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Tuesday’s election was historic in many ways, and a closer look at the results shows it may signal the start of a new, unprecedented realignment in American politics.
President-elect Donald Trump overperformed polls and forecasts, which widely painted the picture of a neck-and-neck race, decisively defeating Vice President Kamala Harris and becoming the first president elected to non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland.
In addition to winning a projected 312 electoral votes to Harris’ 226 and sweeping all seven of the battleground states, Trump also became the first Republican to win the popular vote in two decades.
A look at exit polling shows that the coalition that propelled Trump to such a decisive victory was unlike any ever compiled by a winning Republican campaign – including in the leadup to Trump’s upset win in 2016.
Moreover, what made November 5, 2024, a truly disastrous night for the Democratic Party was that Trump made serious inroads into the very coalition that had sent former President Barack Obama to the White House twice – a coalition that many Democratic strategists in the 2010s falsely predicted would result in a permanent majority for their party.
Hispanic and Latino voters
Both CNN’s and The Washington Post’s (WaPo) exit polls found that Harris only narrowly won the Latino vote – usually a strongly Democratic voting bloc – 52% to Trump’s 46%.
Trump’s percentage share of the Latino vote was in fact the highest on record for a Republican presidential candidate in American history – edging out the previous record of 44% set by George W. Bush during his 2004 reelection.
Trump’s performance among Latinos also represents a 15-point improvement over his 2020 campaign, which lost the group to the Biden-Harris ticket by 21 points, according to the Pew Research Center. In that election, Biden-Harris won 59% of the Latino vote to Trump’s 38%.
Going back to 2016, Trump lost Latino voters by a landslide 38-point margin – with failed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton winning 66% of the Latino vote to Trump’s 28% – again per Pew.
It is noteworthy that during the 2016 election cycle, the mainstream media and the Clinton campaign frequently advanced the narrative that Trump’s fiery rhetoric in support of border security amounted to antagonism toward the Latino community.
Nonetheless, in just eight years, Trump was able to close his gap with Latino voters by a stunning 32 points.
>> TRUMP WON THE HISPANIC CATHOLIC VOTE <<
Key to Trump garnering 46% of the Latino vote was his accomplishment of winning over the support of Latino men by double digits.
The CNN poll found that the president-elect won Latino men by 12 points, with 55% to Harris’ 43%. However, Harris won Latina women by 22 points (with 60% to Trump’s 38%) – accounting for a massive 34-point gap between Latino men and Latina women.
Interestingly, Pew’s stats clearly show that no such gap between the sexes existed among Latinos in 2016 – when Trump won an identical 28% of both Latino men and Latina women.
As a result, it is clear that while Trump improved with Latinos of both sexes over the past eight years, he improved more significantly among Latino men (27 points) than Latina women (10 points).
The 2024 CNN exit poll also indicated that while Trump won both Latino Catholics (by 7 points) and Latino non-Catholic Christians (by 30 points), he lost nonreligious Latinos – who accounted for 22% of the Latino electorate – by 46 points.
The poll also shows an age gap among Latinos. While Trump lost Latino voters under 30 by only two points, and Latinos between the ages of 45 and 64 by one point, he lost Latino senior citizens by 17 points.
>> INCREASING NUMBER OF LATINO VOTERS WANT MORE BORDER SECURITY <<
Trump’s dramatically increased margins with Latino voters come as multiple polls have shown significantly increased Latino support for building a border wall and deporting illegal migrants – both policies championed by Trump – throughout the past few years
Black voters
While Trump, as expected, did not come close to winning the black vote on Tuesday, he did post the best performance among black voters of any Republican nominee in recent memory.
The CNN exit poll found that Trump won 13% of the black vote, including 21% of black men and 7% of black women.
Before Trump, the last Republican nominee to win at least 13% of the black vote was Ronald Reagan, who won 14% of the black vote in his 1980 landslide victory.
Per Pew, Trump won 8% of the black vote in 2020, and 6% in 2016.
In addition to black men, Trump winning the highest percentage of the black vote of any Republican nominee in 44 years was in large part due to him winning 23% of black independent voters and 23% of black voters between the ages of 25 and 29, per the CNN exit poll.
Trump also won over 36% of black voters who said their family’s financial situation is worse off today than during his first term in the White House.
Young male and first-time voters
Trump, who notably appeared on multiple popular podcasts during the 2024 campaign season, made major inroads with men between the ages of 18 and 29 – again, a group that has consistently favored Democrats in recent election cycles.
In the 2024 election, Trump won men under 30 by two points – winning 49% of the group to Harris’ 47%, according to CNN.
Trump also won men under 25 by two points – 48% to Harris’ 46%. Among men between 25 and 29, Trump and Harris tied with both candidates winning 49% of the vote.
Among men under 30, Trump’s margin improved 13 points from 2020, when he lost the demographic to Biden by 11 points (52% to 41%), per CNN’s exit poll that year.
Also in 2020, Trump lost men under 25 by 20 points, with them backing Biden by a spread of 56% to 36%.
Fitting the trend of young men flocking to Trump in this year’s election was the fact that Trump won first-time voters in 2024 – a group he overwhelmingly lost four years ago.
Per NBC News’ exit poll, Biden won voters who were casting their first-ever ballot by 32 points (64% to 32%) in 2020. This year, Trump won first-time voters by nine points (54% to 45%) over Harris – a swing of 41 points to the president-elect.
The NBC poll also found that first-time voters were crucial to the outcome of both elections. In 2020, non-first-time voters backed Biden and Trump equally – both candidates getting 49% of their support.
This cycle, non-first-time voters favored Harris by two points, 50% to 48%, per NBC.
Asian-American voters
Asian-American voters increased their support for Trump by 12 points from 2020 to 2024.
In this week’s election, Harris won a small majority of 54% of the Asian-American vote, compared to Trump’s 39% – a difference of 15 points – according to CNN’s exit poll.
Four years ago, the Biden-Harris ticket won Asian-American voters by 27 points, with 61% to Trump’s 34%, also per CNN.
Harris, who is half Indian-American, would have become the country’s first president of Asian ancestry.
Arab-American and Muslim voters
While Arab Americans do not appear as a separate category on any exit polls, returns in heavily Arab areas in the swing state of Michigan show that the group – traditionally a stronghold for the Democratic Party as part of the “Obama coalition” – trended rightward from four years ago.
CatholicVote reported on Thursday that “two Detroit suburbs – in majority-Arab Dearborn and majority-Muslim Hamtramck – dramatically swung toward Trump and away from Kamala Harris, with the president-elect winning the former and only narrowly losing the latter.”
In 2024, Trump won a plurality of the vote in Dearborn, with left-wing Green Party candidate Jill Stein taking a significant percentage. In 2020, Biden had carried the city with nearly 70% of the vote.
>> ARAB AND MUSLIM VOTE HELPS TRUMP WIN IN MICHIGAN <<
The 2024 CNN exit poll shows that Trump won voters who indicated they belonged to racial and ethnic groups other than white, black, Latino, or Asian by 12 points, with 54% of the vote to Harris’ 42%. This category represented 3% of the total 2024 electorate.
In 2020, the Biden-Harris ticket won the “Other racial/ethnic groups” category by 14 points with 55% to Trump’s 41% – showing there was a swing of 26 points toward Trump among this group in the past four years.
This demographic category may include some Arab voters, as well as American Indian voters.
American Indian voters
NBC News’ exit poll showed that Trump stunningly won the American Indian vote – which had traditionally gone heavily for Democrats – this week.
Per the poll, Trump won American Indian voters by a landslide margin of 31 points – with 65% to Harris’ 34%, or nearly two-to-one.
This result made American Indians Trump’s strongest racial or ethnic demographic in NBC’s poll – even stronger than white voters, whom he won by 16 points.
The battleground state of Arizona, where Trump prevailed, is over 6% American Indian, ranking it seventh among the nation’s 50 states.
The swing states of Nevada and North Carolina also have significant American Indian communities.
NBC’s exit poll data is corroborated by election results in counties with large American Indian populations.
Robeson County, North Carolina, is a plurality-American Indian county, with around 40% of its residents belonging to the Lumbee tribe. The county is also over 20% black.
Trump won Robeson County by 27 points – 63% to 36% – on his way to winning North Carolina and the 2024 election as a whole.
The president-elect won the same county by 18.5 points in 2020, and just over 4 points in 2016.
Before 2016, Robeson County was solidly Democratic and had only ever voted for a Republican presidential nominee once – Richard Nixon in 1972. In 2012, Obama won it by over 17 points.
Two counties in northeastern Arizona also show Trump’s growing support with American Indian voters.
Trump won Navajo County, Arizona – which the 2020 Census recorded as 41.6% American Indian – by 17 points, 58% to Harris’ 41%.
Trump only carried the county by eight points in 2020, meaning he more than doubled his margin of victory there in four years.
In neighboring Apache County, Arizona – which is nearly 72% American Indian – Trump is currently 17 points behind Harris with 41% of the vote to her 58% (60% of the vote has been counted).
If this total holds, it would mark the first time a Republican candidate received over 40% of the vote in the majority-Navajo county since Reagan’s 49-state landslide in 1984.
Trump lost the county by over 33 points – a two-to-one margin – in 2020.
Multiple American Indian X (formerly Twitter) users responded to the results of the NBC News poll by indicating that they voted for Trump, with many citing the issue of immigration.
