In 2024’s issues-versus-intangibles election, the issues won out. According to exit polling, voters gave Kamala Harris a minus-5-point net favorability rating (47 percent favorable, 52 percent unfavorable). That’s not pretty, but it’s better than the minus-7-point favorability rating that they gave Donald Trump (46 percent favorable, 53 percent unfavorable). How, then, did Trump emerge victorious? As exit polling conveys, he won because voters trusted him more than Harris to lead on the issues.
The electorate was deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. Seventy-five percent of voters said inflation has caused “hardship” for their family in the past year. Sixty-eight percent described the economy as “not so good” or “poor,” compared with only 31 percent who called it “good” or “excellent.” Eleven percent of voters described immigration as the “most important issue,” and 90 percent of those voters went for Trump—by far the largest margin for either candidate on any issue asked about. Given such responses, it’s unsurprising that voters gave President Biden a net approval rating of minus-19 points—far worse than the favorability rating of either candidate.
While exit polling didn’t specifically ask about trans policies in schools and sports, school closures, or any other issues that particularly affected kids, exit polling showed a 15-point swing among voters with children under 18—such parents went from backing Biden by 6 points in 2020 to backing Trump by 9 points in 2024. No similar move was found among voters without children under age 18 (Trump fared just 1 point better with such voters this time than last, losing by 1 point rather than by 2 points), suggesting that parents’ votes were informed by more than just economic concerns.
In addition, those who cast their first presidential vote in this election—many of whom came of age, or became politically aware, under the Covid regime—favored Trump by 13 points. Young voters in general (those between 18 and 29) swung 13 points toward him from 2020 to 2024. (Trump lost among them by just 11 points this time, versus 24 points last time.)
On abortion, the issue that Harris emphasized above all others, the verdict was split. Most Americans (59 percent) continue to hold non-absolutist positions on abortion—that is, their positions range from believing that it should either be legal or illegal “in most cases,” but they don’t believe it should be either legal or illegal “in all cases.” Trump won these relative abortion moderates by more than two-to-one (68 to 30 percent). (Those who favor abortion “in most cases” split evenly, while 92 percent those who oppose it “in most cases” backed Trump.)
A minority of voters (38 percent) hold more staunch or extreme views on abortion, in either direction, saying that it should either be legal or illegal “in all cases.” Those who favor unlimited abortion greatly outnumber those who favor no abortion; accordingly, Harris won among these 38 percent of more absolutist voters by more than a three-to-one margin. Indeed, a whopping 60 percent of self-described Harris voters said abortion should be “legal in all cases.” In comparison, just 11 percent of Trump voters said abortion should be “illegal in all cases.” In short, Trump won easily among voters who are more in the center on this issue, while most of Harris’s support came from voters who want abortion to be legal at any point in a pregnancy.
Courting such voters, however, may have cost Harris with others. Self-described Catholics, for example, backed Biden over Trump by 5 points but backed Trump over Harris by 18 points—a 23-point swing. This wasn’t simply a result of Trump attracting more Hispanic voters: Trump more than doubled his margin among white Catholics from 2020, from plus-12 to plus-26 points.
This is noteworthy, because Trump actually fared slightly worse among white voters as a whole than he did in 2020—winning among them by 16 points versus 17 last time. He performed a bit better among black voters this time than last (losing by 72 points instead of 75). But he made massive gains with Latinos. In 2020, Trump lost among Latinos by more than two to one (65 percent to 32 percent). This time, he lost among them by just 6 points (52–46). He even won outright among Latino men, by 12 points, after losing among them by 23 points last time—a massive, 35-point swing.
Trump’s relative success with Latino voters must come as a shock to many establishment Republicans. After Mitt Romney was decisively beaten by Barack Obama in 2012, the Republican National Committee performed an “autopsy,” which counseled a softer stance on immigration in the wake of demographic shifts. Trump, however, has taken the party in the exact opposite direction. And on Tuesday, he fared a whopping 38 points better among Latino voters than Romney did—losing by 6 points, whereas Romney lost by 44.
Much was made in the lead-up to this election about the divide between the sexes, but it was slightly less pronounced this time around than in 2020. On Tuesday, Trump fared 21 points better with males (winning by 13 points) than with females (losing by 8 points); in 2020, he fared 23 points better with males (winning by 8 points) than with females (losing by 15 points). Both times, Trump performed a bit better among married women than among unmarried men. He experienced major gains, however, among married men—doubling his advantage versus 2020 with that group (winning by 22 points, versus 11 last time). And he actually gained among unmarried women, his worst group (from down 27 points in 2020 to down 21 in 2024).
While the gap between the sexes didn’t broaden, exit polling reveals an even wider urban-rural gap than before. In 2020, Trump performed 37 points better in rural areas than in urban areas (winning by 15 points in the former and losing by 22 in the latter). This time, he performed a colossal 51 points better in rural areas than in urban ones (winning by 30 points in the former and losing by 21 in the latter), doubling his rural advantage along the way. He also won in suburbia, 51 to 47 percent, after losing by 2 points there in 2020.
On the generational front, Trump on Tuesday did best among Generation X (and the tail end of the Baby Boomers)—winning by 10 points among voters ages 45 to 64 (the largest segment of this year’s electorate), while tying Harris among voters older than that and losing by 5 points among voters younger than that. He won by almost a two-to-one margin (65 percent to 34 percent) among the one-eighth of the population who are veterans, while losing by 2 points (50–48) among the seven-eighths of voters who aren’t veterans. Interestingly, among the 38 percent of voters who think “democracy in the U.S.” is “very threatened,” he won—albeit narrowly (51–47). Perhaps the Democrats’ lawfare and attacks on free speech backfired. Whatever the cause, Trump’s victory among this cohort must afford his supporters some ironic amusement.
While Harris tried to achieve the trick of running as the “change” candidate while still the sitting vice president, the 28 percent of voters who said that they mostly wanted someone who could “bring needed change” went to Trump by a three-to-one margin (74 percent to 24 percent). Exit polling also hinted at voter concerns about Harris’s potential competence (and concerns about Biden’s actual level of competence) in the role of chief executive—even apart from ideology—as a plurality of voters said that the candidate quality that mattered most was the “ability to lead,” and those 30 percent of voters went to Trump by a two-to-one margin (66 percent to 33 percent).
Going into Tuesday night, a big question was whether the polls were underestimating Harris’s support nationally, underestimating Trump’s support on a state-by-state basis, or correctly picking up on a shift in which the key swing states would more fully match the national results than previously. The answer appears to have been the middle possibility—the undervaluing of Trump’s support in the swing states, including in the Great Lakes region.
As I’ve noted previously, whichever presidential candidate wins a majority of the five states “that form a ribbon from Pennsylvania, through Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, to Iowa,” has prevailed in the vast majority of elections. Indeed, from Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860 through Trump’s on Tuesday, whoever has won a majority of those five states has won the election 83 percent of the time (35 out of 42 races). Trump has now swept those five states for a second time, just as Ronald Reagan also did it twice—but no other Republican between them managed to do it even once.
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