The numbers behind the vote for president

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Reporting, analysis and commentary
by Jim Heaney, editor of Investigative Post

Let’s unpack the presidential vote.

For starters, fewer people voted this year (145 million) than four years ago (158.5 million) despite an estimated growth of 8 million age-eligible citizens. The turnout of registered voters also dropped slightly from four years ago.

This helps to explain why Donald Trump won with fewer votes this year (73.6 million) than he garnered in losing (74.2 million) four years ago. He won because Harris received far fewer votes (69.3 million) than Biden (81.3 million) did four years ago.

Put another way: Trump did not grow his base. Harris lost a chunk of Biden’s.

Closer to home, Kamala Harris won New York state, but her vote count fell well short of Joe Biden’s in 2020 and Hillary Clinton’s in 2016. Harris carried New York City by a 2-to-1 margin. Donald Trump won Long Island by a slim margin. Harris likewise prevailed in upstate, but not by much. She carried the counties with big cities like Buffalo and Rochester, and many of those in the Hudson Valley, but Trump carried most of the rural counties, including seven of eight counties in Western New York — all but Erie. 

As Geoff Kelly wrote in his analysis:

The takeaway: New York State remains a sea of red, bracketed by Democratic strongholds downstate and in Erie and Monroe counties, with a few islands of blue in between. Democrats continue to dominate all branches of state government and its Congressional delegation. But the red parts of the state grew redder this year, and the blue appears to have faded slightly.

There’s been chatter in the press about how the election shows that the country has changed. Yes, the electorate has moved a bit to the right. But more than one-third (38 percent) of  the eligible adult population didn’t vote in this year’s election, either because they aren’t registered to vote or are registered but failed to vote.  

The country is split three ways, not two: Republicans, Democrats and “I don’t care.” No one has a majority.

Let’s take a look at the demographics of this year’s vote, based on exit polls reported by The Washington Post.

• Men preferred Trump 55 to 42 percent. 
• Women favored Harris 53 to 45 percent.
• Whites voted Trump 57 to 41 percent.
• Harris captured 85 percent of the Black vote.
• Hispanics/Latinos favored Harris 52 to 46 percent.
• Asians supported Harris 54 to 39 percent.
• College graduates favored Harris over Trump, 55 to 42 percent.
• Voters without a college degree voted 56 to 42 percent in favor of Trump.
• Harris fared best among younger voters (ages 18 to 29), winning by a margin of 54 to 43 percent.
• Trump did best with middle-age voters (45-64) by 54 to 44 percent for Harris.
• Not many Republicans or self-described conservatives crossed over to vote for Harris (5 percent Republican, 9 percent conservative).
• Independents and those professing third-party affiliations were about evenly divided, with 49 percent voting for Harris and 46 percent for Trump.

Wrote The Post:

Trump won the votes of a majority of White voters across the country, according to preliminary exit polling. But, as in the past several presidential elections, the patterns of support among White voters have been very different for those with and without college degrees.

White voters without a college degree continue to be one of Trump’s strongest groups — roughly two-thirds of these voters cast their ballots for Trump, about the same as his support among the group in 2020.

By comparison, a narrow majority of White college graduates — who make up about a third of voters overall — voted for Harris. In 2020, White college graduates were nearly split in their vote preferences: 51 percent voted for Biden, while 48 percent voted for Trump.

Harris performed particularly well among White women with a college degree. Nationally, nearly 6 in 10 White women with a college degree voted for her, including similar shares in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. White men with a college degree across the United States were about evenly split in their vote choice, a pattern that held within these key states — but not in Pennsylvania, where Harris had a lead over Trump among this group.

Among White voters without a college degree, both nationally and in the key swing states, majorities of both men and women backed Trump, although Trump’s support was particularly pronounced among men in this group. Nationally, about two-thirds of White men without a college degree supported Trump, along with just over 6 in 10 White women without a degree.

More Hispanic men supported Trump this year than in 2020, according to early exit polls. While 36 percent of Hispanic men voted for Trump in 2020, that grew to over half in 2024. Trump’s support among Hispanic men was bolstered in states such as Texas and Florida, where Hispanic men accounted for more than a tenth of the electorate. In these states, nearly 2 in 3 Hispanic men backed the former president.

Among Hispanic women, Harris underperformed slightly. In 2020, nearly 7 in 10 Hispanic women backed Biden; this year about 6 in 10 Hispanic women supported Harris.

In Florida, Trump’s support among Hispanic voters was split by family origin. Roughly 7 in 10 Cuban Americans backed the former president, while a slim majority of Puerto Ricans supported Harris.

Black women and men continue to overwhelmingly support the Democratic nominee in this presidential election. This year and in 2020, roughly 9 in 10 Black women backed Harris and Biden, respectively. Although Democratic Party leaders expressed concern about Harris’s pre-election poll numbers among Black men, this group continued to support Harris at similar levels when compared with previous presidential elections. In both 2024 and 2020, just under 8 in 10 Black men supported the Democratic presidential nominee.

The Associated Press also published extensive exit polling data. So did Reuters. 

What issues turned the election? I don’t put a lot of stock in exit polls because they didn’t measure what I believe to be a driving factor: bigotry, in all its assorted forms.

The performance of the mainstream press has come in for criticism in certain quarters. I’ll agree that, on balance, the coverage could have been better. But, come on, did voters really not know what Trump was about? 

The critical analysis gives short shrift to the information bubble many people live in. Over the past generation the right has constructed a media ecosystem that has dramatically influenced political discourse and voter behavior. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about research that showed the No. 1 source of political news is Fox — the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. Then again, Fox was ranked first by only 13 percent of respondents.

To a growing degree, the action is moving away from traditional news outlets. For example, election night television ratings dropped 26 percent from four years ago. But it’s not that people weren’t watching. YouTube viewers consumed 84 million hours of election day coverage.  

As The Wall Street Journal put it: “New Media Is Leaving the Old Guard Behind: Podcasts are exploding, TikTok is a news source, and traditional media is shrinking in reach and influence.”

The decline of print daily newspapers is a case in point: Research has found it’s the preferred source of news by only 4 percent of adults. That’s where most serious reporting is done.

I fault mainstream news outlets for their obsession with polls and the way they misrepresented them. Story after story breathlessly reported who was ahead, often with margins within the margin of error, which meant no one held a lead. 

I’ll also fault the growing cowardice of daily newspapers when it came to endorsements. Much has been written about the owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times stopping their papers from endorsing Harris for president. But the Post and Times were hardly alone in sitting it out when it came time to endorse. Three-quarters of the nation’s 100 largest dailies declined to endorse this year. I attribute it in part to chain ownership, which is short on journalistic principles. Ditto for billionaire owners.

Trump’s election could boost readership and viewership of traditional news outlets, much like it did when he first took office. 

But Trump’s hostility towards the press is likely to pose challenges to journalism unlike what we’ve witnessed in modern times. The Columbia Journalism Review lays out the grim prospects. CNN and the Poynter Institute also offer perspectives.

I found this Substack piece by Matt Pearce to be especially insightful.

He wrote:

If you want a press that will serve as a bulwark against autocracy, shove money at anything that produces high-quality professional investigative journalism. Investigative journalism has Baumol’s cost disease: It’s incredibly costly and only gets more expensive every year. It’s long past time to dramatically boost funding of it everywhere.

I second the motion.

Jim Heaney