Trump support among Hispanic voters up 14 percentage points from 2020
7/11/2024 6:05
Donald Trump reshaped the U.S. electorate once again this
year, piling up support among Hispanic voters, young people, and
Americans without college degrees -- and winning more votes in
nearly all of the country as he reclaimed the presidency.
Following the Republican's populist campaign, in which he
promised to shield workers from global economic competition and
offered a wide range of tax-cut proposals, Trump's increasing
strength among working-class voters and nonwhite Americans
helped grow his share of the vote almost everywhere.
The starkest increase may have been the 14-percentage-point
swing in Trump's share of Hispanic voters, according to an exit
poll conducted by Edison Research. Some 46% of self-identified
Hispanic voters picked Trump, up from 32% in the 2020 election
when Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Hispanics have largely favored Democrats for decades, but
Trump's share this year was the highest for a Republican
presidential candidate in exit polls going back to the 1970s,
and just higher than the 44% share won by Republican George W.
Bush in 2004, according to data compiled by the American
Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
In counties where more than 20% of voting-age Americans were
Hispanic, Trump's margin over Democratic Vice President Kamala
Harris improved by 13 points relative to his 2020 performance
against Biden.
"Young Hispanics do not have the same muscle memory as their
grandparents who voted for Democrats for 50 years," said
Giancarlo Sopo, a Republican media strategist who worked on
Hispanic outreach for Trump's 2020 campaign.
This time, Trump won 55% of Hispanic men, 19 points more
than the 36% share he won four years earlier, while he garnered
support from 38% of Hispanic women, up 8 points from 2020.
Trump has made opposition to immigration a cornerstone of
his political career, pledging to conduct mass deportations of
people living in the U.S. illegally. Many Hispanic voters
supported Trump's hardline positions, according to the Edison
Research exit poll. About a quarter of Hispanic respondents said
most immigrants in the country without documentation should be
deported to the countries they came from, compared with 40% of
voters overall in the poll.
ECONOMIC CONCERNS
Hispanic Americans skew more working-class than the
country's white majority, with larger shares of Hispanics
lacking college degrees, according to U.S. Census Bureau
estimates.
Hispanics also tend to be younger than average in America,
which means many have had less time to build wealth and have
also been more exposed to the economic troubles of recent years,
including high inflation and soaring interest rates for
mortgages. Trump won 43% of voters age 18 to 29 - 7 points more
than in 2020.
About two-thirds of voters considered the U.S. economy in
poor shape, compared with about half of 2020 voters. Some 46%
said their family's financial situation was worse than four
years ago, compared with 20% who said the same in 2020.
"Republicans have consistently beat Democrats on connecting
with voters on the economy," said Clarissa Martinez De Castro,
vice president of the nonpartisan UnidosUS Latino Vote
Initiative. "This was a referendum on the economy, and that has
consistently been the number one, two and three issues for
Hispanic voters."
In the battleground state of Arizona, a state Biden won in
2020, Mexican-born Arturo Laguna became an American citizen
earlier this year and cast his first U.S. presidential ballot
for Trump, citing the Republican's conservatism and his embrace
of restrictions on abortion access.
"The three biggest things of importance are family values,
being pro-life and religion," said Laguna, a 28-year-old
corporate manager. "I don't feel like Kamala represents those
values."
Across the country, in places where almost all votes were
counted - roughly 2,200 counties nationwide - Trump's margin was
5 points higher than it was in 2020.
This broad increase - a rise of the Republican tide - in
part owed to Trump's gains among voters without college degrees,
a massive class of voters that spans racial and ethnic
categories and made up just over half of the electorate on
Tuesday.
Some 56% of voters without degrees picked Trump, up 6 points
from the Republican's share in the 2020 exit poll. Harris won
55% of voters who have degrees, unchanged from Biden's share in
2020, when affluent suburbs helped power the Democrat's victory.
Trump's gains build on major shifts in the electorate since
his triumph in the 2016 presidential election, when he
outperformed past Republicans by far among working-class white
voters. He largely maintained his dominance with the group this
year, winning 66% of their vote, with his share down 1 point
from 2020, according to the Edison Research exit poll.
Among people without college degrees and who are not white,
however, Trump's share of the vote increased by 8 points.
While Trump gained ground in vote tallies across most of the
country, some of his biggest advances were in and around big
cities, areas that have been critical for past Democratic
victories.
Trump flipped Nassau County - just east of New York City on
Long Island - winning about 52 percent of the vote there.
And in the 25 big urban counties where nearly all the votes
had been tallied by Wednesday morning, Harris won 60 percent of
the vote, down about 5 percentage points from Biden’s
performance in 2020 and the lowest share for a Democrat in those
counties since at least 2012.
Harris won 53% of the women's vote, while Trump won 55% of the
vote by men, with Trump performing slightly better with both
groups compared with 2020.
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