The dust is settling on the 2024 election following President-elect Trump's unexpected easy victory.
Both parties are now looking to the exit polls for lessons about how Trump won, why Vice President Harris lost, and how the trends will affect future elections. I am doing it.
There are some important caveats, including that some exit polls are updated with new data even days after the election.
There are also two major studies.
One is an exit poll conducted by Edison Research for a media consortium consisting of ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN. The other is an Associated Press/Fox News voter analysis conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.
The two methods usually produce similar results, but this is not always the case.
In any case, here are five key takeaways from the exit polls.
Latino man approaches President Trump in a big way
The magnitude of the pro-Trump shift among Latino men was one of the most surprising findings of CNN's exit poll.
Going back to 2020, Latino men favored President Biden over President Trump by a 23-point margin, 59% to 36%. Four years later, they reversed themselves, voting for Trump over Harris by a 12-point margin, 55% to 43%.
The wide swings among these voters contrasted with more modest swings among Latina women, who went from 69 percent supporting Biden in 2020 to 60 percent supporting Harris.
There are various explanations for exactly why the change occurred among Latino men. Trump supporters argue that the president-elect's economic message resonates with Latino voters generally and that Democratic overreach on sociocultural issues such as transgender rights may be alienating Latino men in particular. are.
Another, more demanding theory is that sexism and racism may have been a catalyst for declining support for black and Indian female Democratic candidates.
The abortion rights wave never materialized for Harris.
Perhaps the single biggest disappointment regarding Democratic turnout was the fact that there was no wave of women voters to help Harris win.
The party had hoped for such a wave in 2022, the first presidential election since the Supreme Court's defeat of Roe v. Wade.
There was a lot of evidence to support this idea. Leading up to Election Day, liberals had won every state ballot initiative on abortion, making it a post-Roe election. Trump himself has blamed the party's overwhelming performance in the 2022 midterm elections on the party's message on abortion.
But this time, there was no real indication that the abortion helped Harris in the same way.
Neither CNN's exit polls nor the AP/FOX survey show any dramatic changes in female voters over the past four years.
In fact, both polls showed that Harris' approval rating was smaller than Biden's approval rating four years ago.
According to CNN exit polls, Harris' lead with women in 2020 was 8 points, rather than Biden's 15 points. The AP/FOX poll found a 7-point lead for Harris, rather than a 12-point lead for Biden.
The poor performance is a source of embarrassment for Democrats, especially since liberals dominated in seven of the 10 states that passed abortion-related ballot measures on Tuesday.
In Florida, a majority of voters supported an effort to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution, but the 57% who voted to do so fell short of the required 60% supermajority.
The youth vote shifted several notches to the right.
The Trump campaign's media strategy included numerous interviews with podcasters, particularly Joe Rogan, who appealed to a primarily young male audience.
Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the traditional pattern of new generations becoming more liberal than their predecessors is breaking down.
Exit polls bear this out, showing a clear shift toward Trump among young voters overall.
Among those under 30, Ms. Harris had a narrow 5-point lead, according to an Associated Press/Fox poll. In 2020, Biden won by 25 points.
However, this study does not show that this change is particularly pronounced among men.
Male voters under 45 went from supporting Biden by 7 points in 2020 to supporting Trump by 6 points in 2024. But Harris' lead among women under 45 was also only 12 points, half the 24-point lead enjoyed by Biden.
Different contexts of black male voting
The question of whether Ms. Harris is having trouble relating to black male voters has been a hot topic in the media for much of her campaign.
It's also one of the few issues on which two major voter surveys yielded contradictory results.
CNN exit polls show black men's voting behavior is largely unchanged from four years ago. Trump's approval rating increased by just 2 points, from 19% to 21%. This is such a small change that it might be considered “noise,” a random statistical variation.
But the Associated Press/Fox poll revealed a very different picture, with Trump's share of the black male vote doubling from 12% to 24%.
As more data is processed in exit polls, the gap may narrow. But for now, the question mark over what happened is that post-election data also shows contradictions.
Jewish voters stick with the Democratic Party
Michigan's large Arab-American turnout was another media focus in the final stages of the campaign — not surprising given the debacle in Gaza and Israel's recent invasion of Lebanon.
In the Arab-majority city of Dearborn, Mr. Trump actually won a plurality of votes, while Jill Stein of the Green Party, who has been a vocal critic of Mr. Biden's support for Israel, received an astonishing 18 votes. It was %.
Conversely, there were suggestions that traditional Jewish support for the Democratic Party could weaken before the election as Republicans went on the offensive over Democrats' lack of concern about anti-Semitism.
There was no real evidence that this happened.
According to an Associated Press/Fox poll, support among Jews has slipped only slightly, with Biden's approval rating at 69% in 2020 compared to 66% for Harris.
Perhaps considering the small sample size (Jewish voters cast only 3 percent of all votes), such a small change could again be just statistical noise.
