STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Vice President Harris committed to a peaceful transfer of power yesterday in ways that President-elect Trump did not four years ago.
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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign.
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MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
But we want to take another look at the voters who fueled that campaign as well as her victorious opponents.
INSKEEP: NPR's senior political editor and correspondent, Domenico Montanaro, is here with some fascinating findings. Domenico, good morning.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: Hey, good morning.
INSKEEP: So what are in the results that you see?
MONTANARO: Well, I mean, I've been saying for some time that we're in the middle of a political realignment in the country. When that's happening, you know, things look really volatile. We won't know what's on the other side of this until the dust settles, and that really hasn't happened yet in the age of Trump. But we did find out some things. First, the issue landscape, of course, just favored Republicans from the start of this election because there was an overwhelmingly negative view of the economy. But I have to say, one of those eye-opening things that I saw in these exit polls is that white voters actually went up as a share of the electorate. That hasn't happened since 1992. I mean, white voters had been on a steady decline as a share of the electorate because...
INSKEEP: Yeah.
MONTANARO: ...They're a shrinking share of the eligible voter population. And going up clearly helped Trump.
INSKEEP: Yeah. I'm just thinking this through. So the country is becoming more diverse. More nonwhite people, fewer white people. The electorate went the opposite way. So I guess either some nonwhite voters felt conflicting pressures and sat it out, or new groups of white voters showed up. Is that it?
MONTANARO: Yeah. I mean, it's hard to know exactly until we see turnout rates, which are going to come out in, you know, coming months. But it wasn't just white voters that helped fuel Trump's win. I mean, Trump actually expanded his coalition, and it's why this time, for the first time, he's on track to win the popular vote.
INSKEEP: How so? How would you say that?
MONTANARO: You saw that women turned out. They're actually up a point as a share of the electorate from four years ago, but it appears Harris didn't get as many of them to vote for her as her team expected. I mean, just 53% of women voted for Harris. That's the worst for a Democrat in 20 years. Now, she did very well with white college-educated women, better than Biden, actually, but there weren't enough. I mean, look at white women without degrees. They made up an even bigger share of the electorate - 1 in 5 voters - and they broke overwhelmingly for Trump. Trump also - and this is huge - made big inroads with Latinos. Get this. He got 46% of Latinos, which is the best any Republican has ever done with them. And Trump did it by winning over Latino men and young men.
INSKEEP: OK, so you just mentioned Latino men, young men. How did he do overall with men?
MONTANARO: Well, with Latino men, he won by 12 points. He won young men 18 to 29 by just a couple of points. But many of them had been saying that they're upset, that in their view, society says, you know, other groups are more important than they are. And they had a TikTok feed and a podcast to tell them exactly that. And it's pretty remarkable because Trump won men in every age group.
INSKEEP: OK, so you've given us some broad trends here. Do you feel you understand why people voted as they did?
MONTANARO: Well, I mean, one big piece of this obviously is cultural grievance, as I was noting there. But in our final polling, we got some other clues. You know, women seemed to think Harris was sincere in these moderate proposals that she'd been putting forward in this campaign that were different from her presidential campaign five years ago. But men, they thought that she was doing it just to try and get votes. Clear that men and women see women as leaders very differently. And I think there's going to be a lot to dissect in that. The other piece of this, though, a major thing obviously was the economy. We've been hearing it the entirety of the campaign. Working-class Latinos just said they felt they were better off under Trump four years ago.
INSKEEP: Domenico, thanks very much for the insights. Really appreciate it.
MONTANARO: You got it.
INSKEEP: That's NPR's Domenico Montanaro. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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