Unpacking Trump’s Election: Big Gains With Non-White Voters And A Rejection Of Establishment Media

 President-elect Donald Trump won the 2024 election with a surge in minority support while taking advantage of non-traditional media outlets to reach voters, data from the GOP polling group Cygnal suggests.

The election saw a massive shift among Hispanic and black voters casting ballots for Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris relative to the 2020 race. That wave of support came amid furious debate over hot cultural topics, such as sex-change treatments for minors and trans-identifying players in female sports.

In 2024, Hispanic voters shifted 24 points in favor of Trump, cutting Democratic support from a 33-point lead in 2020 to a 9-point lead this year. Among African-American voters, the Democratic lead dropped by 16 points in four years from a 75-point gap to a 59-point gap, according to Cygnal exit poll data.

Brent Buchanan, president and founder of Cygnal, said that cultural issues drove the heavy tilt among minorities toward Trump from 2020 to 2024.

“[Democrats] have gone off into this woke ideology where you’ve got to believe all these things or you’re a bad person. When Republicans are like, well, we kind of like, we like normalcy and that’s really out there,” Buchanan told The Daily Wire. “And Democrats have just gone so much into this politics of identity and the majority of the country is rejecting that.”

Trump also made gains among non-college educated voters, deepening the “diploma divide” in American politics where the more degrees one has generally means one is more likely to vote Democratic. In 2020, Trump won the group by 2 points. In 2024, Trump’s lead grew to 16 points.

Alongside the large swath of minority voters rejecting the Democratic Party, scores of voters appeared to reject establishment media, as well. Cygnal’s exit polling revealed sizable gaps between likely support based on how each voter consumes news.

 

“I think it’s one of the unsung stories of this election in that Trump really bypassed the mainstream media and went to all these alternative media sources that happen to speak more to men,” Buchanan said while noting that the Trump campaign’s catering to men did not spark a backlash among women. In fact, the percentage vote made up by women dropped by a point from 2020 to 2024.

Of voters who primarily consume news from national news stations, such as CBS and NBC, those voters were more likely to support Harris by 39 points. Among voters who get their news from newspapers, the gap was even larger, favoring Harris by 48 points. But Trump had large leads among voters who listen to talk radio (40 points), use X (41 points) or Facebook (22 points), and watch web streams (26 points), according to Cygnal’s exit polling.

Establishment outlets “are telling people what to think, and they’re not giving them all the facts as they’re telling people what to think. And that’s why we’re having this segmentation of folks who are listening to podcasts, who are subscribing to streaming services,” Buchanan said. “I believe we’re going to find more and more of that as people seek out the truth for themselves.”

The Democratic Party has deep problems to solve before the next election to put together a viable coalition, according to Buchanan.

“I think Democrats are walking into future elections asking themselves, ‘Who is our coalition?’ Because they’re essentially now the party of the coastal elites – and the white, college-educated coastal elites – and those people don’t understand America,” Buchanan said. He is skeptical that the party will adapt, however, because of the strong influence of its progressive wing.

For Republicans, Buchanan said that the GOP has to learn how to communicate with minority voters and hold onto the gains made by Trump.

“Don’t be scared to jump into the cultural issues. Talk about economics in a way that normal people understand. … And you have to go into these communities and start building relationships with folks, because we just can’t take for granted that these non-white voters who moved to Republicans are going to stay with us,” Buchanan said. “They moved to Trump. They did not move to Republicans. And there’s a whole lot of work to still be done in building real relationships, not just election day relationships with these folks.”