As Donald Trump clinches a historic comeback win, early data from the US presidential election suggests the Republican may have benefited from political shifts based largely on class, race and age, undermining the broad Democratic coalition that drove him out of power four years ago.

Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the United States on Wednesday, capping a startling comeback four years after his refusal to accept defeat led to a violent insurrection at the US Capitol.

His return to the White House deals a crushing blow to the Democratic camp, beaten by a convicted felon who is no less polarising and divisive a figure than he was four years ago.

Only 44% of voters nationwide had a favourable view of Trump, according to an Election Day exit poll by Edison Research, compared to 46% who said so four years ago. 54% viewed him unfavourably, up from 52% in 2020.

And yet Democrats proved unable to convert the broad mistrust of Trump into support for Vice President Kamala Harris, failing to reassemble the coalition of voters that unseated the Republican four years ago.

That coalition notably included Black voters – historically a bedrock of Democratic support – as well as Hispanics and young voters.

While the majority stayed with Harris, Election Day surveys suggest some in those groups either shifted in Trump’s direction or shunned the polls, scuttling the Democrats’ hopes of holding on to the White House.

Minority vote split

Harris, 60, was hoping to become the first woman president in the country’s 248-year history – and the first Black woman and person of South Asian descent to hold the office. Securing the minority vote was crucial to her chances of defeating Trump, who was guaranteed to win a majority of white votes.

The Republican had boasted during the campaign that he would get more support from Black men and Latino men than he had before – a trend that appears to have materialised, particularly among Hispanics, with economic concerns carrying greater prominence than in the 2020 election.

About 8 in 10 Black voters backed Harris, down from the roughly 9 in 10 who backed Joe Biden four years ago, according to a VoteCast survey of voters for AP. More than half of Hispanic voters supported Harris, but that was down from the roughly 6 in 10 who backed Biden in 2020.

Edison Research said Trump’s overall share of the Black vote was unchanged at just 12%, though it rose 1 percentage point among Black men. Significantly, only 11% of voters nationwide were Black, down from 13% in 2020, suggesting a slight dip in turnout for a demographic that has long been crucial to Democrats.

The same survey gave a more significant shift towards the GOP among Hispanic voters, with Trump taking 45% of the overall vote, up 13% from 2020 and 17% among Hispanic men – despite talk of recent derogatory remarks about Puerto Ricans alienating Latino voters.

Polling institutes were yet to provide data on Muslim and Arab-American voters, a key demographic in the battleground state of Michigan that helped Biden flip the state in 2020 but has voiced fury at the Democratic president over his steadfast support for Israel.

In the run-up to Election Day, many Arab-American voters had vowed to punish the vice president over the Biden administration’s decision to arm, finance and offer diplomatic cover to Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

Youth vote goes missing

The war still raging in the Middle East has also weighed on Democrats’ hopes of whipping up support among young voters – a Democrat-leaning but also notoriously fickle demographic. 

Voters under age 30 traditionally make up only a small share of the total electorate, but their mobilisation four years ago helped push Biden over the line in key states such as Pennsylvania.

Data from AP VoteCast suggests about half of them supported Harris this time, compared with the roughly 6 in 10 who backed Biden in 2020. Slightly more than 4 in 10 young voters went for Trump, up from about one third in 2020.

About three-quarters of young voters said the country was headed in the wrong direction, and roughly one-third said they wanted complete and total upheaval to how the country is run.

Edison Research came up with similar findings, with Trump taking 42% of voters aged 18 to 29, up six percentage points from a 2020 exit poll.

The reversal was most dramatic in Michigan, where exit polls said voters under 30 had narrowly backed Trump, four years after giving Biden a commanding 61% of the vote.

Gender gap narrows

Surprisingly, preliminary data suggests Harris may also have underperformed among women, whose vote she won by a slightly smaller margin than expected – confounding predictions of a widening gender gap.

This was the first presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended American women’s national right to terminate a pregnancy. It followed a campaign in which Trump overtly courted males with a hypermasculine rhetoric.

Both campaigns had expected a historic “gender gap” between the two candidates, with women making up a clear majority of Harris’s supporters and men providing the bulk of Trump’s total.

While the Democratic nominee did carry 54% of women voters nationwide, according to Edison Research, Trump’s share of 44% was up by 2 percentage points from the last election.

VoteCast reported a smaller gap, with about half of women backing Harris and about half of men going for Trump – figures largely consistent with the shares won by Biden and Trump in 2020.

The survey found that about 1 in 10 voters said abortion was the top issue facing the country, reinforcing the newfound salience of the issue, though the GOP’s preferred topics of immigration and the economy were significantly higher on most voters’ minds.

Democrats overtaken

The Republican candidate also appears to have made inroads among the growing share of voters who identify as independents – meaning they align with neither Democrats nor Republicans.

As in 2020, independents favoured the Democratic candidate, though Trump notably improved his performance with the key swing-voter bloc. Some 50% of independents said they voted for Harris and 45% for Trump – a 4 percentage point improvement for the Republican from 2020.

In Georgia, which Trump flipped, independents broke for the Republican 54% to 43%, according to a CBS exit poll, whereas they backed Biden by nine points at the last election.

Alarmingly for Harris’s party, Tuesday’s vote marked the first time independents accounted for a larger share of voters in a presidential election than Democrats – and were tied with Republicans.

The independent turnout share was up 8 percentage points from 2020, when at 26% it was a distant third to both Democrats and Republicans.

Graduates outnumbered

Winning over moderate Republicans repelled by Trump was a key aim of Harris’s pitch to college-educated voters, which voted for the Democratic candidate in larger numbers than four years ago.

But what gains Harris made there were more than offset by Democratic losses among voters without college degrees.

Edison Research said Trump picked up 54% of voters without a higher-education degree, up 4% from 2020 and 10 points clear of Harris’s tally.

The same survey noted that voters without a degree accounted for 57% of the overall electorate.

Those voters were most likely to make their choice based on concerns about jobs and the economy – the paramount issue for about 4 in 10 voters, according to VoteCast.

A slim majority (51%) of voters said they trusted Trump more to handle the economy, according to Edison Research, against 47% who backed Harris. 45% of voters said their family’s financial situation was worse off than it was four years ago, compared to 20% who said so in 2020.

The figures reflect broad pessimism about the economy after four years of Democratic rule – and signal Harris’s failure to address the anxieties of working-class voters struggling with inflation and alarmed by talk of America’s economic decline.