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Graphic of exit poll data
Graphic Truth: US voting shifts from 2020 to 2024
The votes are still being tallied following Donald Trump’s win in the US presidential election, but looking at preliminary voter data gives clues to what happened in the American electorate last week.
The final vote numbers for Democrats are expected to continue to rise, especially since California is still being counted, and pollster Nate Silver projects that Kamala Harris will win around 75.7 million voters and Trump will win 77.9 million. But it is clear that Harriswill not match Joe Biden’s Democratic turnout in 2020. A large portion of this can be attributed to Democrats having control over the White House this time around. History shows us that voters turn out at higher numbers when they are voting their opposing party out of office.
This is disheartening for Democrats considering they upped this spending from 2020, shelling out $1.51 billion compared to the GOP’s $1.03 billion. Breaking that down by cost per vote, Democrats spent $7 more than the Republicans did for each vote in 2024, and a vote for Harris cost $9 more than for Biden in 2020.
Exit polls also show that the Democrats lost votes among Black and Latino voters. Trump gained 19 points among Latino men and 8 points among Latino women. Among Black voters, three out of 10 men under age 45 went for Trump, roughly double the share he got in 2020.
Pro-Palestinian protesters rally for a cease-fire in Gaza during the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas in Dearborn, Michigan, on May 19, 2024.
Bloc by Bloc: The Arab-American vote in the shadow of Oct. 7
This GZERO 2024 election series looks at America’s changing voting patterns, bloc by bloc.
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In 2019, Mohamed S, an Egyptian-born investment consultant who had lived in New York for more than 20 years, finally decided to apply for US citizenship, for one reason:
“I wanted to vote against Donald Trump.”
But the pandemic delayed his naturalization until after the election. Next month will be the 47-year-old’s first chance to vote in a US presidential race. But this time, Mohamed says, he’s not going to cast a ballot at all.
Mohamed, who asked that we not use his last name over concerns his views might affect his business, said that while he still opposes Trump, the Biden administration’s Gaza policy has made it impossible for him to support a Democrat this fall.
“Why would I vote for a person who has provided weapons and funding that have been used to kill children who look exactly like my son, speak the same language as my son?” Mohamed asks. “That’s an outrageous thing to expect me to do.”
Mohamed’s views echo wider shifts in the Arab American community in the year since Hamas’ murderous rampage through southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, provoked an Israeli response that has killed at least 40,000 people in Gaza and displaced nearly 2 million, according to local authorities. Israel has faced charges of genocide in international courts.
A small community with big electoral power
About 4 million people in the United States identify as Arab Americans. They are a community of diverse faiths, national origins, and viewpoints. Roughly two-thirds are Christian, and one-third are Muslim. They have a large presence in key swing states like Michigan, comprising about 5% of the electorate there, and Pennsylvania, where they make up about 2%.
The war in Gaza looms large for them. More than 80% in a recent poll by the Arab American Institute, an advocacy group, said it’s their top election issue.
That marks the first time that any conflict in the Middle East has topped the list of concerns among Arab Americans, says AAI chairman James Zogby.
“It’s a genocide. And the administration’s response has been abysmal,” says Zogby, “not just in its full-throated support for Israel, but in its failure to put any restraint on Israel.”
Democrats are now paying the price
For decades, Arab Americans were a reliably blue voting bloc. Only about a third of the community ever voted Republican. In 2020, Biden got 59% of the Arab American vote against Trump’s 30%.
But the AAI poll, taken in early October, showed Trump edging out Harris 42% to 41% among Arab American voters — a 12-point swing in Trump’s favor. Expected turnout, meanwhile, has fallen from a historical average of 80% to around 60%.
Given that Biden won Michigan by less than three points in 2020, and Pennsylvania by just over one point, Arab American voters’ choices – not only about whom to vote for but whether to vote at all — could shape the outcome in November. At the moment, Harris leads Trump by roughly one point in both states.
Feeling ignored at a fraught moment
Zogby says weak outreach from the Democrat camp has hurt Harris. The Democrats’ rejection of calls for a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention stung, and the failure to hold high-level meetings with Arab American leaders — as opposed to lumping them in as part of a broader outreach to Muslim Americans — has made the community feel marginalized at a painful time.
“I’d love for her to call for a cease-fire, of course, but if she just got up and gave a speech in Michigan and said, ‘I want your support, I know we have differences, but I know we can talk them through, it would make a difference,” says Zogby.
Some Arab American voters are going further than simply staying home on Election Day.
“Six months ago, I was a Democrat,” says Bishara Bahbah, a Jerusalem-born, Harvard-trained academic and journalist. Now he is the founder of Arab Americans for Trump.
“I came to the conclusion that not only do I not want to vote for Biden or Harris, I want to actually punish them,” says Bahbah, a Palestinian Christian who grew up in East Jerusalem and now lives in Arizona.
Financed by Bahbah himself, Arab Americans for Trump has been coordinating events with Massad Boulos, the Lebanese-born businessman and father-in-law to Trump’s daughter Tiffany, as well as former Ambassador Richard Grenell, who was Trump’s acting director of national intelligence. Bahbah has met with Trump directly at least once, he says.
The Trump campaign has sought to expand its small base of Arab American support with pledges to cut taxes, crack down on undocumented immigration, and defend traditional views on gender, which plays well in many socially conservative Arab households.
A recent endorsement by Amer Ghalib, the Yemen-born mayor of Hamtramck, a Detroit suburb and the only US city with an all-Muslim local government, has helped the Trump effort.
Bahbah dismisses concerns about Trump’s history of strongly pro-Israel policies and his recent pledge to bring the US “closer [to Israel] than it’s ever been.”
“The difference is the Democratic camp has blood on their hands,” says Bahbah, who says he lost three relatives in an Israeli airstrike on an ancient church in Gaza last October. “President Trump does not.”
Bahbah is confident that Trump, without reelection to worry about, would make a push for a two-state solution after all.
“I think he is interested in leaving a legacy of a peacemaker.”
Not everyone who has soured on the Democrats shares that optimism about Trump.
“I’m not naive enough to believe that Trump would be better,” says Mohamed, the New York-based consultant. “I just don’t see a scenario in which Kamala Harris wins and things change in Gaza.”
But Zogby still sees more opportunity with a Democrat in the White House than not.
“There’s a coalition that exists in the Senate around Palestinian rights,” he says. “I would rather be fighting alongside them with a Democratic president than with a Republican president or a Republican Congress that wouldn’t give a shit at all.”
“People tell me it can’t be worse,” he says, “but it can always be worse.”
Tributes are left at the site where an apartment block was heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike in Dnipro, Ukraine.
What We're Watching: Russia lashes out, Khan ups election ante, China's population shrinks
Russia strikes civilians, braces for long war in Ukraine
At least 40 people died in Saturday's Russian missile strike on an apartment building in Dnipro, Ukraine's fourth-largest city, authorities said Monday. It was one of Russia's deadliest attacks against Ukrainian civilians since the invasion began, as Moscow doubles down on the strategy of targeting civilians to turn the tide of the war in its favor. Meanwhile, the Washington, DC-based Institute for the Study of War on Sunday claimed that the Kremlin is preparing for a drawn-out conflict and a fresh mobilization to push back against Ukraine's military gains in recent months. What does that mean for Kyiv? That the US and its NATO allies will need to stay the course on providing weapons to keep the Russians at bay. Clearly on message, the UK on Friday announced that it would for the first time send Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine. This might open up a can of worms within NATO: Poland wants to supply the Ukrainians with German-made Leopard tanks but has yet to get the green light from Berlin, while the US, Germany, and France have so far only agreed to give Ukraine light armored vehicles. If they all go a step further and send in the heavy equipment, Vladimir Putin will know that Ukraine's friends remain committed to its defense and are less worried about Russia escalating.
Khan keeps pushing for snap election
Pakistan’s former PM Imran Khan, who was ousted last April, continues to try to force the government into holding early elections. In his latest maneuver, the 70-year-old former superstar cricketer has managed to dissolve the assembly of Punjab province, home to about half of the country's population. According to the rules, Punjab must elect a new legislature within 90 days. As Khan is threatening to dissolve another provincial assembly soon, potentially triggering snap elections in two of Pakistan’s four provinces, he has created a conundrum for his rival, current PM Shehbaz Sharif. Should Pakistan, which is dead broke, engage in two massive — and expensive — elections now and then again at their due date in November? Or should the government just give up and let Khan have his nationwide polls immediately? Considering that Khan’s popularity has only soared since his ouster, and even more so after the attempt on his life in October, he’s probably likely to dominate the election. But nobody gets to win a vote in Pakistan without the blessing of the all-powerful army, whom Khan has been gunning for. Will the generals he’s challenged so brazenly for many months let him return to power?
Chinese population falls for 1st time in 61 years
China's demographic time bomb has exploded ... early. The population of the world's most populous country and second-largest economy dropped in 2022 by some 850,000 people to 1.41 billion — the first annual decline in over six decades. What's more, this happened a few years before authorities were bracing for due to falling birth rates (the now-scrapped zero-COVID policy made Chinese couples even less willing to have babies last year). The bad news is that an aging and shrinking population will hurt China's economy by having fewer young people entering the workforce while the state spends more on pensions and elderly healthcare. In other words, a smaller labor pool combined with a bigger fiscal burden. The good news (sort of) is that unlike rapidly graying Japan — whose population has been getting smaller since 2010 — China has only recorded a single annual drop and has time to reverse the trajectory before it becomes permanent. If there's any big country that can pull that off, that's authoritarian China, where Xi Jinping simply needs to get his people to have more kids.The Graphic Truth: 8 billion, but nowhere near equal
The world's population hit 8 billion on Tuesday, according to UN projections. So, why should you care about this particular milestone? For one thing, population growth is slowing down, which means it'll take longer to reach 9 billion. That’s mainly a result of declining birth rates in Europe and East Asia. For another, 8 billion humans are now competing for increasingly scarce resources and territory in a planet already suffering the effects of climate change. Meanwhile, countries in sub-Saharan Africa are still having babies like there's no tomorrow — precisely where people have the least access to basic stuff like food, electricity, the internet, or water.
This was featured in Signal, the daily politics newsletter of GZERO Media. For smart coverage of global affairs that normal people can understand, subscribe here.
The Graphic Truth: US kids don't want wars
Today, young Americans' views on US foreign policy are often at odds with the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers, who vividly remember the great power rivalry of the Cold War. As a result, many of them tend to believe that the US has a responsibility to project power around the world. Of course, what America's youth think matters a great deal, because they'll make up the bulk of the future voting electorate — and thus could determine the direction of US foreign policy for years to come. We take a look at how different age groups feel about US responsibilities on a range of foreign policy issues based on a recent survey from the Eurasia Group Foundation.