Less White than Ever? Using Ecological Inference to Probe the Trump Coalition’s Diversity in Louisiana

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Pre-election polls in 2024 showed former President Donald Trump performing relatively well with African-American voters, especially males. Now that Trump has beaten Vice President Harris to retake the presidency, a question arises: Did Trump actually put together a racially diverse coalition, as the polling foreshadowed, or did White and Black voters ultimately slip back to levels of racial polarization seen in previous contests? Exit polls on balance show Trump as having made negligible gains with African Americans, while anecdotal evidence drawn from swing states suggests he did better than the poll results indicate. This analysis uses Louisiana’s precinct-level data, released soon after the 2024 presidential election ended, to gauge African-American support for Donald Trump, as compared to the Black support for Republicans in 2020 and 2023. Because Louisiana was not a swing state in 2024, the analysis might generalize to what happened in the electorate better than observations drawn from the battleground states. Results imply that the exit polling and the descriptive analyses could both be correct: Trump made only minimal gains as a whole, but his support picked up in heavily Black areas.

Original languageEnglish
JournalForum (Germany)
DOIs
StateAccepted/In press - 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH. All rights reserved.

Keywords

  • 2024 elections
  • Louisiana politics
  • aggregation bias
  • contextual effects
  • ecological inference

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Sociology and Political Science
  • General Social Sciences

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