From voters young and older to the potentially very wide gender gap, here’s what to watch for as the election results come in.
If the polls are to be believed, this presidential election is expected to be tight. But beneath the closeness of the head-to-head numbers, there have been some important shifts happening in American politics.
Below is a guide to the groups to pay closest attention to on election night that could tell the story of howformer President Donald Trump or Vice President Harris wins.
1. Watch the number of white voters who go for Harris.
The largest single voting group is white voters. Republicans have been dominant with them in the last 20 years, but with the growing Latino and Asian American populations, white voters have been on a sharp decline as a share of the electorate since the 1990s.
Because of that demographic change, former President Barack Obama was the first candidate to win a presidential election with less than 40% of the white vote in 2012. Democrat Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 when she got 2 points lower (37%). Biden won four years later and was above 40%.
The October NPR/PBS News/Marist poll showed Harris winning 45% of white voters. If that were to hold, it would be the highest share for a Democrat since 1976. But Harris still only had a 2-point lead over Trump in the survey because of Trump cutting into margins with Black and Latino voters.2. The split among white voters by education has been the story of the Trump era and only growing.
Almost nothing now is a better predictor of how white voters will vote than whether or not they have a college degree. White voters with college degrees had long been reliable Republican voters. But that changed between 2016 and 2020, when Biden won them narrowly.
Polling suggests Democrats’ advantage with them could balloon in this election.
In 2016, Trump won the group in five of the seven swing states, but in 2020, President Biden won them in six of seven.
The opposite has been true with white voters who don’t have college degrees. They have been trending heavily toward Republicans, and the Trump team believes it can turn out even more of them this year, even though they are generally less likely to vote at all.
White voters without degrees, many of whom live in rural areas, are declining as a share of eligible voters in the country. But in key states, they still make up a larger percentage of eligible voters than whites with degrees. That’s true, for example, in the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. In every one of the seven swing states, white non-college voters made up a higher share of the electorate than in 2016.
Trump, though, won them by less in six of the seven swing states, except North Carolina. It will be a tall task for Harris to replicate Biden’s inroads, but she has made that a critical piece of her strategy — losing by less.
3. Mind the gender gap.
Women have made up a majority of the electorate in every presidential election in the last 40 years. Democrats won their largest share of women in 2020 — 57%, according to exit polls.
Democrats hope that number goes even higher this year, given the party’s intense focus on women’s reproductive rights, and the fact that this is the first general election since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Pair that with Trump’s apparent depth of support with men this year, the gender gap could be the widest in any presidential election ever. The last two elections showed very wide gaps — 24 points in 2016, and 23 in 2020. The latest NPR poll showed it was a whopping 34 points.
But this isn’t strictly a men-women divide. There are nuances within the groups by education and race.
The education divide is very prominent here. The gap is widest with women who have a college degree and men who don’t. Biden won college-graduate white women by 9 points, while Trump won white women without degrees by 27. Trump won college-graduate white men by 3 points, but won white, non-college men 70% to 28%.
By race, white women voted 11 points in favor of Trump in 2020. Black women, though, voted for Biden by 81 points (that’s not a misprint). Latinas also broke overwhelmingly for Biden, too, 69% to 30%.
