How Americans voted in 2020 and what that could mean for 2024

WASHINGTON (AP) — As Election Day approaches, Democrat Kamala Harris is trying to maintain a diverse coalition of voters energized four years ago by her bitter opposition to Republican Donald Trump and fears of a deadly pandemic.

The former president, meanwhile, is trying to deepen gains among groups like men without college degrees, where he has already shown strength, and undermine Harris’ support among Hispanic Americans and other key demographic groups.

AP VoteCast, a comprehensive voter survey, tells the story of how Democrat Joe Biden won and Trump lost in 2020, and what those results could mean for the 2024 election. We will know whether the candidates were able to expand their coalitions or form new ones when the results of the 2024 VoteCast poll are released on Election Day.

Biden’s victory four years ago was decisive but not overwhelming, which presented Harris with a challenge: She must either keep up with his broad support base or form a new winning coalition herself.

According to AP VoteCast, Biden won clear majorities among college graduates, women and younger voters. He won about two-thirds of urban voters and more than half of suburban voters. He received the support of about three-quarters of non-white voters, including about 9 in 10 black voters and 6 in 10 Hispanic voters. And Biden not only secured these groups, many of whom have favored Democrats in the past, but also won over moderate voters and dented Trump’s support among white women and young white voters.

Unlike Biden, Harris has harnessed the energy surrounding her campaign by holding large rallies. But she has also acknowledged the diversity of her coalition with various Zoom meetings aimed at demographic groups such as “Black Women for Harris,” “Black Men for Harris,” “Latinas for Harris,” “Cat Ladies for Kamala,” and “Dads for “Judged Kamala,” among other things.

She has made a strong commitment to reaching women through a meeting with TV legend Oprah Winfrey and the “Call Her Daddy” podcast. She has made direct contacts with unions that are part of the turnout in swing states, while leveraging her connections to historically black colleges, universities, fraternities and sororities as a graduate of Howard University.

Trump, meanwhile, held on to his base of white voters without college degrees, rural voters and religious conservatives in 2020.

He remained competitive in 2020 despite losing the popular vote because they were large blocs and he won many of them significantly. In 2020, VoteCast found that about three-quarters of US voters were white and 55% of them supported Trump. The president secured the support of about 8 in 10 white evangelical Christian voters. He won 6 in 10 voters who lived in small towns and rural areas and was supported by about 6 in 10 white voters without a college degree.

It wasn’t enough to win him the White House four years ago, but his coalition is large enough to remain competitive in his third presidential election. White voters without a college degree made up about 43% of all voters in 2020, a foundation of support he has promoted through large outdoor rallies and social media posts this year.

Trump has also appeared on podcasts popular among younger men, courting big tech investors such as Elon Musk, who recently appeared with him at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, commemorating a previous assassination attempt. The former president has also publicly tried to woo black and Hispanic voters in his speeches. And he also strengthened his brand as a businessman in this campaign by starting a cryptocurrency business and selling sneakers and watches, among other things.

But the 2020 election also took place at a completely different time for the country. The most important issue facing voters in 2020 – the COVID-19 pandemic – is currently barely on Americans’ minds. Four years ago, about four in 10 voters said the pandemic was the country’s most important problem, and about three-quarters of those voters supported Biden.

The change in topic could be helpful for Trump – but it is not a guarantee. Inflation, immigration and abortion seem to attract the most attention. Even in 2020, about half of voters said Trump could handle the economy better, while about four in 10 said the same about Biden. There are signs that views on the economy are increasingly being shaped by people’s own political views, and Harris is trying to erode Republicans’ previous advantage on the economy by focusing on policies that will help middle-class households to help control costs.

The 2020 election was partly a referendum on Trump, the then incumbent president. And while about 6 in 10 voters said they voted mostly for their candidate, a significant number — about 4 in 10 — said they voted mostly against a candidate.

Harris has tried to suggest that she is a pro-change candidate as a younger candidate who has never been president, while Trump is also running as a pro-change candidate because he would break with Biden’s policies.

Many voters have signaled they want change and were initially unhappy with a rematch between Biden and Trump. However, those concerns were somewhat assuaged when Biden dropped out of the race on June 27 after a disastrous debate against Trump. In December 2023, an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that 58% of U.S. adults said they would be dissatisfied if Trump were the Republican nominee and 56% would be dissatisfied if Biden were the Democratic nominee.

The desire for change is reflected in Democrats’ increased enthusiasm for Harris over Biden in the AP-NORC polls since she emerged as a candidate. In September, polls showed that more voters compared to Trump thought the phrase “would change the country for the better” that described Harris.

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AP VoteCast is a survey of American voters conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago for Fox News, NPR, PBS NewsHour, Univision News, USA Today Network, The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press. The 2020 survey of 110,485 voters was conducted over eight days and ended when polls closed. The interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. The survey combines a random sample of registered voters from state voter files; self-identified registered voters using NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak panel, designed to be representative of the U.S. population; and self-identified registered voters selected from non-probability online panels. The margin of sampling error for voters is estimated to be plus or minus 0.4 percentage points. For more details on AP VoteCast’s methodology, see