After every election, pundits and laymen alike pore over the exit polls, hoping to make sense of the results. These polls, while imprecise and often contradictory, are used to draw conclusions about the country’s political and cultural trajectory. They aren’t perfect, but, in the immediate aftermath of an election, they’re all we have to work with.

More useful is Pew Research Center’s review of validated voters, which it releases the summer following a presidential election. These are more rigorous than exit polls and are thus widely considered some of the best post-election data available. Pew’s 2024 review of validated voters, released June 26, shed light on the racial and religious dimensions to President Trump’s 2024 victory.

Perhaps most striking is how diverse Trump’s voters were in 2024 compared to previous election cycles. In 2016, 88 percent of Trump voters were white. In 2020, that figure dropped to 86 percent. Yet in 2024, only 78 percent of Trump supporters were white.

This isn’t evidence that Trump is alienating white voters, though. In 2016, 54 percent of whites cast ballots for Trump, compared to 55 percent in both 2020 and 2024. Although the percentage of the white vote has remained stable since 2016, recent elections reveal a small but widening gender gap. Between 2020 and 2024, there was a decrease of two percentage points in the support of white women (53 percent to 51 percent), whereas white men increased their support by two points(57 percent to 59 percent).

Trump’s biggest minority gains were among Hispanics, whose support for the president jumped from 36 percent in 2020 to 48 percent in 2024. Trump also gained Asian voters in 2024, increasing his share from 30 percent to 40 percent. While Trump is still overwhelmingly unpopular among black voters, he did manage to nearly double his share of the black vote (8 percent in 2020 to 15 percent in 2024).

It is significant that Trump’s 2024 victory was fueled by gains among nonwhite voters, given that mass deportations were central to his campaign. For years, establishment conservatives and Republican strategists have argued that in an increasingly nonwhite America, the embrace of diversity and immigration was a prerequisite for electoral success.

In Sam Francis’s 2001 essay titled Ethnopolitics, the late Chronicles columnist explained how Bob Dole’s poor performance among Hispanics in 1996 helped give rise to this misguided strategy:

But because of Bob Dole’s poor showing among Hispanics in 1996, supporters of liberal immigration policies such as Linda Chavez and Paul Gigot of The Wall Street Journal argued that Republican support for Prop 187 and subsequent restrictions on immigration had only served to alienate the growing Hispanic vote and that only by abandoning immigration restriction and courting Hispanic voters could Republicans expect to win in the future. In the years between 1996 and 2000, their advice was largely adopted by the Republican Party at the national level and in many states, including California. The Bush campaign in 2000 sought to attract Hispanic voters just as much as it sought to win black voters. It was only marginally more successful in doing so.

George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign was characterized by heavy pandering to Hispanic voters. On July 5, speaking before 1,000 members of La Raza, Bush promised to spend $100 million annually to expedite immigration applications. This earned him 35 percent of the Hispanic vote. That Trump won 48 percent of Hispanics while talking about the threat of immigrants eating your pets is remarkable.

The Republican Party should never again get away with claiming that immigration restriction and winning minority voters are mutually exclusive. If anything, the opposite is the case.

But racial voting trends only tell part of the story. In addition to being multiracial, America is also multireligious. Trump won a majority of Protestant voters, increasing his share from 59 percent in 2020 to 62 percent in 2024. Among white evangelical Protestants, he is still widely popular, earning 81 percent of their vote. Curiously, this constitutes a two percentage-point decrease from 2020, suggesting that some in this cohort have soured on Trump.

Trump made gains among Catholics of all races. In 2020, 49 percent of Catholics cast their vote for Trump, compared to 55 percent in 2024. White Catholic support increased by five percentage points (57 percent to 62 percent), whereas Hispanic Catholic support increased by a full 10 points (31 percent to 41 percent).

More noteworthy is the Jewish vote. For better or worse, questions surrounding Israel, Jews, and anti-Semitism have been front and center since Oct. 7, 2023. Many Jewish Americans have expressed growing dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party, which they view as insufficiently supportive of Israel and the Jewish people. Some, such as hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, have become fierce critics of wokeness. As such, I was interested to see to what extent, if any, Jews shifted toward the Republican Party in the last election.

Such a shift did occur, yet it was smaller than some expected. In 2024, Trump garnered 35 percent of the Jewish vote. While Pew’s review of validated voters only began measuring the Jewish vote in 2024, we can compare this data to exit polls from 2020 to get a slightly less precise understanding of the shift. According to the Associated Press’s Votecast, 30 percent of Jews voted for Trump. Other exit polls show Trump earning less, with one from J Street revealing that only 21 percent voted for Trump. This means that Trump succeeded at increasing his share of the Jewish vote by anywhere from 5 percentage points to 14 points—no small feat, given Jewish Americans’ historical preference for the Democratic Party. One wonders if this trend will continue. 

A word of caution, however: The 2024 election, much like the two previous elections, was anomalous if for no other reason than that Donald Trump—a once-in-a-generation talent—was the Republican nominee. And the Democratic Party wasn’t sending its best. Between Biden’s disastrous presidency and Kamala Harris’s equally horrible campaign, the Republican Party had it easy. Future presidential elections will undoubtedly prove more challenging. 

This is why the right shouldn’t take Trump’s 2024 gains for granted. Whether the right succeeds in the coming decades will depend on this administration delivering to the American people what they voted for. So far, though not without some obstacles, it is doing a reasonably good job of delivering what it promised. There is still much work to be done, however, and 2028 is closer than it seems.