Reddit AMA: Yahoo News Political Reporter Andrew Romano answers readers' questions

On Wednesday, shortly after Donald Trump secured victory in the 2024 presidential race, Yahoo News Political Reporter Andrew Romano participated in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) about the election.

The format allows users of the popular social media site to ask questions and get answers directly from experts, Q&A style. (Read the full AMA here.)

Below are some of the highlights from Andrew’s exchanges with users. Andrew’s analysis of Trump’s victory and takeaways from election night are also available.

DarkenRaul1: Why is every outlet so confident Trump won when it’s unclear (at least to me) that he has yet to get mathematical certainty of winning. Until this point, isn’t there still a chance Harris could flip some battleground states since all that’s been “projected” so far is just the statistical victory? I guess another way to frame my question is why is the race called from the statistical victory and not the mathematical victory which will come out in only a couple of days.

ZombieChief: How is a race called with only a small percentage of the votes in? I saw several races that were pretty close (4-5% difference) and had less than 20% of the votes in that were called for one candidate. How do they know the trailing candidate can't catch up in the uncounted 80% of the votes?

I get what you’re saying when you characterize Trump’s victory as “statistical” rather than “mathematical” (at this point). There are still some outstanding votes — votes yet to be counted — in all of the swing states that have been called for Trump: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

But here’s the thing: more than 95% of the ballots cast in those states have been counted, and there just aren’t enough votes left out there for Harris to catch u

When you read that you might think, “Wait a minute. Harris is only behind in, say, Georgia by 2 percentage points. What if she wins most of the 5% that still needs to be counted?”

But the analysts who call elections for a living — at Yahoo News, we rely on the Associated Press — know the demographic and geographic composition of that remaining 5%. They know how those kinds of voters — rural voters, urban voters, suburban voters, white voters, black voters, Latino voters, college-educated voters — have voted across the rest of the state and the rest of the country. And they never “declare a winner until [they] are 100% confident” — because of those larger factors and dynamics — “that the trailing candidate can't catch up," as the AP recently put it.

Mathematically speaking.

Coeus_42: What’s your takeaway on what Kamala’s campaign did wrong? And how will democrat campaigns change moving forward?

Democrats are going to be debating these questions for the next four years (and beyond). But right now my answer — as boring as it might sound — is that Harris didn’t lose because she did something wrong. She lost because Biden is historically unpopular (58% disapproval rating); because the current “America is on the right track” number is historically low (just 26%); and because voters associated Trump with “change.”

To illustrate this point, the political scientist John Sides charted presidential approval ratings in June of an election year — going all the way back to 1952 — against the incumbent party’s final share of the presidential vote a few months later. He found that Biden’s paltry approval rating was consistent with the Democratic candidate — in this case, Harris — winning 48% of the vote.

Harris’s current share of the popular vote? 47.5%.

This doesn’t mean Harris ran a perfect campaign. And it certainly doesn’t mean people will stop floating other explanations for why she lost. But as Sides tweeted Wednesday, Trump’s gains “were widespread, so explanations should start with the broadest factors — not with bespoke stories about states, cities, counties, and groups.”

I would add campaign strategy to that list.

Cultural-Narwhal-488: Do you have any preliminary data analysis associated with this election? Did Kamala lose potential voters and/or did Trump have a lot more support than predicted? What demographic made the biggest difference in terms of what was projected vs what actually happened? How much did it matter that Kamala was a woman of color in this election? I would like to understand why trump won by such a large margin and I’m looking for an answer grounded in data.

All of these numbers come from preliminary exit polls, so take them with a grain of salt. But compared to 2020, Trump’s margins this time were 11 points better among young voters, 12 points better among rural voters, 25 points better among Latino voters and 33 points better among Latino men. Those stats go a long way toward explaining where Trump’s margin of victory came from.

As for Harris, the exits show her improving on Biden’s 2020 margin among white, college-educated voters by 7 points. Among college-educated white women, her margin was 11 points better than Biden’s. But that wasn’t enough to offset Trump’s gains among voters without a college degree, which helped him narrowly flip the suburban vote and lose by less in key cities like Philadelphia.

How much of this had to do with Harris being a woman of color? No idea. Probably some. But given Biden’s historic unpopularity and this year’s terrible right-track/wrong-track numbers, I suspect Democrats might have lost this election even if the incumbent vice president had been a white man.

Fge116: Based on exit polls and current vote counts, which voting demographics were the most surprising as far as who they voted for?

Mimosatipples: With all the talk about immigration policies, why is Trump seeing an increase in voters of color?

I was most surprised by the swing toward Trump among Latino voters, especially in light of his vow to launch the largest mass deportation effort in U.S. history — a program that could sweep up people who have lived in America for decades and send them to giant detention camps.

Four years ago, the exit polls showed Trump winning 32% of Latinos. Right now, they show him winning 45%.

Nationally, Latino men seem to be driving this shift. In 2020, they voted for Biden (59%) over Trump (36%) — again, according to the exit polls. This year, they voted for Trump (54%) over Harris (44%).

Now, exit polls can be a bit fuzzy — and pollsters have struggled to precisely quantify the Latino vote in the past. But if you look at counties where Latinos make up a majority of the electorate — places like the Bronx in New York or El Paso in Texas — you also see a 20-point shift in Trump’s direction. In Texas’s much-smaller and almost uniformly Latino Star County, on the border with Mexico, that shift was something like 76 points.

For an explanation of why Latinos swung toward Trump, this quote from Mike Madrid (an anti-Trump GOP strategist who wrote a book on the subject) sums it up:

“Latinos, U.S.-born Hispanic men specifically, are not going to college at rates faster than any other race or ethnic group. Those with college degrees are increasingly Asian and white in this country. Those without are Black and brown. The white share of the blue-collar workforce is shrinking dramatically, as is the voter base. And minority voters are voting much more along economic class lines than they are as a race and ethnic voter.”

Wil_daven_: Now that we're starting to see numbers/results from the election, I find it striking that so many younger voters have swung to the GOP/Trump. What insights do you have on those trends? Is it ideological? Is it a consequence of a terminally online culture? Do they simply not remember or know about Trump's first administration?

I find it striking too! To visualize the rightward shift among young voters, check out this chart. It shows women aged 18-29 going from a +32 Democratic group in 2020 to +18 Democratic group in 2024. Meanwhile, men ages 18-29 have gone from +15 Democratic to +13 Republican (!) over the same period.

Teens and 20-something men voting Republican isn’t some alien phenomenon. Remember Alex P. Keaton? But Barack Obama was so popular among millennials that anyone who came of age politically during the late aughts/early 2010s could be forgiven for thinking young people would always be hopey-changey progressives.

That’s clearly not the case now. But why? I have to think that identity-politics backlash, diminished economic prospects (post-Great Recession, post-pandemic) and ever-more-algorithmic online echo chambers (like Elon Musk’s X) all have something to do with it. Also, Trump has been the dominant gravitational force in U.S. politics for nearly 10 years now. He's going to attract some younger people simply because he's there.

Anon-eight-billion: Talk to us about your POV on political disengagement. The surge in Google searches of “did Biden drop out?” on Election Day. How do we measure or respond to total political disengagement?

I’m not sure how we measure disengagement, but I’ll tell you this: People who cover politics for a living — or hang out on r/politics — vastly overestimate how closely “average Americans” actually follow this stuff. The Google search trends showing clear Election Day spikes in queries like “Did Biden drop out?” (or, even better, “Who is running for president?”) were a depressingly hilarious reminder that a lot of voters — especially undecided voters, who tend to be much less engaged and informed than committed partisans — are not making detailed pro-and-con policy lists when deciding how to cast their ballots. They’re picking and choosing based on identity and vibes. Maybe some big structural changes would help — like abolishing the Electoral College so candidates have to compete everywhere and making voting compulsory, à la Australia, so everyone has to tune in.

Cover thumbnail photo illustration: Yahoo News; photo: Rebecca Noble/Getty Images