President Donald Trump secured the 2024 presidential election with the largest coalition of voters to support a Republican president in two decades largely by retaining his base and unleashing new voters who sat out the 2020 election.
A Pew Research Center study released June 26 is putting hard numbers behind the historically diverse coalition of middle-class voters that elected President Trump. While Trump was able to pull a portion of former Democrats and independents toward the GOP, a significant amount of Trump voters were new and infrequent voters. Changes in the electorate played a critical role in Trump’s victory, and turnout trends will continue to shift the electoral landscape in the 2026 midterm cycle and beyond. Â
The Pew study reveals the way in which President Trump was able to cut into Kamala Harris’ margins with minority voters compared to the 2020 election with Joe Biden. While Harris won a majority of Black voters in 2024, Trump moved the needle seven points toward the GOP compared to 2020. Trump secured 15 percent of the Black vote in 2024 up from eight percent in 2020. Â
Trump’s gains among Latinos were even more substantial with President Trump coming within three points of winning the Latino vote in 2024 after ceding it to Joe Biden by 35 points (61 percent to 36 percent) in 2020. Trump even moved the needle among Asian voters, with 40 percent of Asians backing Trump in 2024 up from 30 percent in 2020 according to Pew’s calculations.
Were minorities switching parties or were minorities who sat out previous elections motivated to vote for Trump for the first time in 2024? It was likely a little of both, but the Pew report emphasizes the degree to which a diverse new electorate played into Trump’s victory.
President Trump held the line in 2024 with voters who supported him in 2020 with more strength than Harris won over Biden voters. According to the report, 85 percent of 2020 Trump voters supported the president again, compared to 79 percent of Biden voters who came out to vote for Harris.
However, Trump’s strength wasn’t only in voter retention, be also claimed a substantially larger portion of new voters who sat out the 2020 election. Trump won a full 54 percent of non-2020 voters, while Harris won 42 percent, a twelve-point difference. A smaller share of 2020 Trump voters decided it wasn’t worth voting in 2024 (11 percent) compared to 2020 Biden voters (15 percent). Â
President Trump’s ability to activate new voters who historically sat out the political process is key to reclaiming the country from the left and creating a sustainable conservative coalition. The vast majority of the American people were never on-board with the left’s agenda, but had given up on using the voting process to reclaim the country. President Trump was able to reach and activate a coalition of low propensity voters who will be key to ensuring conservative priorities, such as a secure border, a level-playing field with global trade partners, and U.S. job growth, remain on track beyond the next election cycle.
Based on recent elections, reaching and activating low propensity voters is a strategy that could significantly benefit Republicans over Democrats.
The Pew study found that among eligible voters who chose not to vote, President Trump would have beat Kamala Harris by four percentage points, 44 percent to 40 percent, indicating that higher turnout would not have changed the outcome of the election. If anything, Trump would have won by a greater margin if everyone who was eligible to vote had turned out. Â
As Rick Moran recently noted in an article for PJ Media, “there used to be an axiom in politics that high voter turnout always favored the Democrats because it meant that more minorities and other demographic groups that favored Democrats showed up to vote. That’s simply not true today. The realization that fewer people voting is better for Democrats upends 60 years of Democratic strategy about maximizing voter turnout of all demographic groups.”
Moran points out that for decades, Democrats have favored a get out the vote (GOTV) strategy, employing celebrities to encourage people to register to vote, with the implication that new voters tend to favor Democrats at the polls. This is no longer the case.  Â
A detailed New York Times report released Aug. 20 found that Republicans have been far outpacing Democrats in terms of raw voter registration numbers since 2020. The GOP added 2.4 million voters between the 2020 and 2024 elections, while Democrats parted ways with 2.1 million voters, according to the report. Â
New voters no longer favor Democrats, which means all of the celebrity GOTV campaigns, college-campus registration drives, and minority targeting schemes, are not necessarily going to benefit them. Democrats’ interest in “getting out the vote” may falter as the party realizes that the more Americans who express their voices at the ballot box, the less Democrats win.
Manzanita Miller is the senior political analyst at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
