5 takeaways from the 2024 exit polls

The dust is settling on the 2024 election after President-elect Trump’s unexpectedly comfortable victory.

Now both parties are looking to the exit polls for lessons as to how Trump won, why Vice President Harris lost — and how the trends might affect future elections.

There are some important caveats, including that some exit polls are still being updated by fresh data even days after the election. 

Also, there are two major surveys. 

One is an exit poll conducted by Edison Research for a media consortium comprised of ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN. Another is a voter analysis for the Associated Press and Fox News, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.

The two methods usually produce broadly similar results — but not always.

In any event, here are five major takeaways from the exit polls.

Latino men moved toward Trump in a big way

The sheer scale of the pro-Trump shift among Latino men was one of the most startling discoveries in the CNN exit poll.

Back in 2020, Latino men went for President Biden over Trump by a 23 point margin, 59 percent to 36 percent. Four years later, they flipped, voting for Trump over Harris by a 12 point margin, 55 percent to 43 percent.

The gigantic swing among those voters contrasted with a more modest swing among Latina women, whose 69 percent backing for Biden in 2020 ticked down to 60 percent backing Harris.

Explanations vary for exactly why the shift occurred among Latino men. Pro-Trump voices contend that the president-elect’s economic message resonated with Latino voters generally, and that perceived Democratic overreach on social and cultural issues such as trans rights might have alienated Latino men in particular.

A different, harsher thesis is that sexism and racism might have been the catalysts for the fall-off in support for a female Democratic nominee of Black and Indian descent.

The abortion rights wave never materialized for Harris

Perhaps the single greatest disappointment regarding election turnout for Democrats was the fact that there was no wave of female voters to lift Harris to victory.

The party had hoped such a wave would materialize in the first presidential election since Roe v. Wade was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2022. 

There was plenty of evidence to support the idea. Up until Election Day, the liberal side had won every state ballot initiative on abortion, post-Roe. Trump himself had blamed GOP messaging on abortion for his party’s underwhelming performance in the 2022 midterms.

But this time around, there was no real sign that abortion helped Harris the same way.

Neither the CNN exit poll nor the AP/Fox survey showed any dramatic change among female voters over the past four years.

In fact, both surveys showed women breaking for Harris by a smaller margin than they did for Biden four years ago.

The CNN exit poll indicated Harris’s advantage with women was 8 points, rather than Biden’s 15 points in 2020. The AP/Fox survey found a 7 point edge for Harris rather than Biden’s 12 point advantage.

This underperformance is the source of some puzzlement among Democrats, not least because the liberal side prevailed in seven of the 10 states that voted on abortion-related ballot measures on Tuesday. 

Florida also saw a majority of voters back an effort to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution — but the 57 percent who voted that way fell short of the 60 percent supermajority required.

The young vote shifted several notches to the right

The Trump campaign’s media strategy included a number of interviews with podcasters — most notably Joe Rogan — who appeal predominantly to a younger male audience.

Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the traditional pattern whereby each new generation is more liberal than the one before is undergoing a disruption.

The exit polls bore this out with younger voters overall showing a clear shift toward Trump.

Among those under age 30, Harris’s edge was a mere five points, according to the AP/Fox survey. Biden prevailed by 25 points in 2020.

The survey did not, however, show this shift was especially more pronounced among men.

Male voters under age 45 moved from giving Biden a 7 point edge in 2020 to backing Trump by 6 points in 2024. But Harris’s advantage with women under age 45 was also just 12 points, half of the 24 point edge Biden enjoyed.

A mixed picture on the Black male vote

The issue of whether or not Harris was having difficulty with Black male voters was a hot media topic for much of her campaign.

It’s also one of the few issues where the two main voter surveys produced contradictory results. 

The CNN exit poll showed very little difference in Black male voting behavior from four years before. Trump edged up his support by only two points, from 19 percent to 21 percent. That’s a a shift so small it could perhaps be chalked up to “noise” — a random statistical variation.

However, the AP/Fox survey produced a much different picture, with Trump doubling his share of the Black male vote from 12 percent to 24 percent.

It’s possible that the disparity will be reduced as more data is processed for the exit polls. But for now, the question-mark over what happened demonstrates the inconsistencies even in post-election data. 

Jewish voters stuck with Democrats

The sizable Arab-American vote in Michigan was another media fixation in the last days of the campaign — fairly, given the catastrophe in Gaza and the more recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

In the Arab-majority city of Dearborn, Trump actually received the plurality of votes while the Green Party’s Jill Stein — a vigorous critic of Biden’s support for Israel — pulled a startling 18 percent.

Conversely, there were also suggestions before the election that the traditional Jewish backing of Democrats might weaken, as the GOP sharpened attack-lines revolving around a purported lack of Democratic concern over antisemitism. 

There was no real evidence this happened. 

The AP/Fox survey found only a very slight ebbing of Jewish support, with Harris getting 66 percent support compared to Biden’s 69 percent in 2020.

Given the likely small sample size — Jewish voters cast just three percent of all ballots — a shift so small could again be mere statistical noise.