President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was the result of demographic shifts that benefited Republicans.
Exit polling by Edison showed that Americans were more similar in their voting patterns this cycle than they were divided. Expected wide gaps between Republicans and Democrats, based on gender, education, age, and race, failed to materialize.
Trump ultimately was able to narrow such gaps vastly compared with 2020, concentrating on economic messaging that was compelling to a broad cross section of American political society.
Currently, the president-elect is projected to have carried all seven of the core swing states, bringing him up to a total of 312 electoral votes to Vice President Kamala Harris’s 226.
Gender
This campaign season was unusually gendered in each campaign’s strategy.Harris sought to target female voters, using the issue of abortion as a rallying point. Trump focused more on male voters, particularly young men, and appeared on podcasts popular with that demographic.
Observers thus expected a substantial gender divergence—which ultimately didn’t materialize.
In reality, Trump outperformed among both men and women, winning white men, white women, and Hispanic men outright and increasing his share among black men and Hispanics.
Education
Democrats have gained ground among wealthy, white, college-educated voters in recent years, and those trends continued in 2024.This cycle, Harris gained ground among white college-educated voters; she did 0.8 points better with that demographic than President Joe Biden did in 2020. That’s unsurprising, as Harris targeted these voters.
Trump has also made gains for the GOP among non-college educated voters across racial groups.
Technically, Trump lost a point of support from white non-college educated voters compared with 2020, though that’s within the exit poll’s margin of error.
But where he lost some among white voters, he gained among minority voters, including those with and without college degrees.
Age
Traditionally, young people tend toward Democrats and older people veer more Republican.That standard wisdom, however, was flipped on its head in this election: Harris underperformed with young voters, meaning those aged 18 to 29.
While Trump managed to win 18- to 24-year-old voters outright, 25- to 29-year-olds slightly favored Harris, bringing Trump’s total with the group to 43 percent—an increase of 7 points compared with 2020.
At the same time, Harris made gains with older voters, winning voters aged 65 and older outright. The oldest voters reduced their support for Trump by about 3 points, with 45 percent supporting the president-elect this cycle.
Race
Likewise, the Democratic coalition has historically relied on minority voters as a counterbalance to Republican-leaning white voters.
In this election, Trump again won among white voters outright, which was crucial to his sweeping victory, as the group made up nearly 71 percent of the electorate. White voters backing Trump accounted for 40.5 percent of the electorate compared with Harris’s 29.1 percent.
However, Trump also made crucial inroads with other racial groups.
His vote share among black voters nudged up 1 point in 2024 compared with 2020, driven largely by shifts among black men.
Shifts were more pronounced among Hispanic voters, with whom Trump saw an increase of 14 points compared with 2020, falling just shy of a majority with the demographic. That shift enabled Trump to drastically increase his vote share in states such as Florida and Texas, which he won by more than 10 points for the first time in his political career.
The same trend was seen among Asian voters, with Trump winning 39 percent of the demographic, a 5-point increase from 2020.
Trump Gains in All States
These demographic shifts enabled Trump to increase his margins in every single state.Aside from resulting in a sweep of all seven swing states, the shifting political alignments enabled Trump to make gains in dark red and deep blue states alike.
For instance, in Florida and Ohio—once the quintessential swing states—Trump won by more than 10 points, the first time any candidate has pulled off such a feat since President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory.
Swing states, by comparison, shifted less than states that were firmly in the GOP camp or the Democratic camp.
The chart below shows how these shifts played out.
Blue States Shifted Most
Surprisingly, states that were safely blue in 2020—those that voted for Biden by a margin of 15 points or more—shifted the most in Trump’s favor.Across safe blue states, Trump gained on average 7 percentage points.
That shift was most visible in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.
New York shifted a sizable 12 points in Trump’s favor, with Harris barely holding on to double-digit margins in the state at just 11 points over her Republican challenger. In 2020, Biden won the state by 23 points.
Illinois, a 17-point victory for Democrats in 2020, shifted 9 points to the right, voting for Harris by just an 8-point margin.
But nowhere were these shifts more visible than New Jersey, which Biden won by 16 points in 2020; this year, Harris eked out a 5-point win—such a small margin that it places the state firmly in potential swing state territory in 2028.
Red states also saw shifts, but these were less pronounced than in safe blue states.
In the chart below, we define safe states as those with a margin of 15 points or more in 2020, likely states as those with margins between 5 and 15 points, and swing states as those with margins of less than 5 points. In addition to the swing states in 2024, Florida is considered a swing state in our analysis because of the 3.3-point margin in 2020 election.
