President-elect Donald Trump shocked Democrats this week by winning at least five battlegrounds and the popular vote to secure a resounding victory in the Electoral College.

Here is a deeper look into some of the numbers that illustrate how Trump improved his performance across racial and gender lines and how shifting voter turnout led to a Harris loss.

Voter turnout

With some votes still being counted in Arizona and Nevada, there were some 17 million fewer voters this year than during the 2020 presidential election. The disparity appears to be driven largely by low voter turnout from Democrats.

Federal Election Commission data show that 158,429,631 people voted in 2020. Set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic during an election year when mail-in ballots and early voting became a hugely successful strategy pushed by the Democratic Party, that presidential race generated the highest voter turnout ever. With all votes tallied, Trump received roughly 74.2 million votes to Biden’s 81.2 million.

Four years later, more than 140 million people cast ballots during the 2024 presidential election. With the Republican Party now aggressively pushing early voting, Trump received more than 72.7 million votes to Harris’s 68.1 million votes.

The ‘blue wall’ comes down

Low voter enthusiasm among Democrats hit Harris hard in a trio of swing states dubbed the “blue wall.” Michigan, Wisconsin, and the all-important Pennsylvania largely decided the outcome of the election, and Trump flipped them all.

Meanwhile, self-identified independent voter turnout reached the highest on record, outperforming Democrats and tying with Republicans. It turned out to be bad news for Harris, as Trump improved his performance among the voting bloc by 4 percentage points over 2020, per data from Edison Research exit polling.

Political strategists had warned that Harris would have to overperform in Philadelphia in order to win battleground Pennsylvania. Instead, she received roughly 50,000 fewer votes in the pivotal city than Biden did in 2020, while Trump garnered more support in the Democratic bastion than a Republican presidential candidate has in years.

Although registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 7 to 1 in the City of Brotherly Love, Harris saw the lowest turnout of any Democratic presidential candidate in decades, per an analysis from the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Harris also saw low voter turnout in Wisconsin’s most populous city, Milwaukee. While she failed to receive as many votes as Biden did during the 2020 presidential election, Trump’s support from black voters across Wisconsin nearly tripled his performance with the demographic four years ago, rising from 8% in 2020 to 22%.

Meanwhile, staggering increases in Arab American support for Trump in Muslim majority strongholds across Michigan likely carried him to victory in that battleground state.

Trump’s gains over his 2020 performance were the highest in Hamtramck, whose Muslim mayor made headlines for endorsing him last month. The former president received 42.7% of the vote with all ballots counted following the election, which marked a steep increase from the 13.4% he received in 2020.

Breaking gender and racial barriers

Historically a safe bet to vote for Democrats, Latino voters flocked to Trump en route to his victory. Across the country, he saw a 14-point bump with Hispanic voters over his 2020 performance, per exit polls.

Perhaps nowhere was his deepened connection to Latinos displayed as well as in Starr County, Texas. The area holds more Hispanic voters than any other county in the United States. Trump lost it by 60 points during the 2016 presidential election. On Tuesday, he won it by 16 points.

Trump also made gains with black voters. He improved his performance with the demographic by 5 percentage points over his showing in 2020, according to CNN exit polls.

The shifts with black and Hispanic voters in Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Detroit, all heavily minority metropolitan cities and critical Democratic strongholds, likely proved to be the tipping point in the blue wall states.

Harris didn’t just suffer from low voter enthusiasm from minorities. Her performance with women also declined. After Biden won the female vote by 15 percentage points in 2020, Harris secured them by just 10 points, according to CNN exit polls.

During his victory speech early Wednesday morning, Trump credited his win to “the biggest, the broadest, the most unified coalition” in U.S. history.

“They came from all quarters — union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American,” he told cheering supporters. “We had everybody, and it was beautiful.”

The ad

A critical component in Trump’s victory came from his persistent focus on issues that resonated with working-class voters, whether black, Latino, or white, many of whom expressed dissatisfaction with inflation and policies at the border.

In the middle of October, the Trump campaign released an ad that argued Harris and her allies had their priorities wrong, focusing more on niche, progressive agenda items than working-class people.

Following similar pitches, the ad targeted Harris’s pledge to provide transgender operations to prison inmates and her support for allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports. It concluded with a tagline that proved to be compelling to many voters.

“‘Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,’” the narrator said as a headline flashed across the screen saying that “Trump tax cuts benefited middle, working-class.”

Trump allies had spent at least $17 million on the 30-second ad and similar pitches, airing them over 30,000 times by Oct. 19, according to an NPR analysis.

Between Oct. 7 and Oct 20, GOP affiliates poured roughly $95 million into the pitch and similar ads and dropped more money on them than ads about housing, immigration, and the economy “combined,” per a PBS report.

The top-dollar gamble paid off in a big way for the Trump campaign, ultimately transcending gender and racial lines, and resonating with female, Latino, and black voters.

It ended up shifting the race 2.7 percentage points in the former president’s favor, per a New York Times report.

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In other numbers that spell dismal news for Harris, reports indicate that her campaign has run up a $20 million debt, despite having $118 million on hand as of Oct. 16.

The Harris campaign has yet to deny the revelations from Politico and Breitbart News. The Washington Examiner reached out for comment but did not receive a reply at the time of publication.