The Play by Play 2024 Election Recap

The Play by Play 2024 Election Recap

Hosts: Jack McFarlane & Nick Schlemmer

This week on The Play by Play podcast, Jack McFarlane and Nick Schlemmer discuss the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

• Early Insights on the 2024 Presidential Election
• Trump’s Popular Vote and Historical Context
• Republican Party Gains and Election Surprises
• Gen Z Voting Trends
• Voting Patterns and Key States
• Quote of the show

Thank you for joining the show today! Remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!

Transcript follows:

Jack McFarlane 0:06
Hi everyone, and welcome to the HR Happy Hour Network. This is The Play by Play podcast hosted by myself, Jack McFarlane and Nick Schlemmer. Hey guys. How’s it going? Well, it’s that time of year again, Nick, as you know, and I’m sure listeners of the show know that I love the election, right? And, oh, yes, presidential election is coming on. It’s been exactly one month. Almost tomorrow will be exactly one month since the election. So we just want to come on here and we’re going to give you the early insights to how Gen Z was voting and just how the rest of the nation voted. So I’m really excited for it. I think it’ll be a fun one.

Nick Schlemmer 0:41
Yes, I’m excited too. And Jack mentioned this a little bit earlier, off the show, but our stats, you know, they’re not firm yet. It’s hard to get those firm stats, Jack, like you said, until about a year from now, right?

Jack McFarlane 0:53
So it’ll be a couple months before we get the huge breakdown of, you know, every demographic and every generation, but we have the early exit poll stats as much as we could get. So it’s still, it gives you a good insight of to what every demographic voted as, but not the exact statistic, like not the exact number, but it’ll give a good insight.

Nick Schlemmer 1:17
All right, yeah, let’s jump right into it. So 2024, election stats. As we all know, Mister President Trump wins it from a vote of 312 to 226.

Jack McFarlane 1:30
Yeah, 312 to 226, um, not necessarily a close election, not like 2020, and we’ll kind of get into the comparison there. But yeah, I mean, it was, it was, I don’t know if landslide is the right word, but it was pretty significant, you know, like, what, what were your thoughts of, like, did you watch it much at all? Or, I’m sure you saw updates of it, like, kind of, what was right, yeah, you know.

Nick Schlemmer 1:54
I kind of saw sporadic updates of, you know, what states, you know, once the voting was finalized, what the end result was for each of the states, and it’s kind of what I expected. I had a feeling that he was going to win the election, yeah. Was I leaning one way or the other? Not necessarily, but, you know, seeing it, it was, it was curious, though, because with the Illinois end up voting? They were red, right? They were a red state?

Jack McFarlane 2:23
No, they were blue, right? And, well, yeah we’ll get in Illinois. I’ve got it pulled up here. It looks like yeah, and we’ll get into this later. Um, but Harris did severely underperform in Illinois compared to Biden, and that’s kind of a trend, and we’ll get into that, but that’s kind of a trend we saw throughout the whole night. And I remember having a conversation with our fantastic Grandma, you know, she love her, but I was at their house when Biden dropped out and endorsed Kamala, and she was very excited. And I said that’s great, like, be excited, right? But it’s almost impossible to start a presidential campaign with no money and no time until the election and actually win, right? Like, yeah, regardless of how good people thought the Biden administration was and how much of a role they thought she had in it, even if it was, if he was the greatest, you know, we wouldn’t be in this situation, but let’s say he was, and she jumped in, maybe she’d have a chance. But I kind of knew going into the night, it would be an uphill battle for her. Oh, I’m sure, just based on that. So as like, I watched the whole thing, and, yeah, I mean, it kind of played out like I thought it would. A lot of, you know, speculation heading into, you know, Pennsylvania and Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, even, all the all the swing states were up in the air. And then I forget the first one to close. It might have been Georgia. I’m trying to remember off top man, I think it was. But once the first couple swing states closed in favor of Trump, it was over even before they called it.

Nick Schlemmer 4:10
And we have a little bit of interesting statistics here about the just the popular vote, right? Yeah. So, so Trump won the popular vote 49.9% to 48.4%

Jack McFarlane 4:27
Yes, yeah.

Nick Schlemmer 4:28
And a little interesting fact from that is that the last Republican to win that popular vote was George W Bush, back in 2004 so it’s been a 20 years since the last Republicans won that popular vote?

Jack McFarlane 4:42
Yeah, that actually, that’s a stat that I thought was surprising as well, because I think it came over it was like a little over 77 million votes for Trump and just slightly under 75 million for Harris. But yeah, I did not realize that Bush was the last one to win the popular vote. Yeah. Did catch me by surprise. And I guess, like oh four, it would have, I mean, what was going on in oh four, it would have been Iraq war in Iraq, or something like that. But I remember, I remember reading something about how he kind of ran away with that one. I’m gonna look it up here real quick on the fly. Oh yeah. I mean, it was a, it was a landslide in oh four, 286 Well, I guess 251 286 but just looking at the map itself, it was pretty dominated by Bush, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, but that, that did still catch me by surprise, um, and I think, honestly, I think, and, you know, I was optimistic for Trump, for reasons I said earlier, but I think it surprised, like a lot of people, that he not only won, but won the popular vote. Because, like in in 2016 obviously, Trump won the election, but he didn’t win the popular vote in 2016 Yeah, um, so for him to win the election and then also when the popular vote was just a huge blow for the Democratic Party, I remember they were talking about, I was watching Fox News, and they had a couple members of the party on as well during the election, and they were talking about how it’s almost like an eye opening needed to happen to make changes in The party, or whatever. And I thought that was interesting, like, how off the media was. I noticed that, like every time I went on my phone, every time I was on Hulu, I was getting the ads left and right, and it was all saying, like, Trump’s got no chance, you know, this is going to be a landslide for Kamala. And it was just eye opening how wrong the media was. Did you notice any of that at all?

Nick Schlemmer 6:41
No, you know, like I said, I didn’t really look too deeply like into it, and I only tuned in a couple different times throughout the night. But no, I didn’t, I didn’t see that the that that happened, how the media was off like that. But you know, that’s, I could see that happening, to say the least, the media seems it’s either completely correct or just the exact opposite. There’s really no middle ground with the media.

Jack McFarlane 7:08
Yeah, like a lot of people I know, were nervous about the election, and I just kept saying, like, Look, you can’t really, you know it’s on the internet. You can’t trust everything you read on the internet. You kind of gotta look into it yourself. Um, let’s jump into some other statistics. It was not just a great day for Trump, but also the Republican Party as a whole, as they gained four seats in the Senate, um, and now they hold the majority in the Senate and the House. I think Senate’s 53 to 47 houses, 220 to 215, although the Democratic Party did gain a seat in the house. So that was the only of the three major ones. That’s where they fared the best. But, yeah, just a good day all around for the Republican Party. Not to say that it’s, you know, a bad day for the Democratic Party, and if that’s who you voted for, like, you know, it’s not like we’re all Americans, you know what? I mean, so win or loser is not the right words in an election? Um, no, because we’re all Americans. But just just interesting facts. Um, yeah. Do you want to get into and this is the big the big surprises. Do you want to talk about the states that Trump ended up flipping from 2020, to 2024.

Nick Schlemmer 8:22
Yeah, so he flipped a total of six states that previously did not vote for him in the 2020 election, which was Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. So for me, and a person who’s not necessarily heavily focused on elections and things of that nature, to go from losing, you know, very important states like this, six different states, to now flipping it back to his side, I feel like that’s really impressive, and maybe Jack can dive a little bit deeper into like, what that means, more than I could but to me, that sounds very impressive that he was able to win those states back.

Jack McFarlane 9:08
Yeah, yeah. I found it impressive as well. You know, they talked a lot about the blue wall, and the blue wall basically consists of almost all those states. It’s Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and then you got out west, Washington, Oregon, California, all those states. So most of them are, you know, historically blue. That’s why it’s called the blue wall. So for Trump to come in and flip three of them that he had already lost four years ago honestly said a lot, although he didn’t lose them by much in 2020 it’s it kind of shows a shift in in how the nation viewed the Biden administration after the four years on. Um, on how drastic that. I mean, he won every swing state. Um, all the swing states were Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania. Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina. So all of the blue wall that was not gonna, you know, guaranteed, the blue vote, like California ended up flipping, which was very surprising. I thought he’d get a couple of them, but I remember when Pennsylvania came in, and that was pretty much the the last hope that Kamala had, because, I think after that, he just needed one electoral vote or something like that. But after that one came in, it was like, Wow, he really flipped Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which really caught me by surprise. And a lot of people by surprise. I think the most optimistic people, I think Trump himself would have been surprised by that, honestly. So that was a that was a pretty big deal, and a lot of that has to do with these demographics. So let’s jump into some of them. Do you want to take us through, like, what are the early indications of how Gen Z was voting, Nick?

Nick Schlemmer 10:57
Yeah, so Gen Z as a whole, shifted and leaned more to the right.

Jack McFarlane 11:03
Yeah. So, yeah. One quick note on that. You know, throughout our we did a midterm episode, we’ve done a couple, you know, Gen Z voting. Um, that is a steady trend. So as a whole, I think Gen Z is still left, left leaning, but it’s shifting more to the right. And that’s just the clarity I want to give it there. But that is a trend that is a trend that we’ve seen not just this election, but through the past four years as a whole. So yeah, keep going.

Nick Schlemmer 11:28
And this is kind of interesting here, that men were more likely to, you know, that shifting to the right, but the women were more left sided. So it’s kind of interesting that we have that divide there between the men and the women leaning left or leaning right. What are your thoughts on that?

Jack McFarlane 11:43
Yeah, I mean, I’m not surprised, honestly, when I think about, like, just everyone that I know and who they support, that kind of lines up. A lot of my guy friends, you know, lean to the right. And you know, there’s some important women in my life that, you know, lean a little more left. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I did notice that just in my life. What about you, Nick, did you notice that too, among your friend and friend groups and family?

Nick Schlemmer 12:13
I did, yeah, just just, you know, overhearing conversations with, you know, kids from college or while I was on the internship, just people around the workplace. It very much seemed that, yeah, the women were left sided and the men were more right side. Yeah. And, you know, there’s some outliers in there too, but.

Jack McFarlane 12:29
Well, of course, yeah. And the I would like to know, like, why that is, you know, like, I’m sure maybe for another podcast topic, guys, you’ll hear us dive deep into that, because I think that’d be interesting, but yeah, that’s kind of the early Gen Z statistics. That’s about as much as we can give you on Gen Z for now. Like once the real data comes out, we will definitely hit you guys with exactly how Gen Z voted, but that’s just what early exit polls are suggesting. Some other key groups would be like suburbs, rural and urban. So let’s dive into those. I’ll take us through the suburbs. Um, so a fun fact about the suburbs is that the winner in the major suburbs has won 11 of the past 12 presidential elections. So it’s kind of like, if you win the suburbs, you win the whole thing, right? Seems to be a trend. Yeah, yeah. That dates back to the 80s. This year, Trump won 51 to anywhere from 51 to 47% of the suburbs. Like we’ve said a couple times, these aren’t exact numbers yet, but we can tell that he won suburban women by 7 points and suburban men by 27 points. So Trump had a, had a, had a clear victory. We don’t know the number yet, but it was a clear victory in the major suburban areas, yeah. What did we see in rural areas Nick?

Nick Schlemmer 13:50
So the rural areas again, going back to that 1980 that year, this year, Trump won by a record margin. Since that 1980 no candidate has done better, except Trump. So Trump won 64% of the voters in those rural areas this year, and the previous bet was set by again himself back in 2016 which was 61% so he had over a little over half the votes in 2016 and he increased it by another 3% in this 2024 election, up to 64%.

Jack McFarlane 14:28
Yeah, I think the one thing I take from that is that you saw that Trump kind of gained momentum everywhere, even in the areas that he was really strong In, like rural areas, you know what? In rural areas are traditionally right leaning, and you know, urban areas are traditionally left leaning, for those that don’t know, but for Trump to gain even more ground and rule was fascinating, I guess that’s probably the best word to say it. And now let’s talk about urban and urban areas are dying. Eliminated by blue like, if you think about, you know, California, Illinois, right with Chicago, Illinois, New York, with New York City, Wisconsin and Michigan. They’re big cities, so excuse me. Yeah, so those are traditionally blue states. What we did see, and I’ll dive a little bit deeper into it, is that Harris did particularly worse than previous candidates like Biden and Hillary Clinton. She got just around 59 to 60% of the voters in urban areas, that’s and that’s, yeah, like I said, that’s lower than Biden Clinton, and it’s also lower than Obama did. So that’s shocking at all, though 60% is a great number, obviously, but it shows the trend that Trump was gaining momentum even in those really heavy democratic areas. Here are the states where Harris underperformed Biden, and these are traditional blue states this year. So she underperformed in Oregon, Illinois, Montana, Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, by almost a million votes in New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and her home state of California, and she underperformed by 2 million votes in California, which really surprised me, because California is, you know, traditionally, a very blue State, and it’s her home state, usually, okay, and the biggest presidential blowouts ever, um, I’m gonna forget exactly what the race it was, but the Democratic Party, the guy won one single state in the whole thing, and it was his home state, right? So, like your home state, you’re supposed to win your home state, you’re supposed to dominate your home state. And she severely underperformed President Biden in California, which really shocked me.

Nick Schlemmer 17:05
Yeah, and there was one thing that I want to go back to, is that 59% number that she won for the urban areas. And like you said, she underperformed with 59% so it makes me wonder, what were those percentages, you know, for Obama and Clinton, like, were they just significantly higher, or were they kind of, like, how Trump won the rural areas with 64-61.

Jack McFarlane 17:28
Yeah, that’s a, that’s a great question. Yeah, um, I’ve got 2020, pulled up here, and this, it doesn’t have this number exactly, but I’m, I am scrolling through if I had to guess, this is purely a guess. This could be way off, honestly, but my guess is Biden probably won anywhere from 65 to 70% Yeah, yeah. Which percentage wise, those points aren’t a lot, but if you look at the vote total wise, that’s a lot of votes to change. You know that many Yes, 5% is millions of votes. I mean, just just looking at the popular vote, Biden got 7 million more votes than Harris did total. So, I mean, that’s a pretty significant that is a good yeah, percentage there. That was just curious, yeah. And I think, I honestly think, um, that goes I think part of the problem maybe there’s, you know, more to it, but part of the problem is probably, like I said earlier, Harris had, you know, how long to make a campaign. She had, what, three months something like that. Like, yeah, I can’t, I’m sorry. You’re not winning the you’re not really going to win with three months of preparation.

Nick Schlemmer 18:35
I never realized the amount of funds and money that goes into running for presidents, like, millions and millions of dollars, millions.

Jack McFarlane 18:45
It takes and years of time and to have three months hundreds of people. Yeah, so, and that’s, you know, and it’s not like she was starting on even ground either. Like, obviously the Biden administration was not very favorable in the public eye, and especially after the debates, so she was kind of starting from behind with three months. So you know, it was going to always be an uphill climb. But yeah, that’s kind of, that’s kind of a wrap for that. Honestly, that’s about as much as we can give you guys, like I said, when we get the official, official number breakdown, we’ll definitely bring that to you, but you can still you get a lot of insight from just these base numbers. So obviously Trump made up a ton of ground. The country as a whole shifted to the right, and part of that was that the economy was the number one issue to the public of the whole election. So that’s pretty much it. Do you have anything else to add? Nick or do you want to take a quick break and come back with a quote of the show?

Nick Schlemmer 19:49
No, yeah, I think we hit everything and nail on the head there, and we can come back for the quote of the show.

Nick Schlemmer 20:00
Alrighty guys, we are back. We just finished up a great segment with the election votes and all the information of the 2024 election. But we’re going to get right into wrapping up this show here. We’ve it’s been a great show. But as you know, we end it off with the quote of the show and Jack today, I wanted to keep the quote of the show going with kind of the topics that we talked about earlier, with the presidents and presidential election. So this one is coming from President Jimmy Carter.

Speaker 1 20:27
Oh there we go, a Presidential quote, I was hoping, yeah, one, yep, of course.

Nick Schlemmer 20:31
Yeah, we’ll just dive right. It says from Jimmy Carter, he said. And I quote, We must adjust the changing times and still hold to those unchanging principles. So with each election, you know, all these times and people are changing, but there’s still a lot of those unchanging principles that hang tight, probably for the rest of our lives.

Jack McFarlane 20:53
I think that’s great. Yeah. I think that’s a great quote, not just in the election, I think just in everyday life. You know, obviously whole world around this is changing rapidly with technology and AI and all that. But, you know, it’s still good to hold on to your core values, your core principles, and, you know, keep yourself grounded. And I think that’s fantastic,

Nick Schlemmer 21:09
Yeah, and Jack, this is a great episode. I’ve had fun. We’re on 26 episodes now. Yeah, getting close to that 30 number. 30 is going to be a good one. I got a feeling. Yeah.

Jack McFarlane 21:19
Hey, next episode, guys, is your interview. It’s one of our favorites, if not our favorite of the whole years. Be excited for that that’ll that’ll come to you either very late December or the very beginning of January, um, depending on when it gets published. But that will be a fun one. Um, but thanks for joining us. This was also a fun one, especially for me. So thank you Nick for letting me nerd out on my election crap.

Nick Schlemmer 21:48
Of course. Alrighty guys, thank you for tuning in today, and bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai