Despite much hand-wringing about whether Black men would jump ship from the Democratic Party and vote in droves for Donald Trump, election exit polls tell a different story.
Early exit polls from The Washington Post show that 78% of Black men voted for Kamala Harris. The vice president’s numbers were just one point under those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020.
“We said early on, based on our data, that the mainstream media was going to continue to prepare to blame Black men for whatever the results of this election were going to be,” said Dr. David Johns, Executive Director and CEO of the National Black Justice Coalition in an interview with theGrio. “What our data showed, in fact, that the biggest divide was not gender. It was generational concerns for older voters and adults are different than younger generation millennials, Gen Z and the like.”
Johns says that many Black men carried empathy for the plight of women in the post-Roe era and had the women they loved in mind when they went to the polls.
“I just apologized to my 21-year-old Black niece who lives in Texas where both of our parents were born,” Johns told theGrio. “She didn’t ask to be born. She is just now able to engage in a political process that has continued to state and constrain her life options and opportunities, often without her being able to consent.”
Nevertheless, Trump still made notable gains with Black men, earning an estimated 20 percent of Black male voters per Politico. In specific states like North Carolina, Black male voters did break for Trump, with 1 in 5 Black men voting for him, which was twice his support in 2020, according to CBS exit polls.
According to Washington Post exit polls, Black women overwhelmingly voted for Harris, with 92% voting for her — even higher than the number of Black women who voted for Biden in 2020.
Any gender gap in the Black community is indicative of a much larger gender nationally. According to CNN exit polls, women voters leaned toward Harris by 10 points, but not at the levels they did for Joe Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016. Meanwhile, Trump gained in his standing with male voters overall.
Latinos, who are categorized as a race in most exit polls, despite being a community composed of multiple races of people (ex., white Latinos, Black Latinos, mixed Latinos, etc.), also voted for Trump in larger numbers than previously seen. While 45% of Latinos voted for Trump, per The Washington Post, a whopping 54% of Latino men broke for Trump.
However, white men and women determined the greatest impact of a demographic group’s choice in the 2024 election.
According to Washington Post exit polls, the majority of white voters — 55% — voted for Donald Trump. When broken down by gender, 59% of white men voted for Trump, and 52% of white women followed. There was no massive departure of white female voters from white male voters.
“All I’m gonna say is some of y’all spent a lot of time questioning/doubting Black men and not enough on white women and Latino voters. Good night,” tweeted Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter.
