With the election in the rear-view mirror, the final wave of the 2024 Black Voter Project (BVP) Longitudinal Survey offers a look at where Black public opinion and political behavior stand post-election, how much things have changed since campaign season started, and what to expect going forward. New survey results offer insight not only into Black public opinion over the course of the campaign, but also how Black people feel about politics and society looking toward the future:

• Black support for Harris matched 2020 numbers, with 86% of Black voters choosing Harris compared to 12% voting for Trump.
• Support for Harris among Black men continued to build throughout the election, peaking at 82% of Black male voters on election day – up from 58% when measured in April. (Support among Black women grew as well, although not as dramatic, peaking at 91% before the election.)
• The majority of Black voters (57%) opted to vote in person, with 31% voting in person on Election Day.
• Almost two-thirds (72%) of Black voters chose to vote for all Democrats on the ballot; few (13%) reported splitting their ballot, i.e., voting for some Republicans.
• While more respondents perceived the Democratic Party as “extremely welcoming” to Black people over the course of the campaign, peaking at 42% in October, attitudes post-election show this trend reversing, dropping to 35% in December.
• The majority of Black people disapprove of mass deportation (56%), especially when framed as potentially deporting legal immigrants in the process (64%).
• When asked about the next Democratic candidate for president, the most important feature to Black people is race, where 28% prioritize race over everything else, such as age, political experience, and even education.
• Almost twice as many Black people feel exhausted and want to be left alone after the election compared to those who report feeling motivated and more committed to politics (43% compared to 23%, respectively).

Since Harris took over the ticket in July, Black support continued to increase for the Democratic candidate, essentially matching 2020 numbers in the post-election survey. Of those cast a voter, 86 percent say they voted for Harris compared to 12 percent for Trump (+74), insignificantly different from Biden’s 2020 results (87-12; +75).  

Much has been said about Black men moving away from the Democratic Party; however, results suggest that, when the election arrived, support among Black men coalesced around Harris. Support for Harris among Black men increased by 24% over time, with 82% of Black men voting for Harris come election day.  Notably, Black support for Trump dropped to 17% among Black men, almost identical to 2020 exit polls, ending the narrative of Black men moving to Trump. (Support among Black women also grew throughout the campaign but in a less dramatic way, peaking at 92% in wave 4 right before the election.)

In addition, most Black voters voted in person on election day – a choice many didn’t have in 2020 during the COVID-19 outbreak. Overall, 57% of Black voters reported voting in person, with 31% voting in person on election day and another 26% voting in person early.

Beyond the presidential race, it’s clear that most in the Black community supported Democrats up and down the ballot. For example, 72% of Black voters reported straight-ticket voting for Democrats on down-ballot races; on the other hand, only 13% of Black voters say they voted for some Democrats and some Republicans. (Even though several Democratic wins in statewide races where Trump won at the top of the ticket suggests split-ticket voting may have increased this year, this simply wasn’t the case for Black voters.)[1]

In addition to the possibility of split-ticket voting in the Black community, much of the conversation following the election was about immigration and surprising support for Trump’s plan to start mass deportations. Like split-ticket voting, the data fails to support the narrative that Black voters favored this measure. For instance, 56% of Black people disapprove of Trump’s mass deportation policy (only 26% approve), and that number drops even lower when the policy includes the possibility that legal migrants are faced with deportation as well (here, approval drops to only 18%).

Wave 4 permits us to examine Black attitudes after the election. Better still, but the longitudinal design also allows us to explore Black attitudes from the beginning of the campaign to the post-election period. Here, the results suggest that although Black attitudes toward the Democratic Party were growing more and more positive throughout the campaign, that trend reverses post-election.

To elaborate, only 28% of Black respondents said the Democratic Party was “extremely welcoming” when Biden was the candidate back in April. Then, over the course of the campaign, the percentage of respondents who perceived the party as extremely welcoming steadily increased, jumping 14 percentage points from April (Wave 1) to October (Wave 3). However, in the months following the election, Black attitudes toward the Democratic Party reversed course as only 35% reported the party as extremely welcoming to Black people in December (Wave 4). This finding illustrates the effect of Trump’s victory on Black public opinion, suggesting that Democrats have work to do to re-engage Black voters before the next election cycle.

The survey also asked respondents how they feel about political engagement in the aftermath of the election. When asked whether a second Trump presidency will motivate them to become “more committed to politics,” or prove exhausting and leaving them “wanting to be left alone,” the choice was clear. A plurality of voters (43%) said that a second Trump presidency will prove exhausting; they just want to be left alone. On the other hand, only 23% of respondents felt motivated by a second Trump presidency, more committed to politics. What’s more, these differences were only exacerbated by gender: 51% of Black women said they were exhausted compared to 34% of men; 31% of Black men feel motivated compared to only 16% of Black women. Relative to Black men, this finding suggests that the election of Trump to a second term took hit Black women hard. Moving forward, these findings suggest that Democrats must commit resources to the mobilization of Black men as well as Black women.  

Furthermore, the survey asked subjects to consider future Democratic candidates, probing the attributes they find most important in prospective candidates. When asked to select the number one attribute they want to see in the future Democrats running for office(s), 28% identified race as the most important candidate attribute going forward. In order, the following are the next most important attributes: political experience (19%), education (15%), and youth (12%). Undoubtedly, Black voters have a good sense of the type of candidate they want representing the Democratic party in the future.[2] Democrats would be wise to keep these results in mind as motivating Black voters to engage politics in the near future may prove a difficult task.

Lastly, the survey allowed for a look at how the Harris campaign reached out to Black voters. When asked if they were contacted by the Harris campaign or groups that supported her, 59 percent of respondents reported contact – this is compared to 69 percent of Black respondents who reported contact from the Biden campaign in Cooperative Election Study (CES) data from 2020. Moreover, only 31 percent of low propensity voters report contact. In other words, of those contacted, a whopping 72 percent were high-propensity voters compared to a paltry 28 percent of the low-propensity group.

The 2024 National Black Voter Project (BVP) survey is a longitudinal study of Black public opinion. The survey (in collaboration with Black Insights Research) is part of a national (nonpartisan) series of public opinion polls that focuses on collecting rigorous and representative data on Black Americans. The fourth wave was fielded from December 16 – 30, 2024, surveying respondents about politics and society. A total of 675 African-American respondents were interviewed, and the survey had an average interview length of 18 minutes.

The surveys, directed by Dr. Christopher Towler (P.I.) and Dr. Christopher Parker (Co-P.I.), are the sole multi-wave study of the Black community leading up to, and after, the 2024 Presidential election. Unlike almost all data on Black communities, the BVP/BIR study is based on a design in which participants are recontacted over a period of time, in this case: April-December. Given the dynamics of the 2024 election cycle—especially the elevation of Kamala Harris from VP to the top of the ticket, this data is especially unique since it captures the response of the Black community to the candidacy of the first Black female to the highest office in the land.

The fourth wave includes 630 respondents who were recontacted after participating in previous waves of the survey. The surveys, administered by YouGov, are stratified by age, education, gender, and region, collecting a nationally representative sample of respondents from all 50 states. The following toplines offer data for wave four of the survey. Data for previous waves are available separately.

[1] Black Voter Project (BVP) results for the 2018 midterm election reported 79% of Black people voting straight-ticket for the Democratic Party. For more, see the results from the 2019 National Black Voter Project (BVP) Study: https://blackvoterproject.com/national-bvp-study.

[2] Other attribute options included other racial identities, male or female candidate, political outsider, military experience/veteran, older in age, endorsed by Joe Biden, working class background, and an ally of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Of all of the other attribute options listed, no more than 7% of respondents identified them as most important.