How Key Demographic Groups Voted in the 2024 Election
Former President Donald Trump is now president-elect for the second time in eight years after Americans came out for him in higher numbers than expected.
As of early Wednesday afternoon, Trump had already carried five of the seven critical swing states, and was leading Vice President Kamala Harris in the two others. He is poised to win the popular vote – which he did not do against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016 – and win the Electoral College by an even wider margin than he did eight years ago. Trump will also have support from Congress, with the GOP having secured the majority in the Senate and the chances of them holding the House look high.
There’s many reasons for Trump’s resounding win, but his unexpected strength or, rather, Harris’ underperformance with some voter demographics played major roles in the former president’s path back to the Oval Office.
Here is how five key groups voted in the 2024 election, based on polls. The data is mostly according to AP VoteCast, where 120,000 U.S. voters were surveyed from Oct. 28 to Nov. 5 when polls closed. It should be noted that this type of polling is not immune to controversy or potential error.
Women
While Harris beat Trump by more than 10-percentage points, 55% to 43%, among women between the ages of 18 and 44, the former president had a strong showing among women 45 years and older, according to preliminary polling from AP VoteCast.
Yet the two candidates had a closer split in support among women between the ages of 45 years and older, where 51% voted for Harris compared to 47% for Trump.
Most notable was Trump’s performance among white women. The Harris campaign actively targeted the group in the hope that protecting abortion rights would garner their support.
Yet such support failed to materialize, with Trump winning among white women 53% to 46% over Harris, with that group making up the largest overall voting bloc at 40%, according to AP VoteCast.
Black Voters
Harris’s strongest support by far came among Black voters, where she received 83% of the vote compared to 16% for Trump. Overall however, Harris underperformed compared to President Joe Biden during the 2020 election, where he received 91% of the vote from Black men and women compared to 8% for Trump.
In particular, Trump performed better among Black men, where he received 24% support versus 9% of the vote among Black women, according to AP VoteCast.
Latino Voters
While Harris beat Trump among Latino voters, the former president gained significant ground with the group from 2020. Harris received 56% of the vote compared to 42% for Trump this election. Those numbers reflect a huge shift from the totals in 2020, when Biden received 63% of the Latino vote versus 35% for Trump.
A breakdown of the vote within this demographic shows much of the shift among Latino voters toward Trump in 2024 was fueled by an increase in support among Latino men, with Harris receiving 50% of the vote compared to 47% for Trump versus 60% to 38% among Latino women.
Young Voters
Harris underperformed among voters 18-29 years old, according to the latest VoteCast data. Support for her in that age group only narrowly edged out the share of those who supported Trump, 52% to 46%. In 2020, 61% of voters in the demographic supported Biden, compared to 36% for Trump.
It was yet another area where pre-race polling appeared to be at least slightly off the mark. An ABC News-IPSOS survey released days before the election found that in a five-way matchup between presidential candidates, Trump only got 33% support from surveyed voters under 30.
White and Suburban Men
The Pew Research Center found that Trump in 2016 had a 30-point advantage over Clinton among white men. While Trump still had a sizable advantage in that demographic in 2020, Biden did make some gains and shrunk the margin to 17 points.
So far, Harris appears to have lost some of that ground in 2024, according to the AP. White men who supported Trump made up 59% of those surveyed as of Wednesday afternoon, compared to 39% for Harris – a margin that was smaller than Clinton’s eight years ago but still larger than Biden's in 2020.
The vice president, however, also lost some ground with suburban men. Biden narrowly won support from that demographic group (49% to 48%) in 2020, while this year, Trump had a 6-point advantage over Harris as of publication (52% to 46%).
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