Kamala Harris’ relatively weak support from Black men was a prominent storyline leading up to the 2024 presidential election. A number of polls suggested Donald Trump could win a larger share of these voters than any Republican presidential candidate in recent memory. YouGov’s Cooperative Election Surveys (CES) even showed Trump’s share of the Black male vote surging from 12% in 2020 to 32% in 2024.
The national exit polls did not show much change among Black men from 2020 to 2024, as it turned out. But Trump made significant inroads with Black men in the larger AP VoteCast survey. According to this survey, Trump’s support among Black men increased from 12% in 2020 to 25% in 2024. Just 10% of Black women, by contrast, voted for Trump in the 2024 AP VoteCast survey.
Several analysts suggest that sexism played an important part in this sizable gender gap among Black voters. Former President Barack Obama also endorsed that idea. Speaking about Harris’ tepid support from Black men before the election, Obama said, “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”
The story is more complex, however. Although sexist attitudes helped predict which Black men shifted from supporting Joe Biden in 2020 to supporting Trump in 2024, these shifts don’t simply stem from an aversion to Harris. Instead, Black men with sexist attitudes switched to Trump before Harris entered the presidential race.
How we did our research
These conclusions come from our analyses of YouGov’s SAY24 Project. This survey has a few advantages. For one, it surveyed nearly 100,000 likely voters in both July and September, providing large samples of Black men.
YouGov also surveyed most of these same respondents in 2020 and asked them how they voted in that election. We can therefore calculate shifts in support for Trump without relying on people’s memories of how they voted four years ago. According to this YouGov survey data, Trump’s margin among Black men increased by 5.5 percentage points in 2024 compared to 2020.
Finally, the SAY24 included questions designed to measure “hostile sexism.” Those items tap into antagonistic attitudes toward women by asking how strongly respondents agreed or disagreed with statements such as “women seek to gain power by getting control over men” and “women are too easily offended.”
Hostile sexism scores among men are similar among major racial and ethnic groups, the survey shows. On a 0-100 scale, where 100 is the most sexist, the mean scores for Asian American, Black, white, and Hispanic men all fall between 49 (Asian men) and 55 (white men) in the SAY24.
Sexism and Black voter shifts to Trump
The graph below shows how the 2020 to 2024 vote shifts to Trump among Black men and women were related to hostile sexism. The left side shows shifts between 2020 and July 2024, when Biden was still in the race. The right side shows the shifts between 2020 and September 2024, when Harris had replaced Biden as the nominee.
When Biden was in the race, hostile sexism was related to shifts towards Trump among Black men – but not Black women – comparing 2020 to July 2024. After Harris entered the race, she did better among Black voters who scored lower on hostile sexism. But hostile sexism remained related to vote shifts among Black men, though less so among Black women.
Thus, Trump’s increase in support from 2020 to 2024 among Black men who score high on the sexism scale is not simply because he ran against a woman candidate.
Notably, the impact of sexism among Black men voters persists even after accounting for factors such as immigration attitudes, partisanship, ideological conservatism, education, age, and income.
Why did sexism shift Black men to Trump?
The results present an interesting puzzle: Why was sexism a stronger predictor of Black men’s support for Trump against Biden in July 2024 than it was back in 2020? After all, as of 2020, Trump already had a long history of sexist statements and behavior.
We’ll need more data to answer this question. But the differing political and racial contexts in 2020 and 2024 are a logical starting place.
In 2020, Trump’s unpopular presidency, the pandemic’s toll on communities of color, and the Black Lives Matter protests may have kept more Black men on Biden’s side, even those who could have been tempted by Trump’s hyper-masculine gender politics. In particular, the BLM protests and Trump’s opposition to them may have exerted racialized social pressure, which political scientists Ismail White and Chryl N. Laird show has long kept Black conservatives from voting for Republicans.
But inflation took its toll on Biden’s popularity. And as the media’s focus on racial justice protests waned, this pressure eased. These developments also coincided with the rise of the so-called Black Mansophere – a movement that echoed the long-standing framing that supporting “alpha-male” Trump was a way to combat feminism. The Black manosphere amplified views celebrating Trump and denigrating Black women during the 2024 campaign. One example was Le’Veon Bell posting “Trump or the Tramp.” This movement may also have weakened some of the social pressures that have kept Black men from supporting Republican candidates.
These early explanations are, of course, speculative. But we have more confidence that the stronger link between sexism and Black men’s support for Trump in 2024 isn’t simply about antipathy toward Harris. After all, Black men with sexist attitudes moved to Trump long before Harris entered the race.
Crystal Robertson is a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Her research uses political psychology to understand racial politics, intersectionality, and social movements.
Michael Tesler is a professor of political science at UC Irvine, where he teaches courses on public opinion, racial politics, elections, political psychology, American government, and quantitative research methods.
