The 2024 Presidential Election and the Enduring Power of the Racial Divide

Abstract The 2024 presidential contest was, for various reasons, simultaneously historic and unremarkable. The Republican nominee was a previously defeated president with a long list of scandals and seemingly insurmountable political baggage. The Democratic nominee was a Black and South Asian female vice president elevated in virtually the eleventh hour to replace an unpopular incumbent. For these reasons, and many others, the previously stable voter coalitions associated with each party might have differed sharply from past election cycles. But, in general, this did not happen. In this essay, I examine the demographic dynamics of the 2024 presidential election and highlight the relative stability of voting preferences based on gender, class, age, and religion. Most importantly, however, I underscore the enduring power of the most consequential demographic cleavage: the Black–White racial divide. Relying primarily, but not exclusively, on national exit poll data, I show that the Black American vote for the Democratic presidential nominee has remained reliably consistent since at least 1972. When adopting this longer time horizon, and contrary to some media accounts before and after the 2024 election, there is little support for the proposition that the Black vote is drifting away from the Democrats. Similarly, majority White support for the Republican presidential nominee has also remained steadfast, with, at most, only minor fluctuations during this period. I conclude by discussing the historical factors that gave rise to this enduring racial divide and why it is unlikely to dissipate any time soon.