Tracking the Changes: The 2024 US Presidential Exit Polls

I was watching Frontline’s excellent documentary on Trumps comeback and noticed how they emphasized his success among younger voters in 2024. This made me curious about the actual numbers and more specifically, how they changed between 2020 and 2024.

At the end of the day, Harris lost the popular vote by roughly 2.3 million votes which is less than Clinton won by in 2016 (2.8 mil) and more importantly, significantly less than Biden’s margin of victory in 2020 (7 mil). So in total, support for the Democrat nominee went down by 9.3 mil (from 7 to -2.3) votes while the Republicans gained 5.1 mil of the popular vote (from -2.8 to + 2.3). In other words, it wasn’t so much about the Republicans winning, as it was about the Democrats losing. Granted, Trump didn’t run against Harris in 2020, but she was Biden’s VP.

So where did the Democrats lose?

The younger demographic was one:

2020:

2024:

That is indeed a +4 and +5 for Trump for the 18-29 and 30-44 groups respectively.

But what about Trump’s claim that he gained a lot of black and hispanic votes?

2020:

2024:

So only +1 for blacks (still by far the least Trump-friendly ethnic group), but +19 for latino and asian. But then also – his support among whites had gone down 5 points, but up a whopping 14 for “other”.

It does appear that bashing the Biden administration for their handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal was very effective gaining Trump 12 points among veterans – almost exactly the same number that Harris lost:

The gender lines seem to be pretty well entrenched by now:

2020:

vs 2024:

Pretty much the same picture for area of residence:

and region:

and obviously for party affiliation. Althought it should be noted that Harris gained 2 points among democratic supporters:

Which suggests the dynamics are not about ethnicity, party affiliation or where people live. So basically none of your classic physical metrics.

So let’s look at the ideological differences. Starting with ideology. Pretty significant losses here for Trump, but also quite a big loss for Harris among conservatives:

Or how about religion:

He did get a big boost among catholics (partially explained by the bump in latino votes), but also lost 7 points among atheist (or at least that’s how I’m interpreting “no affiliation”):

So roughly as many gains as there are losses in these classic demographic categories. Which suggest the key to his victory lies somewhere else. Let’s keep looking…

People’s views of the economy:

vs

So 87% of Biden voters thought the economy was in a poor state in 2020 while 84% of Trump voters thought it was excellent. And 94% of Harris voters in 2024 thought the economy was excellent/good while 70% of Trump voters thought it was poor. Out of all the categories, the diametric opposition in how people interpret the state of the economy is by far the most vexing for me. This should be a pretty objective metric coming from the same

People’s stance on abortion are another interesting one:

You can really see how much bigger Biden’s image as a centrist was compared to Harris. A whopping 18% of Biden voters in 2020 thought that abortion should be “illegal in all cases”. Contrast that with just 5% for Harris.

Conclusions

Mango Mussolini’s victory in 2024 was not a landslide. As a European, I’m not even impressed by him winning the popular vote – that’s how elections are supposed to work. It was all about the margins and winning over new supporters among historically hostile ideological territory.

I think these trends tell us that Trump’s popularity is much more widespread among different categories of voters and that tight elections are won less in certain “key demographics” and more in the margins – nibbling away a bit of support in many different categories. This also tells us that preconcieved notions like the “blue wall” hold little relevance anymore. It’s more about ideas and public image than geography or income level. And ideas and public image is what online platforms do best.

There’s no reason to believe this trend will change in the future which means focus on cybersecurity must become increasingly important in elections. Precision psyops are especially good at instigating just these sorts of changes. The key to the success of such attacks is that only their targets are affected. In other words, they are much more effective at convincing a large number of small groups with specific messages than swaying the perceptions of a large demographic with one big message. These messages can cut through ideological walls and find pockets of potential buyers within seemingly impenetrable enclaves – the democrat who believes Harris was a bit “too leftist”, the liberal young voter who wants to afford a home and start a family, the female college educated voter who’s also worried about the situation at the southern border. Together, we are resistant to these kinds of influence, but divided we fall.

Overall, I have to say that Republicans seem to have the more effective (I hesitate to use the word “better”) winning strategy right now and that’s largely thanks to Trump. There seems to have existed this notion that you can only either cater to your base OR grow it, but he proved you can do both at the same time. His base holds the Republican establishment hostage while his showmanship and total disregard of reality grows his national appeal. He’s still seen as the only “real” change agent in Washington, which is what most of this is ultimately about. I think Obama was and is a great orator and in many ways the polar opposite of Trump, but the fact is, he was not the radical reformist his campaign lead so many to believe. Hope – another key message of Obama’s winning campaign – was also much more prevalent in Trump’s than Harris’ campaign in 2024. A “Golden Age of prosperity” sounds much more appealing than whatever the Democrat’s message was. While for the oligarchy, Trump was also the More Useful Idiot. In other words, the Perfect Candidate.

With this I’m also taking a break from following U.S. politics. It’s been a fascinating ride. Big thanks to C-SPAN for all those countless hours of “unfiltered view of government” and particularly to PBS NewsHour for still maintining high journalistic standards among the noisy wall of talking heads that most of American news media has mutated into.

All image credits go to CNN. Their 2024 exit poll data set contained many more interesting categories, but unfortunately they were absent in 2020 so I couldn’t use them for this comparison.