The 2024 Election: Why Most Marginalized Communities are Anti-Trump

Former President Donald Trump has been elected as the 47th President of the United States. He collected 312 electoral votes while sweeping this year’s seven  swing states: Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Nevada. Trump’s second term is imminent and is sparking fear across the nation. It’s important to reflect on the harm he caused not just during his last presidency, but throughout the course of his career, to better understand why so many people from marginalized communities are fearful and disappointed. 

Vice President Kamala Harris, despite losing the election, was overwhelmingly favored amongst marginalized communities. LGBTQ+ voters had a larger turnout than ever in the 2024 Presidential election, and Harris earned 86% of the LGBTQ+ vote, according to NBC News exit polls. Harris widened the gap that President Joe Biden had created in 2020 by a massive 15-point change. More voters identified as LGBTQ+ in this election than any other in the past, so what are possibly some of the key reasons that this demographic had such a major shift in the 2024 election from the one in 2020?

On the very first day of Trump’s presidency, he removed all LGBTQ+ content from the official White House website. This scrubbing wiped the government’s acknowledgments of how they have historically harmed the queer community, such as an apology for the U.S. Department of State’s “Lavender Scare.” The very literal erasure of queer history from our nation’s government was immediately enacted only two hours after Trump’s inauguration. Later on in his presidency, Trump opposed the Equality Act, banned transgender people from serving in the military, and harmfully narrowed the scope of Section 1557 under the Affordable Care Act. These are just a few of the many damaging actions Trump took to discriminate against the Queer community, and a longer list of Trump’s anti-LGBTQ+ history can be found here, compiled by the Human Rights Campaign.

LGBTQ+ voters were not the only marginalized community that turned out to vote for Harris. According to PBS exit polls, 83% of Black voters voted for Harris: 89% of Black women and 74% of Black men. Despite this turnout still being overwhelmingly in Harris’ favor, this is an 8-point difference compared to Biden, who secured 91% of Black voters in 2020. Although there was a decrease in Black voters voting for the Democratic candidate, 83% remains to be an inordinate amount of voters within this demographic. 

Trump has been accused of racism long before he initially ran for president against Hillary Clinton in 2016. One of his most infamous acts was his public call for the death penalty against the Central Park Five. The five Black and Latino men who were wrongly accused of rape were later exonerated, but despite this, Trump refuses to acknowledge or apologize for any of his wrongdoing. Trump has been accused several times of racism over the decades, and he has faced legal ramifications for some of his racist actions as well. In the 1970s, Trump was sued by the Justice Department over his alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act, in which he and his father refused to rent apartments to Black tenants. AP News reports that “The lawsuit ended in a settlement in which the Trumps acknowledged they ‘failed and neglected’ to comply with the Fair Housing Act, though they were never required to explicitly acknowledge discrimination had occurred.” More instances of Trump’s racism can be found here, provided by AP News.

His racism did not end with his actions against the Central Park Five, however, as Trump continued to perpetuate racism throughout his first presidency. One of his most notorious remarks comes from his response to the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina. White supremacists, Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members, and Neo-Nazis marched through the streets in response to the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Following the rally, the then-KKK leader said, “We’re going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump because he said he’s going to take our country back.” Despite dozens of counter-protesters being injured and another killed, at a press conference, Trump, according to The Nation, “equivocated and went off-script to wax admiringly about ‘very fine people on both sides,’ [but] he ultimately denounced the far-right racists.” His lack of immediate outright condemnation against those attending the rally, however, is extremely telling of Trump’s values. The failure to immediately condemn white supremacists, and his long history of racist remarks and actions, have implemented fear within the Black community, and many Black voters have very real worries about how Trump’s second term will affect them due to his racist history.

His bigotry has not just been aimed towards the Black community, however, as his prejudices expand to Islamophobia as well. Trump enacted Executive Order 13769, also widely known as the Muslim Ban. This legislation, as described by the Brennan Center, “banned travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen – for ninety days.” The Brennan Center continues to report that a following proclamation “indefinitely bars almost all travel to the United States from six Muslim-majority countries (Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen), and subjects Iraqi nationals to ‘additional scrutiny.’” Mary Meg McCarthy, the Executive Director of the National Immigrant Justice Center, stated that, “This Muslim Ban expansion is founded on nothing more than cruelty and racism. Keeping families separated and blocking people from immigrating to the United States based solely on their nationality serves no interest other than the president’s desire to distract Americans and further ingrain Islamophobia and xenophobia in U.S. policy.”

Interestingly, Muslim voters overwhelmingly voted in favor of  third party candidate Jill Stein, who secured 53.2% of the vote, according to a CAIR exit poll. Stein has been outspoken about the war in Gaza, Palestine, and has openly advocated for blocking United States aid to Israel, most likely being a key factor for securing the majority vote of this demographic. CAIR’s National Government Affairs Director, Robert McCaw, notes that the lack of response from the Biden-Harris administration negatively affected Harris, as there is a large discrepancy between Muslim support for President Biden in the 2020 election, and Harris in the 2024 election. 

Trump used Israel as a key point in his campaign to try and harness a larger percentage of the Jewish vote. Trump stated, “Israel, in my opinion, will cease to exist within two years,” when trying to convince Jewish voters to choose him over Harris. Trump even posted to Truth Social that Harris “hates Israel.” Despite Trump’s claims, according to NBC News, Harris secured 79% of the Jewish vote in this election. She did not take nearly as large of a stance against Israel as more progressive Democrats would have liked for her to take, however. CBS reports that a lot of voters protested Harris by voting third party, which deeply affected her overall performance in this election. 

Trump also notably upset many American Jews back in March 2024, when, according to PBS, he stated, “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion. They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed.” By perpetuating a false narrative around the Jewish community and their political beliefs, Trump consequently continues to promote antisemitism, which, as mentioned before, he was also criticized for with his failure to condemn the Charlottesville rally. 

Trump’s attacks against the Jewish, Black, Muslim, and LGBTQ+ communities seem to have impacted his performance in this election. Despite their widely anti-Trump turnout, Trump still secured the presidency by earning the majority of the vote amongst both white men and white women. Trump even managed to secure a large portion of the entire vote amongst all women, earning 45%, although he still fell short of  Harris’ 53%, according to NBC News. Trump actually secured a larger number of women voters in this election than he did in 2020 against Biden, while Harris received less than Biden previously did. According to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, Biden earned 57% of the vote from women, while Trump earned 42%. 

Harris ran a woman-centered campaign, largely focusing on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. She continuously reached out to women from both the Republican and Democratic Parties, urging them to vote for her over Trump because of their contrasting stances on reproductive rights. Although NBC News reports that 68% of voters believe that abortion should be legal, reproductive rights were not the most pressing issue in this election. NBC News posed the question, “Which one of these five issues mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?” 34% picked the state of democracy, while 32% selected the economy, abortion followed suit with 14%, immigration with 11%, and foreign policy with 4%. Despite the overturn of Roe v. Wade sparking nationwide retaliation, it was not the forefront factor in deciding this election.

It’s shocking to see such a large percentage of women vote for Trump after he was found liable for sexual abuse by a jury, made a slough of misogynistic, defamatory remarks, and played a major role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade through the appointment of anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court. Women’s rights were not enough for Harris to prevail, however, and Trump will ultimately serve as the United States’ next president.  With Donald Trump’s long history of prejudice, violence, and discrimination against oppressed groups, it’s more than understandable why marginalized communities are fearful of what the future may bring. Social media has already seen a surge in virtual attacks against women since he became the projected winner, and in his last presidency, a surge of hate crimes occurred after he was elected. The hateful dialect and violence that occurs during a Trump administration cannot be overlooked, and the onset of social media’s sexist attacks are only a snippet of what is potentially to come. Members of marginalized communities are not just fearful of the legislation that could be enacted or repealed during a Trump presidency, but they also fear what his presidency normalizes. Hate and violence become more frequent under Trump, threatening the well-being of marginalized groups across the nation. These claims are supported by substantial evidence, more of which is available outside the bounds of this article. Trump’s white supremacist, sexist ideologies and actions continue to be revealed through new proof and firsthand accounts. The nation has elected an official with a long history of discriminatory, and sometimes violent, actions; his position as president alone is enough to serve as proof that the United States is regressing in inclusion and acceptance, and that we are not a safe haven for marginalized communities.

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