In November 2024, the dust of the election settled, and President Trump (Donald Trump) won the election easily. Both parties are currently studying the exit polls, hoping to discover the reasons for Trump’s victory and Vice President Harris’s defeat, as well as the impact and insights of the current trends on future elections.
It must be noted that some exit polls are not comprehensive, and some are still updating data several days after the election.
Additionally, two major surveys are currently in progress. One is an exit poll conducted by Edison Research for a media consortium composed of ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN. The other is voter analysis conducted by the University of Chicago NORC for the Associated Press and Fox News. Undoubtedly, the results from these two different methods may be roughly similar or starkly different.
However, here are five major findings from the exit polls:
One of CNN’s exit poll findings is that the number of Hispanic men supporting Trump significantly increased.
In 2020, Hispanic men supporting President-elect Joe Biden outnumbered Trump by 23 percentage points, with 59% and 36% respectively. Four years later, there was a dramatic shift in the data, with Trump’s support surpassing Harris’s by 12 percentage points, at 55% and 43% respectively.
The significant swing in the willingness of these male voters contrasts sharply with a slight swing among Hispanic female voters, whose support for Biden dropped from 69% in 2020 to 60% for Harris, a decrease of 9 percentage points.
There are various opinions on why this change occurred among Hispanic male voters. Trump supporters believe that the President’s economic policies resonated widely among Hispanic voters, while the Democrats’ excessive behavior on social and cultural issues such as transgender rights may have alienated Hispanic male voters.
Another more severe view suggests that Harris’s decline in support could be due to gender and racial discrimination because of her Black and Indian heritage.
According to the Christian Post, in the 2024 presidential election, Hispanic Christian voters significantly shifted their support to the elected President Trump. Trump garnered the majority of Hispanic Catholic votes (53%), a significant increase from the 28% he received in 2020. While the majority of Hispanic Catholics (71%) supported Biden four years ago, this year, Harris received 46% support from this voter group.
One of the biggest disappointments for Democrats in the election is the lack of overwhelming support from female voters for Harris.
Democrats were hoping for a wave of female voter support in the first presidential election after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
There was ample evidence supporting this expectation. Before Election Day, after the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe, liberals won every state vote related to abortion initiatives. Trump himself attributed the Republicans’ poor performance in the 2022 midterm elections to the party’s discourse on abortion.
However, this time there was no indication that the abortion issue helped Harris in the same way.
Exit polls from CNN and AP/Fox both show that female voter preference has not significantly changed over the past four years.
In fact, both surveys indicate that support for Harris among women is lower than the support for Biden four years ago.
CNN’s exit poll shows Harris has an 8-percentage-point advantage among female voters, while Biden had a 15-percentage-point advantage in 2020. The AP/Fox survey found Harris had a 7-percentage-point advantage, compared to Biden’s 12-percentage-point advantage.
This poor performance has left Democrats perplexed, especially considering that liberal initiatives related to abortion prevailed in 7 out of 10 states where votes were cast on Election Day.
Even though a majority of voters in Florida supported enshrining the right to abortion in the state constitution, the 57% vote fell short of the required 60% absolute majority.
Trump’s campaign team’s media strategy included interviews with several podcasters, most notably Joe Rogan, whose audience mainly consists of young men.
Various anecdotes suggest that traditional models of increasing freedom with each generation are being overturned.
Exit polls confirm this trend, showing a noticeable shift towards Trump among young voters overall.
According to the AP/Fox survey, Harris only had a 5-percentage-point lead among those under 30. In contrast, Biden won with a 25-percentage-point lead in 2020.
However, this shift is not as prominent among men.
Support for Biden among male voters under 45 dropped from a 7-percentage-point lead in 2020 to a 6-percentage-point lead in 2024, and Harris’s lead among female voters under 45 was only 12 percentage points, half of Biden’s 24-percentage-point lead.
The question of whether Harris faced setbacks among Black male voters was a topic of media discussion during her campaign.
In the final sprint of the election, former President Obama bluntly and passionately urged Black men to support Harris. He criticized them, saying, “You come up with all sorts of reasons and excuses… you just don’t like having a woman as President; you come up with other choices and other reasons.”
He said, “Based on reports I have received from campaigns and communities, we are not seeing the same enthusiasm and voter turnout in our community as when I was campaigning.”
This was also one of the few issues on which the two major surveys produced opposing results.
CNN’s exit poll shows that the voting behavior of Black men has barely changed compared to four years ago. Trump’s support increased by only 2 percentage points, from 19% to 21%. This minimal change may be attributed to statistical noise.
However, the AP/Fox survey produced drastically different results, with Trump doubling his voter share among Black men, rising from 12% to 24%.
As more data is used for exit polls, the discrepancies between these two polls may decrease. However, the questions surrounding what transpired suggest that inconsistencies exist even in post-election data.
In the final days of the campaign, the voting trend of a significant number of Arab-American voters in Michigan became another focal point for the media, not only because of the Gaza conflict but also due to Israel’s recent attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon.
In Dearborn, a city where Arabs are the majority, Trump won a majority of votes, while Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who strongly criticized Biden’s support for Israel, also received a surprising 18% of the vote.
On the other hand, while lacking concrete evidence, there were indications before the election that traditional Jewish voters might weaken their support for the Democratic Party due to ongoing Republican criticism of the party’s lack of attention to anti-Semitic protest movements.
In mid-April, a series of protests against Israel and in support of Palestine erupted on American university campuses, including Columbia University. Protesters demanded universities to divest from Israel, including cutting financial ties with Israel and its affiliated entities. In response, the U.S. government strongly suppressed these protests. President Biden criticized these protests as being filled with anti-Semitic sentiment, while New York’s federal congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats criticized the crackdown.
The AP/Fox survey found a slight decline in Jewish support, with Harris garnering 66% support compared to Biden’s 69% in 2020.
Given that Jewish voters account for only 3% of all votes, the sample size may be small, so such a small change may just be statistical “noise.”
(This article referenced The Hill’s reporting)