Thread by @Catalist_US

NEW from Catalist: A comprehensive look at What Happened in 2020. 🗳️

Read the report at the link below. And here’s a quick 🧵 on what we found.

catalist.us/wh-national

This report is based on the Catalist database, which looks at public voting records over the past 15 years. It also benefits from wide-scale surveys, modeling, and precinct-level analysis.

You can see more on methods here: catalist.us/wh-national/#p…

So what did we find? First, this was the most diverse electorate ever and @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris won with a multi-racial coalition.

Turnout levels and vote choice also varied by race, with some significant changes since 2016.

Latino voters continued to favor Democrats with 63% vote share, but Republicans made inroads with Latino voters, too.

Black voter turnout increased substantially, resulting in significant gains for Democrats, exceeding the margin of victory in Georgia and Arizona, despite Republicans making gains with some Black voters.

Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters saw the largest relative increase in turnout, with the raw number of votes from AAPI voters increasing a staggering 39% from 2016. 67% of AAPI voters supported the Democratic ticket.

Women remained critical to the Democratic coalition. Democrats enjoyed a 10 point advantage with women voters, who comprised 54% of the electorate.

This election had remarkably high turnout, driven in large part by young voters. Millennials and Gen Z now comprise nearly a third of the electorate.

New voters made a big difference, especially in Sunbelt swing states. This includes entirely new voters as well as people who moved to a new state.

Turnout and vote choice also shifted based on population density. Democrats gained in rural areas, lost ground slightly in urban areas and continued to make gains in diversifying suburbs.

Despite record-breaking turnout, there are still millions of people on the sidelines. And the electorate is incredibly dynamic. The voters who show up in 2022 and 2024 will be different than the ones who showed up in 2018 and 2020.

Importantly, this analysis helps us understand what happened, but to understand why people turned out and voted in specific ways, we point readers to commentary from our partners and other analysts.

catalist.us/wh-national/#p…

Finally, we want to say this clearly: data science is an incredibly powerful tool for understanding the electorate. But nothing is perfect. Throughout this analysis we compare our results to other data sources...We encourage readers to do the same.