2024 Election Autopsy: Results vs. Forecast

HILO, Hawaii — Donald Trump’s decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris may have come as a surprise to many in the Democratic party, but it didn’t come as much of a shock to us, despite HawaiiLocal.News tilting five of the seven swing states in Harris’ favor, shown on the map above and in the tables on our Election Forecast page.

Based on the probabilities in our final forecast, we acknowledged a Trump victory was very possible, with the odds of him winning the Electoral College just shy of a coin flip. We even had Trump ahead in our forecast shortly before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race a little more than 100 days before the election, shown on the map below.

The popular vote tally, on the other hand, did take us by surprise. Trump is all but guaranteed to win the popular vote as the remaining ballot tabulations wind down, despite being impeached twice by the House of Representatives and earning felony convictions in the state of New York.

Turnout was less of an issue than we thought it would have been, as the numbers appear to be very close to what they were in 2020, with some states seeing more voter turnout while others lagged slightly. It is clear that expected voting behaviors in urban population centers didn’t win this election, as Trump made gains among groups that historically lean Democratic while Harris underperformed in almost every county deemed to be a safe Democratic stronghold, including all of the counties in Hawaii that she ended up winning.

At the risk of sounding condescending, given what was at stake, disinformation, emotional populism, and dissatisfaction with the failure of both establishment Republicans and Democrats to solve existential problems, won this election.

What this means for the United States remains to be seen, but we’re not too optimistic. Americans made their choice. Now they must live with the consequences of it, whether good or bad.

– HawaiiLocal.News