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More than 150 million American voters turned out in Tuesday’s election, marking the highest turnout in more than a century. But while the country – and the world – await a complete result, what do we know about who voted for each of the candidates?
While knowledge at this stage is limited (survey data can be unreliable and national exit polls do not account for geographic differences within demographics), experts say some broader trends are evident. among those who voted for Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
So far, the picture appears to be strikingly similar to that of 2016, said political science professor Charles H Stewart, founding director of MIT’s Election Data and Science Laboratory.
“There were slight changes, but the changes in the electorate, at least those who showed up to vote on Election Day, are much less dramatic than the pre-election polls led us to believe,” Stewart said.
Pollsters had predicted that this election would see the widest gender gap since women won the vote 100 years ago, but that does not appear to have happened.
Stewart noted a slight increase in the gender gap: women voted 56-43 for Biden, while the two candidates were almost even among men.
But one of the biggest divisions to ensue was between voters older and younger than 30, who became even “less in love with President Trump than before.”
“The other age groups, 30-44, 45-64, 65 and over, it’s a pretty narrow divide between Biden and Trump. So it’s really the young people who are overwhelmingly anti-Trump and that’s really remarkable. “
He said Trump also lost some appeal among low-income voters, who were more attracted to Biden, but the president won among voters with household incomes of more than $ 100,000 a year.
“That right now seems to be the biggest demographic change I’m seeing. And you can tie that to [Trump’s] tax cuts [for the wealthy] and lower regulations. “
He added: “As much as we talk about culture wars and all that sort of thing, it seems like the most important thing was good old fashioned pocket economics.”
While evidence is lacking on who exactly voted, he said the increase in turnout likely came from youth and the Latino community, who said “historically they have been significantly underrepresented in the electorate.”
Democratic and Republican campaign groups spent tens of millions of dollars in recent years to register voters and help increase turnout, especially among Latino communities. Grassroots Latino activism in historically Republican states like Arizona and Georgia appears to have boosted Biden significantly.
Contrary to what some polls predicted, Stewart said, exit polls do not show a “dramatic exodus from Trump” among older people. While in 2016, they showed that 52% of voters 65 and older voted for Trump, in 2020 they said the figure was 51%.
In terms of racial breakdown, Louis DeSipio, a political science professor at the University of California, Irvine, said that nationally it was estimated that Trump had won about 57% of white votes, with huge variations from state to state linked to factors such as education and age, and that African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans voted strongly for Biden.
The most dramatic change, he said, was likely in South Florida, where Trump is believed to have gained support among Cuban Americans and Venezuelans who he said were “returning to the Republican camp.”
He added: “They had been steadily moving toward the Democrats actually since 1996 or so, so that’s an interesting story and will need some attention.”
One area where he believes Trump did not fare so well among white voters is Arizona, where the Associated Press (AP) has called for a Biden victory.
But he said Trump continued to have support among evangelical Christians and was interested to see how Trump fared among members of the military and veterans when the data emerged.
Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of the Center for Information and Research on Learning and Civic Engagement (Circle) at Tufts University, said the more education young people had, the more preference they had for Biden.
Using AP VoteCast data, based on interviews with more than 110,000 likely voters, he said: “If they were between the ages of 18 and 29 but were college graduates or postgraduates, they preferred Biden more than two to one.”
“Really in the youth electorate, the only groups that we know of that prefer Donald Trump nationally are white men.”
Among young voters, the data showed that the group that preferred Trump the most was rural or lived in small towns and had not been to college, with 46% supporting Biden, compared to 51% for Trump. But, Kawashima-Ginsberg said, “all the other groups at least had an advantage over Joe Biden. Even small-town rural college graduates preferred Biden by eight points, 52% to 44%. “
The other big difference between young voters, he said, was between white people and people of color. Among white youth, he said there was a 19-point gender split.
Among first-time voters specifically, he said those up to 29 years old preferred Biden, with 53% supporting the Democrat, compared to 43% for Trump. But first-time voters in their 30s and 44s overwhelmingly supported Trump, who got 67% of their votes.
But, he said, attempts to define demographic groups among voters can be vulnerable to generalizations and historical assumptions, particularly for people of color.
“We use models of political science that are quite old to try to figure out who the voters are. But with diverse populations that are really rich in both heritages and their belief systems, it’s really hard to use well as a predictive model, and exit polls are always subject to that. “
