WASHINGTON (AP) — As Election Day approaches, Democrat Kamala Harris is trying to maintain a diverse coalition of voters who were driven four years ago by their fierce opposition to Republican Donald Trump and fears of a deadly pandemic.
The former president, meanwhile, wants to widen gains among groups like men without college degrees, with whom he has already shown strength, and erode Harris’ support among Hispanic Americans and other key demographics.
AP VoteCast, a comprehensive survey of the electorate, tells the story of how Democrat Joe Biden won and Trump lost in 2020, and what those results could mean for the 2024 election. We’ll know if the candidates have been able to expand their coalitions – or have been able to build new ones — if the results of the 2024 VoteCast survey are released on Election Day.
Biden’s victory four years ago was decisive but not overwhelming, leaving Harris with a challenge: she must either match his broad base of support or shape a new winning coalition of her own.
According to AP VoteCast, Biden won a clear majority of college graduates, women and younger voters. He won about two-thirds of urban voters and more than half of suburban voters. He received support from about three-quarters of non-white voters, including about 9 in 10 black voters and 6 in 10 Hispanic voters. And in addition to securing these groups, many of which have historically favored Democrats, Biden also won over moderate voters and reduced Trump’s support among white women and young white voters.
Unlike Biden, Harris has harnessed the energy surrounding her campaign by holding large rallies. But she has also recognized the diversity of her coalition with several Zoom meetings that focused on demographic groups such as “Black Women for Harris,” “Black Men for Harris,” “Latinas for Harris,” “Cat Ladies for Kamala” and “ Dads for Kamala,” among other groups.
She has gone out of her way to reach women through a conversation with TV legend Oprah Winfrey and the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. She has made direct contacts with unions that are part of the turnout operation in swing states, while also, as an alumnus of Howard University, leveraged her connections to historically black colleges, universities, fraternities and sororities.
Trump, meanwhile, held on to his base of white voters without college degrees, rural voters and religious conservatives in 2020.
He remained competitive in 2020 despite losing the popular vote, because these are big blocs and he won many of them decisively. In 2020, VoteCast found that about three-quarters of American voters were white and 55% of them supported Trump. The president received the support of about eight in 10 white evangelical Christian voters. He won 6 in 10 voters in small towns and rural areas, and was supported by about 6 in 10 white voters without a college degree.
It wasn’t enough to get him the White House four years ago, but his coalition is big enough to remain competitive in what will be his third time in a presidential election. White voters without a college degree represented about 43% of all voters in 2020, a base for his support that he has nurtured this year through large outdoor rallies and social media posts.
Trump, too, has frequented podcasts that tend to be popular with younger men and courted big tech investors like Elon Musk, who appeared with him at a recent rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, commemorating an earlier assassination attempt. The former president has also publicly tried to court black and Hispanic voters in his speeches. And he has also used this campaign as a businessman on his brand by launching a cryptocurrency company and selling sneakers and wristwatches, among other things.
But the 2020 elections also took place at a very different time for the country. The top issue facing voters in 2020 – the COVID-19 pandemic – is now barely registering with Americans. Four years ago, about four in 10 voters said the pandemic was the most important issue facing the country, and about three-quarters of those voters supported Biden.
The shift in issues could be helpful for Trump — but it’s not a guarantee. Inflation, immigration and abortion seem to get the most attention. Even in 2020, about half of voters said Trump was better able to handle the economy, while about 4 in 10 said this about Biden. There are signs that views on the economy are increasingly shaped by people’s own political views, and Harris is seeking to erode Republicans’ previous lead on the economy by focusing on policies that help middle-class households keep costs down. control.
The 2020 election was also partly a referendum on Trump, who was then the sitting president. And while about 6 in 10 voters described their vote as being primarily for their candidate, a significant number — about 4 in 10 — said they were voting primarily against a candidate.
Harris has tried to suggest that, as a younger candidate who has never been president, she represents change, while Trump is also campaigning as a change candidate because he would break with Biden’s policies.
Many voters have indicated they want change and were initially dissatisfied with a rematch between Biden and Trump, a concern that was somewhat assuaged when Biden left the race after a disastrous June 27 debate against Trump. In December 2023, a poll from the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 58% of American adults said they would be dissatisfied if Trump were the Republican candidate, and 56% would be unhappy if Biden were the Democratic candidate.
The desire for change is reflected in increased enthusiasm among Democrats for Harris over Biden in AP-NORC polls since her emergence as a candidate. In September, polls showed more voters thought the phrase “would change the country for the better” described Harris, compared to Trump.
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AP VoteCast is a survey of the American electorate conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for Fox News, NPR, PBS NewsHour, Univision News, USA Today Network, The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press. The 2020 survey of 110,485 voters was conducted over eight days and ended when the polls closed. The interviews took place in English and Spanish. The survey combines a random sample of registered voters from state voter files; self-identified registered voters using NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population; and self-identified registered voters selected from online panels who are not likely to vote. The margin of sampling error for voters is estimated at plus or minus 0.4 percentage points. Find more details about AP VoteCast’s methodology at https://apnews.com/ap-votecast-faq.
