Parents of minor kids voted for Trump by wide margin after backing Biden-Harris in 2020
According to exit polling from NBC News, parents of minor children backed President-elect Donald Trump over failed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris by a nine-point margin – a shift of 15 points from the 2020 election.
In the 2024 race, Trump won voters who have children under the age of 18 living at home with them – 27% of the electorate – with 53% of the vote compared to 44% for Harris.
Harris won all the remaining voters by two points, 50% to 48%, meaning that parents with minor children were a crucial demographic to Trump’s decisive victory.
In 2020, parents with minor children not only supported the Biden-Harris ticket by six points, but they were three points more likely to vote Democratic than voters who did not have minor children living at home.
Four years ago, 52% of parents with children under 18 at home backed Biden-Harris, compared to 46% who backed Trump – also according to NBC exit polling. Among all other voters, 51% backed the Democratic ticket and 58% favored Trump.
Among fathers living with their minor children in 2024, Trump won in a landslide by 23 points, winning 60% to Harris’ 37%.
When polled following the 2020 race, fathers with minor children at home backed Trump by only one point – 49% to 48% for Biden-Harris – meaning the group shifted a massive 22 points toward the president-elect in just four years.
Mothers with minor children also shifted toward Trump from 2020, although less dramatically than fathers did.
In 2024, the moms favored Harris by a narrow five-point margin, 51% to 46%. They supported Biden-Harris by 13 points, 56% to 43%, four years earlier – meaning they shifted eight points toward Trump between the two election cycles.
School choice advocate Corey DeAngelis celebrated the shift in the parent vote on X (formerly Twitter) Friday.
“Teachers unions overplayed their hand with school closures and indoctrination in schools,” DeAngelis wrote. “The GOP is now the Parents Party.”
In the years between the 2020 and the 2024 elections, parental rights emerged as a prominent issue driving many parents, some of whom had previously supported Democratic candidates, to the right.
This rightward movement of millions of American parents was a reaction to prolonged post-COVID school closures and the embrace of the LGBTQ movement in school curricula and libraries.
Moms for Liberty, one of the groups at the forefront of the parents’ rights movement, was founded on the first day of 2021.
In October 2021, Biden-Harris Attorney General Marrick Garland issued a deeply controversial memorandum directing the FBI to deploy agents in order to address what he called “violent threats against school officials and teachers.” Critics widely asserted the directrive targeted parents who speak out against unpopular education officials and their policies at school board meetings.