We don’t yet know who won the presidency, but we have an idea of how voters changed this cycle.

Democrats were hoping for a landslide and didnt get it. President Donald Trump was hoping to hold on, and he just might. We wont know who actually won the race for the White House for a bit as all the votes get counted, but we do know a little bit about how the country changed during four years under Trump.
For starters, we know that turnout far exceeded 2016. But that didnt signal a blue tidal wave as some Democrats expected. Rather, Trumps supporters kept pace, defending the President from Democrats motivated to defeat him.
But while Democrats had hoped to unlock new portions of the electorate and counted on lopsided support from voters of color, the most movement from 2016 appears to be among White voters.
Its also important to note here that this data is based on national exit polls, which paint a broad picture of the country. The election is actually won or lost state-by-state. But the data below is a good starting point to see how the country as a whole voted. If youre interested in how specific sets of voters did in specific states, see the full exit polls here.
Related: What motivated voters in 2020?
CNN Exit Polls are a combination of in-person interviews with Election Day voters and telephone polls measuring the views of absentee by-mail and early voters and were conducted by Edison Research on behalf of the National Election Pool. In-person interviews on Election Day were conducted at a random sample of 115 polling locations nationwide among 7,774 Election Day voters. The results also include 4,919 interviews with early and absentee voters conducted by phone. Results for the full sample have a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
Note: Exit poll data for 2020 will continue to update and will automatically reflect in the charts below.