How America voted: A closer look at how the U.S. presidency was won – and lost

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Polling shows that Republican Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. presidential election thanks to an improved showing among several key demographic groups, including Black and Latino voters, rural and suburban dwellers, middle-income earners and those with relatively lower levels of education.

It wasn’t just one or two groups that tipped the balance in Mr. Trump’s favour. He improved in several key areas on his results in the 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.

Vice-President Kamala Harris polled well among younger voters, those with high incomes and women, but was unable to maintain the level of support among the Democratic voting coalition that gave Mr. Biden the presidency four years earlier.

The following data are taken from AP VoteCast, a survey of the American electorate that functions in a way that resembles an exit poll, but is not an exit poll. It has a different methodology that reflects how voting has changed, thanks to the increased adoption of advance and mail-in voting. It is based on a combination of in-person, telephone and online research that reaches thousands of Americans.

For the second time in a decade, voters declined to elect a female president of the United States. The gender divide in support for Kamala Harris and Donald Trump resembled the 2016 election in which Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump won handily among male voters in 2024, and did just well enough among women to coast to victory.

“There’s an enormous gender gap,” said Ken Kollman, professor of political science at the University of Michigan. He said the trend has been going in the same direction for the past several elections as women form an ever-more important part of the Democratic base and men move closer to the Republican Party. Ms. Harris did not poll as well among either group as Joe Biden did in 2020, when he captured 46 per cent of men and 55 per cent of women.

One of the important shifts in this election was the growth in Black and Latino support for Mr. Trump. In 2020, those groups turned out in huge numbers for Mr. Biden. While Ms. Harris held on to a similar level of support among white voters this time, her share of Black and Latino votes was seven to eight percentage points below the 2020 level for Mr. Biden.

Rodrigo Dominguez-Villegas, director of research at UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute, said a combination of factors were at play with the Latino vote. Inflation and economic stress, as well as a general realignment of the working class to the Republican Party, contributed to the change. Although Ms. Harris still won an overwhelming share of Black votes, the decline was owing to a shift among younger Black men to the Republicans.

The Democratic Party is increasingly the party of the university educated. Few demographic groups were as strong for Ms. Harris as those with a postgraduate degree, one of a handful of spots where she outperformed Mr. Biden’s 2020 campaign. She slipped slightly among college graduates when compared with his numbers from four years ago.

For Mr. Trump, support was strongest among those with a high-school diploma or less. Mr. Trump also did better this time than in 2020 with voters who attended some college or who have a two-year associate’s degree.

Mr. Trump’s victory owes a lot to his popularity with those in the middle of the income distribution. Working-class and middle-class people in households with incomes up to $100,000 a year opted for Mr. Trump over Ms. Harris by a margin of five to seven percentage points. Those voters were hit hard by inflation over the past few years and it’s clear that some took a dim view of the Biden administration.

“High inflation, especially in things like food and housing, hit lower-income people harder, and when they’re paying higher prices they’re going to blame the incumbent administration,” said Michael Berkman, director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University. “In retrospect, it was obvious that was going to happen.” Ms. Harris’s support was strongest among those with the highest and lowest incomes.

The enthusiasm among young men for Mr. Trump’s campaign, the bro vote, is being described as a feature of his victory. There were important shifts to the Republicans in some swing states among men 18-29. In Michigan, for example, data showed a 10-point shift in that demographic away from the Democrats in 2024.

Ms. Harris did very well among young women nationally (58 per cent support) and kept that age group in her column, but it was a much lower margin than Mr. Biden achieved in 2020. Middle-aged Americans, those 45 to 64, opted for Mr. Trump by a slightly larger margin than in the previous election.

Mr. Trump’s campaign was able to capture the small-town and rural vote by a huge margin, and early indications are that turnout in those districts was high. As usual, the cities were heavily Democratic, but margins there weren’t enough to make up for Mr. Trump’s better showing in suburban areas. Although he didn’t win a majority in the suburbs, he improved his position over 2020 by two percentage points.

“Trump was able to do really well turning out the rural areas. In the suburban areas I’ve looked at around Detroit and Philadelphia, Trump didn’t do much better than he did in 2020 but Harris did worse than Biden. That’s also true in the cities of Philly and Detroit,” said Prof. Kollman from the University of Michigan.

The economy was clearly a huge priority for voters on both sides of the campaign. The impact of inflation, although it may have been tamed, remains painful and many voters blame the incumbent administration. Ms. Harris couldn’t escape that cloud, Prof. Berkman said.

“I think that it’s clearly a rejection of Biden,” he said. “At a time when people are hurting, they’re just going to say, ‘throw the bums out.’ ” Abortion, which the Harris campaign hoped would motivate millions of women to get to the polls, did not create a large enough Democratic wave to prove decisive. For a large number of voters, the issue of immigration and the border with Mexico, helped fuel support for the Trump campaign and his call for a border crackdown and mass deportations.

The U.S. electorate is pushing for change. The question of how much change is an interesting dividing line between the voters for each party. The vast majority of Ms. Harris’s supporters said they would like to see small change or no change in how the country is run. Mr. Trump’s supporters, by contrast, were in favour of complete and total upheaval.

Prof. Berkman said that sentiment may be part of what he describes as the populist revolt against democracy. “We see that in a lot of different kinds of polling, the desire for chaos, the desire for upheaval. What exactly that means to people, and whether Trump’s actually going to deliver that, I have no idea,” he said.

– Data analysis by Chen Wang