A Final, Comprehensive Look at How Trump Won in 2024
And how Democrats lost core parts of their coalition.
Shortly before the July 4 holiday, Pew Research released their long-awaited analysis of the 2024 presidential contest, the final major report that political analysts look to to understand what happened in an election. Pew examined how different populations voted, how their votes shifted, and to what extent they turned out to vote. This report complements Catalist’s “What Happened” analysis and the AP VoteCast survey, and all three tell similar stories about Donald Trump’s victory.1
Using an average of all three datasets, we get our clearest picture yet of how the electorate shifted from 2020 to 2024. Trump earned a second term primarily due to gains with groups that have been drifting away from Democrats for several years, most of whom have historically supported the party: young people, racial minorities (especially blacks and Hispanics), men, and lower-income voters.
With the publication of Pew’s report, we can now take a deeper dive—using the most comprehensive data available—into the story of the 2024 election and identify some overarching takeaways.
The rightward shift nationally was propelled almost entirely by non-white voters.
Though racial minorities overall supported Kamala Harris, there was a clear move to the right among three populations: blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Black Americans were still one of the most pro-Democratic groups, backing Harris by 68 points (83 percent to 15 percent), but this represented a 14-point rightward swing from just four years earlier, with Trump nearly doubling his vote share from eight percent to 15. The movement was especially pronounced among black men, who shifted toward Trump by more than any other demographic cohort—22 points. And even black women moved right by nine points.
The group that swung by the most along racial or ethnic lines, though, was Hispanics. Longtime TLP readers will know that Democrats have been losing support from Hispanic Americans for some time now, so this development in last year’s election wasn’t exactly surprising. What was more remarkable is that Trump won a greater share of the Hispanic vote than any Republican presidential nominee on record: 45 percent.2 The result—a mere seven-point advantage for Harris—made Hispanics a true swing group in this last election.
Asian Americans can be a little harder to capture than blacks and Hispanics, as they are the smallest share of the electorate among the non-white groups these studies typically analyze. But from what we can tell, they shifted right by nearly as much as Hispanics. After backing Joe Biden by more than a two-to-one margin in 2020 (67 to 32 percent), they still supported Harris, but by a much smaller 19-point margin. The swings appeared to be greater among non-college Asian women, specifically.
For their part, white voters pretty much stood pat relative to 2020, backing Trump by 14 points, a small two-point rightward shift. Interestingly, there was very little difference when broken down by education: college-educated whites moved right by three points compared to one point for non-college whites. However, there was some disagreement in the studies about the former group. AP VoteCast and Pew captured only minor shifts to Trump among whites with a college degree, but Catalist showed them going rightward by a more robust seven points. Additionally, while just three groups swung leftward, this included white women (D+0.7).
Overall, the averages making a pretty convincing case that the 2024 election saw meaningful levels of racial depolarization. While this was not good for the Democrats, who have long been the preferred party of many racial minorities, it is probably good for the country over the long term if Americans see themselves—and, by extension, their politics—less through the lens of their skin color.
Trump’s gains with men, especially younger men, were crucial.
Leading up to Election Day, it was unclear whether the gender gap—the difference between the party preferences of male and female voters—was set to grow. Some high-quality polls showed Trump making gains with young men, while others found no such movement, as Daniel Cox outlined here a week before the election.
But early signs indicated the shift was real, and the later voter-validated studies reaffirmed this. In 2020, men had backed Trump by just four points. Fast-forward to 2024, and that margin grew to 13, good for a nine-point swing. Meanwhile, though women also shifted rightward, their movement was by a much more modest four points. Pew was the lone study to provide public data on gender and age, and they found that it was young men, specifically, who were behind the change. Men over 50 moved toward Trump by roughly six points. However, the youngest cohort (18–29), swung by nine, and the second-youngest (30–49) moved by a massive 14 points.
As we documented recently, Democrats have been slowly but consistently losing non-white male voters for several elections in a row, and it appears to have finally caught up to them, playing a key role in their loss at the presidential level this time. And so far, the party’s efforts at winning back men haven’t inspired much confidence.
The class shift was mostly along income lines, not education.
One of the biggest political stories during the Trump era has been about the class realignment of the American electorate. Trump first won the presidency on the back of working-class voters—specifically, non-college voters who were less likely to be part of the country’s culturally elite professional class. Since then, many analyses of the working class have focused on these voters, and for good reason: their college-educated peers, including some erstwhile Republicans, were correspondingly moving to Democrats in droves, opening up a new fault line in American politics.
Last year also saw a shift along class lines, but this time, it was appears less rooted in educational attainment. Across the three studies, both college- and non-college-educated voters swung to Trump by about the same margins: six and seven points, respectively.3 Instead, the movement mostly came along socioeconomic lines.
Analysis of historical election data shows that Democratic presidential nominees have not only won the lowest income earners (those making under $50,000 annually) in every election since 1992, but they have won them by double digits. But in 2024, Trump may have become the first GOP nominee on record to carry them. I say “may” because the two studies that gauged income level—VoteCast and Pew—have slightly different ways of defining the three income brackets. According to VoteCast, Biden won these voters by nine points, but they backed Trump by two points last year. Pew shows that Biden ran up a larger margin (19 points) and that they backed Harris by just one point.
Overall, though, both studies tell the same story: Trump made substantial gains with the lowest income earners. Worse for Democrats, who have struggled to retain their identity as the party of workers in recent years, is that the lone income bracket Harris captured was the highest income earners, though here again the two datasets differ slightly. VoteCast showed the wealthiest Americans backing Biden by five points and Harris by seven, while Pew had them supporting Biden by 11 and then dipping to just five points for Harris. Either way, Democrats are clearly losing ground with voters who have long supported them while making inroads with ones whom they campaigned against for decades.
Harris would not have fared better with higher turnout.
Though much of the analysis from these studies focused on how different populations voted and the extent to which voting patterns changed from 2020, another important piece of the picture was about turnout. It is true that from one election to the next, the same voters won’t always show up. Some only turn out for a specific candidate rather than a party. Some who sit out one election might vote the next time around. Every election includes new voters who were not previously registered. These changes can be crucial factors behind a candidate’s win or loss.
One popular theory in some Democratic circles following Harris’s loss is that the real culprit was millions of Biden voters who stayed home. These explanations seemed to suggest that Harris’s attempts to moderate during the campaign—or to insufficiently express outrage over the war in Gaza—had so soured part of the party’s base that many of them chose the couch instead of the voting booth on Election Day.
However, Pew’s study demonstrates that this theory was deeply misguided. Using publicly available voter-file data, they concluded that even if there every American had cast a ballot, not only would Trump still have won, but he actually would have increased his popular vote margin by a percentage point.4 Pew found that 44 percent of these non-voters would have backed Trump, 40 percent would have voted for Harris, and fully 13 percent would have supported a third party. Perhaps just as notable? People who didn’t vote in 2020 but who turned out in 2024 broke for Trump.
All this points to a hard truth for Democrats: it’s far from a given that the Biden voters who stayed home in 2024 would have backed Harris had they turned out.
These three studies offer as complete a picture as we will ever hope to see about what happened in the 2024 election. Of course, past is not always prologue. It is not a given that the gains Trump made with key blocs of voters will persist in 2028 for the next Republican nominee. But some of these shifts also aren’t new and may be the result of Democrats failing to fully reckon with their past performances. Moreover, as recent history has shown, these are the trends the party must respond to, no matter how well they might do in the upcoming midterm election.
As the parties take stock of what happened last year and develop their plans for moving forward, they would be wise to heed the results of these studies.
I am excluding the national exit poll here, which has consistently proven to been an unreliable source. This cycle was no exception, with several discrepancies between the exits and the voter-validated studies.
This even surpassed George W. Bush’s memorably strong performance with Hispanics in 2004, when he won 44 percent (though that figure comes solely from the exit polls, which had serious struggles around that time).
We will note that the Catalist study did find a somewhat larger rightward swing among non-college Asians and Hispanics than among their college-educated counterparts.
This stood in contrast to 2020 when non-voters would have helped increase Biden’s margin had they turned out.
Excellent analysis and the fullest picture yet of the depth of the Democratic Party's failings.
Most often and predictably cited in this category are organized labor, blue collar workers and Hispanic voters, where Trump made huge gains that could well represent the start of a permanent political realignment for the GOP.
Less mentioned but arguably deserving of more than a mere footnote are those political players whose prominence in deciding election outcomes has rapidly dwindled if not disappeared, starting with the Legacy media, followed closely by Hollywood and celebrities in other entertainment fields. They may decide going forward that their credibility and pocketbooks will be better served by calling balls and strikes rather than carrying water.
Bottom line, though, is that the Democratic Party has only itself and its leftward drift to blame for its political disconnect with almost every category of American.
The most striking data concerns the Hispanic vote. The left-wing assumption has long been that Hispanics favor lax immigration enforcement because a large majority of unauthorized migrants are Hispanic. Not true: Hispanics who reside here legally know the problems that mass immigration has created. Blue-collar Hispanic men especially know how their economic conditions have worsened because of illegal immigration.
The next time somebody says that favoring enforcement of immigration laws means that you are racist, confront them with this voting data about Hispanics in 2024.