CV NEWS FEED // According to exit polling from NBC News, parents of minor children backed President-elect Donald Trump over failed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris by a nine-point margin – a shift of 15 points from the 2020 election.
In the 2024 race, Trump won voters who have children under the age of 18 living at home with them – 27% of the electorate – with 53% of the vote compared to 44% for Harris.
Harris won all the remaining voters by two points, 50% to 48%, meaning that parents with minor children were a crucial demographic to Trump’s decisive victory.
In 2020, parents with minor children not only supported the Biden-Harris ticket by six points, but they were three points more likely to vote Democratic than voters who did not have minor children living at home.
Four years ago, 52% of parents with children under 18 at home backed Biden-Harris, compared to 46% who backed Trump – also according to NBC exit polling. Among all other voters, 51% backed the Democratic ticket and 58% favored Trump.
Among fathers living with their minor children in 2024, Trump won in a landslide by 23 points, winning 60% to Harris’ 37%.
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When polled following the 2020 race, fathers with minor children at home backed Trump by only one point – 49% to 48% for Biden-Harris – meaning the group shifted a massive 22 points toward the president-elect in just four years.
Mothers with minor children also shifted toward Trump from 2020, although less dramatically than fathers did.
In 2024, the moms favored Harris by a narrow five-point margin, 51% to 46%. They supported Biden-Harris by 13 points, 56% to 43%, four years earlier – meaning they shifted eight points toward Trump between the two election cycles.
School choice advocate Corey DeAngelis celebrated the shift in the parent vote on X (formerly Twitter) Friday.
“Teachers unions overplayed their hand with school closures and indoctrination in schools,” DeAngelis wrote. “The GOP is now the Parents Party.”
In the years between the 2020 and the 2024 elections, parental rights emerged as a prominent issue driving many parents, some of whom had previously supported Democratic candidates, to the right.
This rightward movement of millions of American parents was a reaction to prolonged post-COVID school closures and the embrace of the LGBTQ movement in school curricula and libraries.
Moms for Liberty, one of the groups at the forefront of the parents’ rights movement, was founded on the first day of 2021.
In October 2021, Biden-Harris Attorney General Marrick Garland issued a deeply controversial memorandum directing the FBI to deploy agents in order to address what he called “violent threats against school officials and teachers.” Critics widely asserted the directrive targeted parents who speak out against unpopular education officials and their policies at school board meetings.
The following month, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governorship of Democratic-leaning Virginia in a major upset after running one of the first campaigns primarily based on parental rights advocacy.
During a September 2021 debate, Youngkin’s Democratic opponent former Gov. Terry McAuliffe declared, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” – a gaffe that many observers agreed played a major role in his shocking loss.
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On Friday, the Democratic research initiative Blueprint released the results of its post-election poll, which the group had conducted to explain why American voters overwhelmingly elected Trump and rejected Harris, its preferred candidate.
Blueprint’s poll found that the third most effective reason why voters did not support Harris was that the Democratic presidential nominee “is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”
The only two criticisms out of a total of 25 that ranked higher were inflation and the crisis at the southern border.
Blueprint assigned each criticism a “relative importance score,” which it defined as “how much more it was selected” as a reason for not supporting Harris “than the average criticism.”
The “transgender” criticism had a relative importance score of +28 among swing voters who voted for Trump, +25 among all swing voters, +17 among all voters, +15 among black voters, and +9 among Latino voters.
Kara Densky, a Democrat and feminist who is critical of her party’s support for the “transgender” movement over women’s rights, highlighted the results of Blueprint’s poll on X.
On its website, Blueprint states it “is a public opinion research initiative focused on narrative-building and message-testing to elect Vice President Harris and deliver Democratic control of Congress in 2024.”
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk took to X to commend socially conservative commentator and Daily Wire host Matt Walsh “for his role in the 2024 landslide.”
“For years, many conservatives were terrified to touch the trans issue,” Kirk wrote. “It was on pace to be socially and politically accepted — a hate crime to even question it.”
“Matt courageously and effectively set out on a one-man mission to expose the Trans mafia at great personal risk to himself and his family,” Kirk continued:
His film “What is a Woman?” is a masterpiece.
Polling suggests that Kamala’s support for radical transgender policies was the single most-important issue for swing voters who picked Donald Trump, narrowly beating out even the economy and the border.
“‘Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you’ deserves to go down as one of the all-time great closing pitches in American history,” Kirk added, referring to a series of viral ads employed by the Trump campaign in the weeks prior to the election.
Again per NBC’s exit polls, an identical percentage of women without minor children voted for the Democratic ticket in 2020 and 2024. In both cycles, 55% voted Democratic and 44% voted for Trump.
The percentages remained the same even though the Harris campaign aggressively targeted childless women following the mainstream media’s circulation of a 2021 tongue-in-cheek remark by now-Vice President-elect JD Vance about “childless cat ladies.”
