Election 2024 updates: With Arizona, Trump sweeps all 7 swing states

As a voting bloc, Black voters are loyally Democratic. They're so loyal, in fact, that 538 previously reported that they're a "captured" bloc — meaning they're ignored by one major political party (Republicans) and taken for granted by the other (Democrats).

But ahead of this year's election, there's polling suggesting the Black men, in particular, are cozying up to Trump. According to a New York Times/Siena College poll of likely Black voters from October, just 70% of Black men said that they planned on voting for Harris. Biden, by comparison, captured 85% of this bloc in 2020. And according to the University of Chicago's October GenForward poll, 26% of Black men between the ages of 18 and 40 said that they would vote for Trump if the election were held today, in contrast to just 12% of Black women in that age group who said the same.

While a rightward shift among men is in line with the gender gaps we're seeing more broadly this year, it's a relatively new phenomenon among Black voters. There's no one reason to pinpoint for this shift. Reporting from Al Jazeera, however, proposed that Black men are particularly keen on Trump's economic policies.

Meanwhile, Harris' campaign has tried to account for this Democratic fears that large swaths of Black voters might just sit out this year's election. In recent weeks, her campaign has made direct overtures to young Black voters, including participating in interviews with The Shade Room and Charlamagne tha God. And during an appearance in Pittsburgh last month, Barack Obama didn't mince words urging Black men to support Harris. "On the one hand, you have somebody who grew up like you, knows you, went to college with you, understands the struggles and pain and joy that comes from those experiences," the former president said of Harris. "And on the other side, you have someone who has consistently shown disregard, not just for the communities, but for you as a person."

It's possible, of course, that Black voters' shift toward the GOP is overstated. After all, Black voters (men included) are still overwhelmingly Democratic. But any marked shift toward Republicans ought to be a cause for concern for Democrats, especially in places like Georgia, a possible tipping-point state this year where around a third of the population is Black. Maybe the results of tonight's race will cause Democrats to stop seeing Black votes as a given — and Black voters can finally be freed of captured status.

In 2016 and 2020, Trump helped solidify a relatively new trend in American politics: Cities, suburbs and more-urban states became increasingly blue, while rural areas and largely rural states became more solidly red. Trump inspired higher turnout and secured larger victories in rural areas in both elections, improving on 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney's performance in those areas. When Biden won in 2020, it was largely because he did even better in urban areas than Hillary Clinton had four years before.

This year, the Harris campaign has tried to lure some of those rural voters away, especially with its vice-presidential choice. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz hails from small-town Nebraska, and has presented a folksy Midwestern, neighbors-helping-neighbors view of rural life — and played up his record supporting farmers in Congress and as governor of Minnesota, a relatively rural state with a major agriculture industry. Walz has talked about being a hunter and gun owner, and a picture of him holding a piglet went viral soon after he was picked for the VP slot. (Not without criticism from progressives over his support of factory farms: Minnesota is a hog farming state.)

Of course, the Harris campaign isn't just deploying Walz. They're reaching out to voters in rural swing states like Wisconsin and North Carolina. In Pennsylvania, they're trying to learn from Sen. John Fetterman's strategy of mobilizing college students to vote to shore up support in rural counties. One study from the University of New Hampshire found that Democrats could tip northern swing states by winning just 3% more of the vote in rural communities.

Walz has at times contrasted his rural, small town background directly with that of Sen. JD Vance, Trump's running mate, who is often mistakenly thought of as being from Appalachia because of his book, Hillbilly Elegy. Vance's hometown, Middletown, Ohio, is in fact a small city of about 50,000 in the Cincinnati metropolitan area, which is not considered part of the region. His connection to Appalachia is more cultural: His grandparents were from Eastern Kentucky, and his book recounts his family's struggles with poverty and drug addiction. Vance represents a different kind of swing-state voter, those from the Rust Belt Midwest, and the Trump campaign has deployed him in similar fashion to Walz in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania — though he spent much of his adult career, after Yale Law School, in Silicon Valley. In early polling, Vance wasn't a popular pick with many voters wherever they lived, and his elevation to VP candidate even prompted a spate of think pieces calling his Appalachian and rural credentials into question — though his relatively solid debate performance may have redeemed him in some eyes.

Rural voters make up only 14% of the electorate. And voters aren't typically swayed by vice-presidential candidates. But in such a tight race, small shifts in any group of voters might be enough to make a difference, and the choices of Walz and Vance show how much these voters still matter to both parties.

In the 2016 presidential race, Trump won 52% of men but just 39% of women, a 13-point gender gap, according to Pew's analysis of validated voters from their American Trends Panel. (Meanwhile, Clinton won just 41% of men but 54% of women, a 13-point gap in the opposite direction.) In 2020, that gap was smaller, largely because Biden did better with men than Clinton, winning 48% of men and 55% of women.

In every presidential election since 1980, women as a bloc have been more likely than men to vote for the Democratic candidate. They've also been more likely to turn out to vote than men, making them decisive. But as 2016 proved, winning women isn't enough to win the presidency.

This fact may explain why so much media attention has been paid to Trump's potential gains among young men this cycle. Young voters typically favor Democrats by wide margins, but several pre-election polls showed a gender gap among 18- to 29-year-olds that was much larger than gender gaps within other age cohorts. These and other polls suggest that Democrats' lock on young men is uncertain; a Data for Progress poll from early October showed a presidential tie (48% each) among men under 30. On the other side of that gap, what is near-certain is young women's support for Harris. In October, a Harvard Youth Poll showed Harris up 30 points among women under 30, and a SurveyMonkey/NBCNews poll showed Harris up 33 points.

Encouragingly for Harris, this group is also motivated to vote. According to a recent Pew survey, among voters ages 18 to 29 who plan to support Harris, 50% are extremely motivated to vote, compared to just 34% of young voters who say they support Trump. And this cycle, the abortion issue may further spur young women. According to a KFF panel, as of September, abortion is the top election issue for women under age 30. The same poll found that Democratic women are now more motivated to vote with Harris at the top of the ticket, compared to their responses in June, while Republican women are less motivated.

Like so many things in elections, whether a big gender gap in 2024 would be a major problem for Harris will come down to turnout: If high turnout among these Democratic-leaning female voters under 30 materializes and men make up a smaller portion of the overall vote share, even a larger-than-average gender gap might not spell doom.

By jumping into the race 107 days before election day, Harris had to define her platform quickly. A major concern for Harris was to separate herself from the Biden campaign and make inroads on economic messaging. One month after launching her bid for the presidency, 45% of likely voters said Harris would do a better job at handling the economy than Trump, while 51% said Trump would do a better job, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll.

As far as where she has an advantage, Democrats and the Harris campaign see abortion as a winning issue, and she's made reproductive rights a core focus of her campaign. Revisit our poll quiz on Harris' policies to see what else Americans think of her platform.