Wed. Nov 6th, 2024

By STEVE PEOPLES and BILL BARROW, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) – Even with Tuesday night’s uncertain outcome, the 2024 presidential election has already exposed the depths of a fractured nation as candidates navigated political shifts based on class, race and age under the near-constant threat of misinformation and violence.

Early data suggest that Republican Donald Trump could benefit from some of the changes more than Democrat Kamala Harris.

But since the 1968 election, when the nation was torn apart by racial strife and the Vietnam War, the divisions didn’t seem so glaring.

The biggest conclusions, however, may so far be the most obvious.

The United States is on the verge of electing its first woman president in Harris or its first president with a felony conviction in the former president. Trumpwhose enduring political strength through chaos-largely of his own making-has had few political costs so far.

With votes still being counted across the country, here are some early conclusions:

There is a new map of battlegrounds and contested coalitions

Black voters – men and women – have been the base of the Democratic Party, and Democrats have had a strong pull among Latino voters. The same has been true for young voters.

But preliminary data from AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of more than 115,000 voters nationwide, suggests that the groups shifted in Trump’s direction.

Voters under 30 represent a fraction of the total electorate, but about half of them supported Harris. That compares with about 6 in 10 who supported Biden in 2020.

Slightly more than 4 in 10 young voters went for Trump, compared with about a third in 2020.

Another shift that occurred was among black and Latino voters, who appeared slightly less likely to support Harris than Biden four years ago, according to AP VoteCast.

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