How Trump’s coalition shifted from 2016 to 2024 — and how it didn’t

In keeping with Americans’ perennial inability to properly contextualize the events of the recent past, there’s a particular narrative about the 2024 election that I find frustrating. In short, that the election marked a significant rightward shift of American voters and, by extension, by America.

The value of such a narrative to President Trump and to his ideological allies is obvious. Trump’s return to the White House brought with it the unexpected cudgel of popular support, something he lacked when he arrived in 2017. But that cudgel was flimsier than it appeared. Trump won more votes than Kamala Harris but less than half of votes cast. A central driver of those votes was inflation, not Trump’s politics.

That rightward shift also followed a leftward shift four years prior. Yes, states shifted to the right from 2020 to 2024 — but only after they shifted to the left from 2016 to 2020.

This is little consolation for Democrats, certainly, and it glosses over the actual shifts in the electorate between Trump’s first and third bids for the presidency. So let’s use Pew Research Center’s robust assessment of the electorate in each year to show how Trump’s base of support evolved over that time … and how it didn’t.

Take gender. In 2016, 53 percent of Trump’s support was male, compared to 54 percent in 2024. That’s a subtle change, but one that looks more substantial when you consider the intervening election. In 2016, the pool of Trump voters was 6 points more male. In 2020, the gap was half that size — before swelling to 8 points last year.

Over those eight years? A bit more male and a bit less female.

(Why was the pool of Trump voters more heavily female in 2020? In part because more men voted for Joe Biden. In 2016, Trump won men by 11 points. In 2020, he won them by 2 points.)

When we look at age, we see a more obvious shift. In 2016, about 20 percent of Trump’s support was under the age of 40. Last year, about 26 percent was.

If one ascribes to the thesis that Trump’s decade-plus as the head of the GOP has normalized his politics among younger Americans (as I do), feel free to use the chart above in your defense.

Below, you can see how Trump’s coalition shifted by age and gender over the three elections. Women aged 30 to 49 were 10 percent of Trump’s support in 2016. Last year, they were 13 percent — which was still a relatively modest part of the coalition.

One of the most important distinctions (and one not captured in exit polling) is how much less White Trump’s 2024 coalition was than his 2016 one.

Data on race don’t add up neatly to 100 percent, so let’s compare data across election cycles by stacking racial groups. Below, you can that White men and women made up less of Trump’s support in 2024 than in 2016 (by four and six points, respectively) and that Hispanic voters in particular made up more of it: 6 percent in 2016 compared to 1 in 10 Trump voters last year.

When I was still at The Washington Post, I wrote about how the shift to Trump among young men was heavily among non-White men — in part because younger Americans are less likely to be White. Below, you can see that reflected, to some extent. We’re slicing demographics pretty thin here, so take this with a grain of salt.

More striking is the shift by race and education. Trump’s 2016 coalition was heavily centered among Whites without a college degree, who made up almost two-thirds of his support. Last year, it was barely over half.

That decline was seen among both White men and White women without degrees.

There’s a pattern here: Whites, Whites without degrees and Whites over the age of 50 — groups that overlap heavily — all constituted at least 10 percentage points more of Trump’s coalition in 2016 as they did last year.

The question for the Republican Party is whether they can maintain that more-diverse coalition. Which, in turn, is a question about the roots of that shift: how much of it was about Trump and how much of it was about broader, lasting trends and shifts in American politics?

There’s one other question, too. If the 2028 election shows a shift back to the left, will people remember that this happened in 2020, too?

Photo: Harry Truman and his daughter Margaret Truman voting in Independence, Missouri, 1946. (National Archives)