican for the first time, meaning he may become a transformative figure for his party as Reagan did in the 1980s.
In addition, Republicans enjoyed a turnout boost through the failure of the Biden administration, but can also be true that the long-term voter baseline is now more Republican.
Polls have also been showing Republican gains in the long and short term. Voter registration data reveals that voters were switching parties and registering as Republicans throughout the Biden years, reflecting the Democrats' unpopularity under outgoing President Joe Biden and an unwinding of the Democrats' identification advantages.
And as new voters come online, registration figures will reflect the partisan alignment under the Trump era, Ruffini writes.
This election year also marked a specific Republican turnout surge, with the strongest counties for Trump in the 2020 election now outvoting the strongest Biden 2020 counties by around 10%.
"When we compare the actual 2024 turnout to a model trained on 2020 turnout, the split in party registration states is 2-3 points more Republican in 2024," Ruffini writes.
Party ID can also be used to predict election outcomes, as in 2020 and 2024, the pattern of Democrats overperforming reversed itself and Trump underperforming the Republican margins both times.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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