What does the data tell us from the 2024 and 2025 elections?

The results of the 2025 elections put to rest the question of whether rightward shifts among voters of color and young voters in 2024 were signs of a permanent political realignment. They were not.

Background

• After the 2024 elections, countless articles sought to explain what went wrong for Democrats.
• By summer 2025, two definitive data analyses were released by Catalist and Pew, respectively.
• At that point, MVP conducted our own analysis of what that data revealed about the voters our grantee partners organize — and the implications for MVP’s strategy going forward. 
• Now, in the wake of the November 2025 elections, we are sharing what emerged from that 2024 analysis — and how this year’s electoral results affirm our findings. 

Key Conclusions

1. In 2024, Trump won because young voters, voters of color, and infrequent voters swung right.
2. Importantly, many young voters and voters of color are also infrequent voters who are less politically engaged, informed, and fixed in their convictions.
3. This means Democrats can win these voters back — and evidence suggests that independent political organizations (like MVP grantees) are more effective than candidate or party efforts at reaching them, because these groups prioritize warm, person-to-person outreach and year-round engagement over cold text outreach and other superficial forms of voter contact. 
4. In 2025, youth and voters of color swung back to Democrats (including Trump 2024 voters), supporting the conclusion that 2024 was a temporary shift versus a permanent realignment.
5. In 2026, the electorate may be slightly less Democratic-favoring than in 2025 — and then dramatically less so in 2028. To win, MVP asserts that the big-tent Democratic coalition must proactively scale up sustained investment in deep, year-round organizing (both offline and online), rather than relying on impersonal TV ads and traditional, transactional voter outreach.

To learn more, read our full 2024-2025 voter data analysis.