Exit polls taken on Election Day revealed notable voter shifts and opinions that, together, sealed President-elect Donald Trump's electoral victory. Survey data indicates that the Democratic Party lost small yet key margins of support from typical members of its coalition and Republicans successfully picked some of them up all while maintaining its base.
As Americans work to make sense of the 2024 election outcome, pollsters and political scholars told Salon the data shows American voters yearned for a change from the largely unpopular status quo under President Joe Biden — and they saw it in Trump.
"The vast majority of Republicans voted for Trump, and the vast majority of Democrats voted for Harris, and voter turnout was relatively high," Bernard L. Fraga, a political science professor at Emory University in Georgia, said in a phone interview. "So in many ways Americans are expressing that they're dissatisfied on the economy and punished the incumbent party, and that party was Democrat."
The change experts most noted this election cycle was the shift in Latino voters' support for Trump relative to that in 2020. Most polls show Latino voters still largely voted for Harris this election. Exit surveys from NBC News and CBS News found that Trump received 46% of the group's votes, which is up from the 32% he saw in 2020 when running against Democrat Joe Biden.
The Associated Press Votecast, which uses a hybrid approach aimed at accounting for national increases in mail-in voting, noted a similar change, with 42% of Latino voters reporting they chose Trump compared to just 35% who said they did so in 2020.
J. Miles Coleman, the associate editor of Sabatao's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, noted that Americans' dissatisfaction with the Biden administration could be seen in the 28% of voters in the CBS exit poll who said they needed change and the 32% of voters who said the economy mattered most in deciding their vote overwhelmingly choosing Trump. The dissatisfaction that likely drove Americans overall toward the president-elect may have been more pronounced in Latino communities, a historically strong Democratic group, this election cycle, he argued.
"They tend to have larger families, they tend to be more working class, so they are probably — compared to some other groups, like whites — more likely to be pinched by higher inflation," Coleman told Salon in a phone interview.
"Some of the first states we were watching on election night, when it came to actual returns, was Texas and Florida and, man, you could really see" the shift, Coleman added. "That's a group, especially working-class Hispanics, that the Democrats are really going to have to try to connect back with."
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Breaking down the demographic's votes by gender indicates Trump made most of his inroads with Latino men, 55% of whom voted for him this cycle, compared to the about 6 in 10 who went for Biden in 2020.
A similar dynamic bore out among Black male voters during the 2024 election, though far less pronounced in how it shaped the electoral outcome, Fraga and Coleman suggested.
As one of the Democratic Party's strongest coalitions, Black voters routinely show up for the Democratic presidential candidate at levels around 85-87%. That support was even higher for former President Barack Obama, who received around 95% of the Black vote during both of his presidential bids, and Biden, who also drew more than 90% of the Black vote in 2020. Experts told Salon earlier this year that around 10% of Black voters have historically voted for Republican candidates each election and more than 15% of the demographic voting for Trump this year was unlikely.
That remained the case for Harris' bid, though the demographic backed her less than Biden. Eighty-five percent of Black voters overall chose her compared to 13% who voted for Trump, per NBC News and CBS News exit polls. But Trump made headway among Black male voters that proved detrimental to the vice president's bid, argued Alvin Tillery, a Democratic pollster and founder of the Black Equality Alliance super PAC.
"This was probably a winnable election for the Democrats, but they allowed a segment of their base to slip away," Tillery told Salon in a phone interview, adding: "My biggest takeaway is that if they had started earlier with targeted messaging to Black men, spending more on digital ads to basically draw a contrast with Trump, she probably would have been in a better position."
To win in the Black community, Harris would have had to lock down around 84% of Black male voters, he said, citing his PAC's polling. Survey data indicates Harris only received 77% of their vote to Trump's 21%. That divide was more pronounced in the AP Votecast, which found 74% of Black men had supported Harris to Trump's 24%.
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Tillery attributed this shift to the generational differences between young Black voters and older Black voters, who were more influenced by the presence of the Black church, Civil Rights leaders and Black elected officials to turn out at the polls in favor of the Democratic Party. The Democrats' failure to appeal to the younger cohort in their messaging ultimately cost Harris among Black voters, Tillery said.
"What's really happening with the Black community here in this election is that there was a lot of generational replacement," he said. "Older baby boomer voters are aging out of the population, and they're being replaced by younger, millennial and Gen Z voters who are not as attached to the Democratic Party. So nobody really knew that they had to make the case to these folks through aggressive targeting."
Fraga noted that Harris could very easily have offset the marginal gains Trump made with Latino voters with small pick-ups in support among white women in states like Georgia. Harris, however, only fared about just as well with white female voters as Biden did in 2020, according to a CNN exit poll.
Though Harris won women overall 53% to Trump's 45%, according to the NBC News and CBS News exit polls, those numbers were reversed among white women, who voted for Trump 53% to 45%.
The Harris campaign had hoped that hammering in on the Democratic Party's intent to preserve abortion access and protect abortion rights would lead to gains among women. Democrats had also hoped the same would happen if they emphasized Trump's successful effort to get Roe v. Wade overturned, findings of liability for sexual abuse in civil court and criminal indictments. Fraga said the exit poll data shows, if anything, that those predictions with respect to white women were unfounded.
Outside of the economy, abortion and the state of democracy — another issue that Democrats drilled into their messaging — were deciding concerns for voters in the CBS News and NBC News exit polls. Thirty-four percent of surveyed voters said the state of democracy mattered most in who they voted for president, while 14% said abortion mattered most. Both contingents overwhelmingly chose Harris, which Coleman found notable given Harris' loss.
"Harris lost when more voters collectively were thinking about abortion rights and democracy, compared to some of the issues Trump tended to do a bit better on," Coleman said, adding: "There were probably a critical mass of pro-choice voters who went with Trump."
Along with winning back the White House, the GOP regained control over the Senate. The House, though still up for grabs as of Friday afternoon, is likely to remain in their control.
Democrats' crushing loss, Coleman said, was characterized by stagnations — and at times even reversals — of the gains acquired during Biden's run like Trump's pick-ups this election cycle among voters without college degrees and younger voters, particularly young men.
"We should take away that many Americans were willing to look beyond the various legal issues that Trump faced, were willing to look beyond some of the rhetoric that he used — along with, of course, a majority of his supporters who embraced the rhetoric that he used — and said they wanted change and that Trump represented that change," Fraga said.
In the end, Fraga and Coleman said, Harris receiving the amount of support from American voters that she did was a feat in and of itself given how unpopular Biden has been. Biden's approval rating dropping below 40% in the final months of his presidency meant Harris faced an uphill battle attempting to recoup the Democratic backing her former running mate had hemorrhaged. Her failure to clearly distinguish herself from the president's policies and establish herself as a harbinger of change, all but set up Trump's likely sweep of the national popular vote.
The popular vote win "once again another indication that the idea that Trump can only win through voter suppression or some kind of institutional failure is unfounded," Fraga said. "He won the support of a very large share of the American population, and that's the reality."
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