Republican candidate Donald Trump made history by winning the 2024 US Presidential elections, beating Democrat candidate Kamala Harris and becoming the second person in American history to win two non-consecutive terms in the history of the United States. He is also the first convicted felon to become US President (POTUS).
Trump secured well over the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency, Edison Research projected, capping a remarkable comeback four years after he was voted out of the White House. Critics feel Trump’s return is likely to test democratic institutions at home and relations abroad. Addressing a roaring crowd of supporters at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in Florida as the results rolled in on Wednesday, Trump said, "America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate”.
Who voted for Trump?
Numbers from exit polls show that though women voted for Harris more than Trump, the numbers perhaps did not meet the expectations of the campaign. Harris, who rallied her supporters on abortion rights and women empowerment as potentially the first woman of colour to be the president of US, won 54 per cent of women’s votes while Trump managed to clinch 44 per cent, as per data by Edison Research which surveyed 22,509 respondents.
Black voters may have also aided in Trump’s victory, despite Harris’s campaign specifically targeting Black voters in battleground states, often with the support of the country’s first Black president, Barack Obama. Harris was also pitched as the first woman, first Indian-American and the second African-American ever to become US President with the Democrats hoping to reverse the disturbing trend of Black voters moving away from the party. It was nevertheless Trump who increased his support among Black voters, despite his pro-white supremacist and ultra-right image.
Harris clinched over 80 per cent of the Black vote, according to an exit poll by The Associated Press, which was ten per cent less compared to 2020, when Joe Biden secured nearly nine of 10 Black votes. Trump benefited from the shift, winning about 20 per cent of the Black vote this time. This is a significant rise, from 13 per cent of Black votes in 2020 and 8 per cent in 2016. This is the highest level of support by Black voters for any Republican since George W Bush in 2000. The Edison Research survey showed 86 per cent Black voters picking Harris while 12 per cent voted for Trump.
Incidentally, Hispanics and Latinos—immigrants from Latin America and their descendants and the people whose heritage is from Spanish-speaking countries—contributed to Harris’ defeat, despite being considered traditionally Democrat vote banks. While Harris managed to clock majority of Hispanic-Latino votes at 53 per cent, Trump managed to get 45 percent of the vote, indicating a massive 13-point increase from 2020. This is a record high for any Republican presidential nominee in the US, as per NBC News exit polls. The shift is significant, mainly due to Trump’s previously hostile and antagonistic relationship with the community due to his anti-immigrant policies and borderline racist rhetoric.
Trump maintained his loyal base of rural, white and non-college educated voters, with 54 per cent non-college goers voting for Trump, as per Edison Research, while 57 per cent voters with college degrees voted for Harris.
Why did voters choose Trump?
According to Reuters/Ipsos opinion polls, Trump was seen as a better candidate to lead the US population out of an economic slump. A majority of voters identified jobs and the economy as the biggest electoral and national issues. Frustration against higher prices even amid record-high stock markets, low wages and unemployment remained factors that influenced voting. The Joe Biden administration took on much of the blame for these economic concerns and Harris, who entered the race in the last hour, was unable to restore voters’ faith.
Among Black voters, key swing states saw a shift from Democrats to Republican. In Georgia, one of the first swing states that went Trump’s way, he recorded a one per cent increase in Black votes from 2020, as per exit polls analysed by Al Jazeera. In Michigan, where Harris faced a growing anti-Democratic sentiment in the wake of growing anger against Israel’s war on Gaza, nearly 2 per cent Black votes shifted from Democrats to Trump. North Carolina also saw a big shift of 5 per cent among Black voters from Democrats to Republican. In Pennsylvania, Republicans got three per cent more Black votes than in 2020 while in Wisconsin, Democrats lost a massive 13 per cent of the Black votes. Poverty, low wages and healthcare concerns plaguing the state are being considered factors for the shift.
The shift is not altogether unexpected. A 2023 poll by Gallup had noted a fall in the proportion of Black American adults identifying with the Democrats to 66 per cent (from 77 per cent in 2020). Analysts in the US feel that a growing number of young generation of Black voters do not identify with the legacy of the civil rights movements associated with the Democrats and are instead voting on other issues more pertinent to their times.
With the civil rights movements passing from memory to history, many younger generation Black voters do not see historical baggage as a concern against the Republicans and are even curious to try Trump. There is also growing resentment against the Democrats, whom the community feels it has supported loyally for decades, for not adequately representing the community’s interests with many Black voters feeling the community received little in exchange for the support.
Hispanic and Latino voter demographic which includes a large number of lower-income households, were hit hardest by inflation and housing price rise. They likely saw Trump as more capable of dealing with economic crisis. Moreover, a Siena poll for New York Times shows that over 40 per cent of Latino and Hispanic voters surveyed supported both Trump’s pledge to continue building a wall along the Mexico border and his deportation plans and 63 per cent did not feel personally targeted by his anti-immigrant tirades.
With regard to the women’s vote, while Harris polled the majority, the margin was not as much as her campaign had been hoping.
In fact, Harris secured a lesser margin than her Democratic predecessors like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. White women, who historically vote Republican, once again voted in large numbers for Trump, despite Harris making inroads in that demographic. While larger majority of younger women voted for Harris, Trump seems to have improved his voter share of young women as well from 2020. While Black women majorly remained a Democratic vote bank, Harris seems to have lost out on Latin and Hispanic women.
