President Trump’s election last fall was boosted by a more racially and ethnically diverse coalition of voters than in his previous two campaigns, according to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center.
“For the most part, voting patterns across demographic groups in the 2024 presidential election were not substantially different from the 2020 and 2016 elections,” Pew’s analysts wrote in their report. “But Donald Trump’s gains among several key groups of voters proved decisive in his 2024 victory.”
Trump, who lost his reelection bid in 2020 to former President Biden and was elected in 2016 despite losing the popular vote, bested former Vice President Kamala Harris by more than 2 million ballots last fall and won 312 Electoral College votes to Harris’s 226.
Pew found that, while Trump didn’t win majorities among minority groups, he fared better among Hispanic voters, Black voters and Asian voters than he did four years earlier, despite Harris being the first Asian and first Black major party presidential candidate in history.
Biden won Hispanic voters by 25 percentage points in 2020, but Trump nearly matched Harris with Hispanic voters, losing among the demographic by just 3 points.
“Again, these changes were primarily driven by changing turnout patterns: 9 percent of eligible Hispanic voters voted in 2020 but not in 2024, and these voters favored Biden in 2020 by roughly two-to-one (69 percent to 31 percent),” Pew’s researchers noted. “By contrast, among Hispanic eligible voters who voted in 2024 but not in 2020, 60 percent voted for Trump in 2024 and 37 percent voted for Harris.”
Black voters, while remaining reliably Democratic, also shifted to Trump, from 8 percent in 2020 to 15 percent last fall.
According to Pew, voter turnout also drove that shift.
“Increased shares of Black voters who favored Trump were driven not by individuals shifting their preferences, but by changes in who turned out to vote,” the researchers wrote.
Asian voters also were more likely to back Trump over his Democratic rival in November than they were four years earlier, shifting from 30 percent for Trump in 2020 to 40 percent.
“Donald Trump’s voters overall were more racially and ethnically diverse in 2024 than in his prior campaigns, reflecting gains among Hispanic, Black and Asian voters,” the Pew analysts wrote. “Conversely, Kamala Harris’s voters were somewhat less diverse than the voters who backed Joe Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016.”
“Despite these changes, there continue to be wide differences in the makeup of the partisan coalitions,” they added.
Ballots for president are confidential, so Pew’s study was based on surveys of 8,942 validated voters representative of the electorate for the cycles analyzed.
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