5 key takeaways from election night 2024

Election Day is in the books: NBC News has projected that Donald Trump won the presidential race over Kamala Harris and that Republicans have captured the Senate, while the House is still up for grabs.

The results and exit poll data reveal the undercurrents of what has shaped a hotly contested election full of twists and turns.

Here are five takeaways from election night 2024.

Latinos swing dramatically to Trump

It may be the biggest story of the race: Latino voters swung toward Trump by a staggering 25 percentage points compared with four years ago.

Trump won the support of 45% of Latino voters nationally compared with 53% for Harris, the NBC News Exit Poll found. That's far better than the 33-point loss Trump suffered among Latinos in 2020, when he won 32% to Joe Biden’s 65%. And it may end up being the strongest GOP performance among Latinos in a presidential race since George W. Bush carried 44% in 2004.

Nationally, Latinos accounted for 12% of the electorate, and Trump’s gains are boosting his margins across a host of battleground states, from Pennsylvania to Arizona, which complicated Harris’ path.

Trump's gains were fueled by a massive shift among Latino men, who backed him over Harris by 10 points.

The swings are likely to force a reckoning among Democrats about why they're hemorrhaging support in the fast-growing demographic. Members of the party were bracing for some losses with Hispanic voters, but not at the level they suffered Tuesday.

Political gravity catches up to Senate Democrats

Democrats, facing an enormously difficult Senate map, had bet that their battle-tested incumbents would be able to defy political gravity once again in hostile territory — especially with the aid of millions of dollars in spending from allied groups.

It was not to be.

Republicans flipped Democratic-held seats in West Virginia and Ohio to capture the majority while comfortably holding their ground in red-leaning states like Texas, Florida and Nebraska.

The result will give Republicans a boost when they set the agenda on big items Congress will have to deal with in 2025: the expiring Trump tax cuts and a potential extension of Obamacare subsidies designed to lower premiums for the middle class, as well as another extension of the debt ceiling and a new round of government funding.

Harris gains with white women and college graduates

The election showed signs of a racial realignment: Republicans made gains among nonwhite voters, while Democrats gained a few points among white voters, primarily women.

After Trump carried white women by 11 points in 2020, Harris narrowed the gap to 5 points, according to the NBC News Exit Poll.

Biden beat Trump by 9 points among white women with college degrees four years ago. Harris expanded that advantage to 20 points, arguably her most significant demographic triumph among a historically Republican-leaning cohort.

The education divide also grew overall: Harris gained a few points among college graduates, while Trump picked up a few points among voters without college degrees.

And the generational divide flattened somewhat, as Trump gained among men under 30, winning 47% of them, compared to 49% for Harris.

The abortion issue wasn’t a panacea for Democrats

Without a doubt, the issue of abortion and the backlash to overturning Roe v. Wade helped Harris. The NBC News Exit Poll found that abortion ranked as the third-most-important issue for voters, and Harris won those who cited it by 52 points.

But abortion wasn't the defining issue of the cycle, with the economy and democracy trumping it. Trump handily won those who cited the economy as their top issue, while Harris comfortably won those who said they prioritize the state of democracy.

In the end, economic concerns loomed large: Trump dominated by 40 points among the two-thirds of voters who rated the economy as “not so good” or “poor.”

The battle for the House is headed for overtime

Meanwhile, the results of the race for control of the narrowly divided House may not be known immediately.

The reason is that the fight for the chamber's majority is playing out on a different battlefield from the one for the White House and the Senate. Competitive House districts are in the disproportionately white and well-educated suburbs, where Democrats have largely held their ground.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. Getty Images file

The House majority is likely to be decided by races in blue states — most notably New York, where Democrats are poised to make gains, and California, where Republicans are defending five seats in difficult territory. Still, it's unclear Democrats will pick up enough seats to flip the House, as they've lost a bit of ground elsewhere.

It leaves open a high-stakes question about the balance of power in Washington next year.