Författare: Clodagh Harrington Lecturer in American Politics University

There was a little bit of deja vu after this week’s US election when Donald Trump defeated a Democrat candidate seeking to become the first female US president.

When he won against Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump defied expectations. Predictions ahead of that election had ranged from a likely to an almost certain loss for Trump. This time the polls had predicted a much closer race. In the end, Trump was the clear winner.

Despite facing several court cases, some of which may soon be dismissed, Trump is back, only the second president after Grover Cleveland to have non-consecutive terms in office. Trump will return to the White House in January to be sworn in.

Key shifts in who the electorate supported, identified in exit poll data between defeat in 2020 and triumph in 2024, may show what happened, and who voted for the Trump ticket, and contributed to his second victory.

Race as a factor

First, there is some evidence that Trump attracted more ethnic minority voters than during his previous win. In the build up to the election, there were a number of reports about how polling cross tabs (reports used to compare side-by-side data) were showing a swing towards Trump among black voters.

However, on the day, the real improvement for Trump among minority voters was with Latinos, who constituted 12% of the voting population. If taken as a group, the overall Latino population rose from 13% of the population in 2000 to 19% in 2021 (Although it should be noted that this is an umbrella term for people from disparate backgrounds with differing political traditions.) According to exit polls, Trump’s numbers among Latino voters improved from 28% in 2016 to 32% in 2020 and then to 46% in 2024.

Harris did better among white voters than Clinton in 2016, and the same as Biden. Clinton received 37% of the white vote, Biden 41% and Harris also did 41%. The Clinton number was deflated by a slightly higher third-party vote in 2016, but white voters still make up 70% of the electorate, so these margins matter.

If all of these figures hold up under further scrutiny it could upend assumptions that minority groups are natural supporters of the Democratic party. In the longer term, whatever your views on the 2024 election result, a decline in voting patterns defined by race seem a healthy trend for US democracy.

Was there a gender gap?

Second, the gender gap was quite different to the predictions. In the pre-election conversation, this was often framed in terms of Harris’s lead among women. This was understandable given the focus on reproductive rights as an election issue and the Trump-Vance ticket’s at times open chauvinism (see, for example, Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies”), but Trump’s advantage among men was equally noteworthy.

According to the NBC exit poll men and women divided to a similar degree. This ended up with 55% of men voting for Trump and 53% of women for Harris. These initial numbers, however, were disappointing for Harris. Clinton had won 54% of the women’s vote on her way to defeat and Harris’s number was a decline from Biden’s 57% in 2020.

CNN exit poll on Latino vote.

The gender gap becomes even starker when it crossed with vote by race and ethnicity. The numbers also reveal that white women, often the biggest identifiable demographic group of voters, vote for Republican candidates for president. The Harris camp put a huge effort into reversing this trend, but came up short, despite some encouraging pre-election polls.

Harris won fewer young voters than Biden

One stereotype is that younger voters tend to be more leftwing. But that is historically simplistic.

In 1984, voters aged 18-24 were more or just as likely to vote for Republican Ronald Reagan over Democrat Walter Mondale than other voters under 65. Around 61% of this younger age group voted for Reagan, and only 39% for Mondale.

However, both Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden had beaten Trump handily among younger voters. Clinton won 56% of voters aged 18-24 and Biden had improved that number to 60%. Harris, however, slipped back to Clinton’s 56%. On the other hand, belying another age-based stereotype Harris was level with Trump among voters 65 and over (49% Harris, 49% Trump), improving on the performance of her two Democratic predecessors.

These shifts may reflect a reinforcement of previous trajectories rather than surprising new twists. An added caveat is that conclusions are still speculative and based on exit polls, which include large, but not extensive, samples of the population. The CNN poll, for instance, sampled 22,900 voters. Nonetheless, they do offer a tantalising glimpse of where the nation is headed for future elections. Whether the 2024 outcome is an aberration or part of a long-term pattern is not yet clear. Läs mer…

If the powerful documentary How to Build a Truth Engine had to be compressed into two thematic strands they might be “how the human mind works” and “how our brain can be manipulated by information”. Director Friedrich Moser’s film takes us on a two-hour voyage of explanation, covering issues from cyber-warfare to elections, COVID to conflict and more.

Engaged citizens may find some of it they knew already. However, Moser offers a forensic and evidence-based delivery of how, why and the extent to which technology, events and the manipulation of both has had a powerful and deeply disconcerting impact on humans individually and collectively.

As an expert in American politics, who recently wrote on the crisis of truth in the current US election, I found How to Build a Truth Engine makes for sober but crucial viewing.

As our news cycles overflow with disinformation and fake news, this visually engaging film takes us on a calm, scientific tour of how we got to where we are – which is disinformation-central.

Experts in neuroscience, engineering and even folklore explain the ways in which we think and process information. As humans, our brains rely on steady, clear streams of data. When these streams become polluted, our capacity to process and understand reality is challenged, and our vulnerability to false narratives increases.

Clearly, lying for political purposes is as old as politics itself, but the capacity to disseminate these lies is now on a scale previously unimaginable, as the documentary shows.

Unsurprisingly, Moser’s production gives much attention to the plight of traditional journalism. It also focuses on the challenges we face as consumers of news now that the process through which information is filtered and considered fit for dissemination has been dismantled to an alarming extent.

The programme offers a stark reminder of the current state of conventional journalism, weakened by the migration of resources to online search engines where advertising and algorithms trump fact checking and truth telling.

Among the topics covered is the 2022 Russian invasion of Bucha in Ukraine, in which multiple civilians were killed, with bound bodies left in the streets. At the time, the Kremlin rebuffed Ukrainian allegations of war crimes as a fake narrative and went so far as to state that the civilian massacre was a staged event.

Western journalists, including New York Times staff, used satellite imagery to piece together events in the lead-up to the atrocity. As a result, they were able to verify what the Ukrainians had told them, but with the powerful addition of visual evidence, which transcended any “he said, she said” narrative.

If truth is the first casualty of war, this important use of technology for such crucial purpose offers a ripple of accuracy in an ocean of falsehood.

In highlighting the significance to the human brain of narrative and storytelling, the documentary offers chilling insights regarding the conspiracy theory path that led to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol in 2021. History is filled with tales of societies falling for false narratives, and the assault on the Capitol adheres to these criteria.

From stereotyping to the creation of insider-outsider narratives (where certain groups are presented as relatable and others as negative and untrustworthy), it is only a small leap to negative assumptions about those deemed outsiders. In the case of January 6 Capitol attack in 2021, the documentary makes clear the groundwork was laid long before any violence took place.

And so, we are reminded that the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen by Joe Biden was promoted, shared, amplified and repeated back (between Donald Trump, social media and sympathetic television networks) until the protesters were whipped into a frenzy. The result of this unchecked political propaganda was death and destruction.

Neuroscientists look at MRIs to explain how our brains need narratives when it comes to processing information.
Friedrich Moser Film GmbH

Those in Moser’s film offer a chilling reminder that as long as the lie of the “Big Steal”, as it is known now, remains alive as truth in the minds of many Americans, then it can happen again. If the relentless pursuit of accuracy is a core component of journalism, we can see that this pursuit is under constant siege as lies propagate at lightning speed and citizens choose their own truths.

The documentary taps into the key question of our era: how do we know what we know? In an age of information warfare, truth is a valuable and vulnerable commodity. As humans, we have created technology so advanced that it is already outsmarting us.

And truth is often diluted, polluted or drowned out completely in our daily communication torrents. This, combined with the nefarious agendas of bad actors means that individuals, communities and our way of life are under significant threat. The consolation, as presented by Moser’s work, may be that technology can also get us out of this predicament. That’s assuming that we want it to.

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