(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Pew Research released its analysis of the 2024 presidential election on Thursday, and it included some shocking findings that shed new light on how Donald Trump triumphed over Kamala Harris — and should inform Republican and Democratic operatives as they move into the 2026 and 2028 election cycles.
Here are the five biggest takeaways from its report:
1. TRUMP MADE MASSIVE GAINS WITH LATINOS
The GOP’s increasing popularity among Latinos in the Trump era has been a storyline for years, and the results of the 2024 election confirmed their rightward drift.
According to Pew, Trump lost Hispanics to Harris by just 3 points, 51%-48%. Four years before that, Trump lost the same cohort to Joe Biden by 25 points, 61%-36%. Four years before that, Hillary Clinton beat him by 38 points, 66%-28%.
Notably, Trump performed better among both Hispanic men and women in his race against Harris than he had against Biden. In 2024, he actually won men, 50%-48%, over Harris, but he made an even bigger gain among women, whom he lost 65%-33% to Biden in 2020 and 52%-46% to Harris in 2024.
2. HARRIS DID BETTER WITH ONLY ONE GROUP
As compared to Biden, Harris lost ground with not only Hispanics, but Black men (from D+75 to +54), Black women (+90 to +79), Asians (+40 to +17), and White men (R+17 to +20).
But she did make modest improvements among one group: White women. In 2020, Biden lost White women by eight points, (53%-45%), while in 2024, Harris lost the same group by just four points, (51%-47%).
Even so, she still won women overall (D+7) by less than either Biden (+11) or Clinton (+15) had.
3. TRUMP MIGHT HAVE WON BY MORE IF TURNOUT HAD BEEN HIGHER
While Democrats have long argued that high-turnout elections favor them, the results of the 2024 election undermine that claim.
According to Pew’s survey 44% of nonvoters said they would have voted for Trump, while just 40% would have cast their ballot for Harris. An additional 13% of nonvoter indicated that they would have voted for “Other” and 2% said they didn’t know who they would have supported.
Had that cohort actually voted in 2024, Pew found that Trump would have beaten Harris by a bigger margin than he actually did.
4. YOUTHS FOR TRUMP
Harris’s performance also suggested that Democrats can no longer count on running up the score with young people.
While the former vice president still won 18-29-year-olds by 19, that was a seven-point decrease as compared to Biden 2020 and 11-point decrease as compared to Clinton in 2016. She also lost men in the youngest age cohort by one point four years after Biden had won them by 10.
Harris also performed markedly worse in the 30-49-year-old bracket, where she came out ahead by only 2 points. Biden won the same group by 12.
Forty percent of Trump’s 2024 coalition was made up of voters under the age of fifty. In 2016, that figure stood at 35%.
5. TRUMP CONTINUED TO CLEAN UP NON-COLLEGE EDUCATED VOTERS, BUT ALSO MADE HEADWAY WITH GRADS
Trump continued to dominate his Democratic opponents when it comes to voters without a college degree, beating Harris by 20 points among those with a high school diploma or less in 2024.
He also made significant headway when it came to college grads.
After losing them by 11 points in 2016 and 14 in 2020, Trump lost the cohort by just 5 in 2024.
He performed much better across ever racial category in this regard, going from -15 to -12 among Whites with a college degree, -84 to -66 among Blacks with the same educational attainment, and -40 to -14 among Hispanics.
