- Donald Trump won the 2024 election, defeating Kamala Harris in a historic comeback.
- Younger votes tilted red, Latino voters increasingly backed Trump, and spending hit record highs.
- These are the numbers that tell the story of Trump’s victory.
Donald Trump won the 2024 election in a comfortable victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.
These five statistics help explain how he did it.
Democrats’ lead with young voters fell by 11 points
America’s younger voters shifted to the right in 2024, exit poll data released by the major news networks indicated.
(A major caveat: Exit polls have a wide margin of error and as vote counts are finalized, more precise data will emerge. For now, this is what we’ve got.)
It’s potentially yet another sign of a Gen Z cohort not quite sold on the Democratic party.
In the youngest age bracket, 18-29, Democrats saw their lead cut by almost half. A 24-point advantage under Joe Biden in 2020 fell to 13 points for Harris.
Gen X — the 45-64 bracket — favored Trump, the exit poll said, by a much bigger margin than in 2020.
A wrinkle: Those aged 65 and older broke slightly in favor of Harris.
Trump got a 33-point swing with Latino men
Compared with 2020, Latino voters, who make up about 12% of the electorate, had an over 25 percentage point swing toward Trump, based on the exit polling.
The exit poll found that Latino men drove Trump’s gain, as they voted for him over Harris by 10 points.
That eviscerated a 23-point lead for the Democrats that existed under Biden.
Harris retained a 24-point lead among Latina women, but it was still a small margin than for Biden.
Democrats expected some losses in the Latino vote compared to 2020 but not to this extent.
For two-thirds of voters, it was the economy, stupid
The economy was top of mind for many voters — throughout the election, many ranked it as their No. 1 issue.
About two-thirds of voters felt the economy was either “not good” or “poor,” exit poll data showed.
These economic frustrations likely pushed the needle toward Trump.
45% said their financial situation is worse than at the last election, compared to 20% of 2020 voters who felt they were worse off than in 2016.
Rural and suburban voters swung red
Trump won or is on pace to win all seven swing states this election.
Biden won Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona last cycle, while narrowly losing North Carolina to Trump.
On a county level, rural areas remained Trump stalwarts, with support in those areas growing from 2020, the exit poll said.
The suburbs — which swung slightly left in 2020 and broke for Biden — turned slightly red again.
Cities remained strongly blue.
A county-level analysis by The New York Times found that over 90% of counties with mostly finalized results as of Wednesday morning shifted more red.
Harris’ side outspent Trump’s by $300 million — and still lost
Harris’s campaign committee spent nearly 2.5 times as much as Trump’s campaign from the start of this year to mid-October, based on the latest FEC filings.
The filings showed $881 million spent by Harris’ official campaign, with $355 million for Trump’s.
Outside groups like super PACS took total spending far higher, to $3.5 billion, the most in history.
Per the Financial Times, that shook out at $1.9 billion for Harris and $1.6 billion for Trump.
