Republican House Candidates Lose Support Among Key Groups: AP Voter Poll

Republican House candidates held on to far less of Donald Trump’s 2024 coalition on Tuesday. In the AP Voter Poll, about 3 in 10 voters under 30 backed the Republican in their House race. In AP’s 2024 survey, 47% of them voted for Trump. The same pattern runs through the other groups that moved toward Trump in 2024, though by different amounts. AP’s analysts name five groups that swung back. They are young, Hispanic and Black voters, moderates, and households earning under $50,000. Those shifts are part of how Democrats won both the House and the Senate on Tuesday night. The AP Voter Poll is a survey of verified voters run by the research firm SSRS. Its sponsors are AP, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News Media, NBC News and MS Now. It launched in 2025, and AP’s explainer says it “blends the methodologies” of AP VoteCast and traditional exit polls. A traditional exit poll interviews people in person as they leave polling places. The Voter Poll does that in 15 states, adding about 25,000 interviews there, AP says. Most of the sample came earlier: SSRS reached about 75,000 voters in all 50 states by phone and online before Election Day. AP gives a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 0.6 points for the full sample. The 2024 numbers come from AP VoteCast, which AP ran in general elections from 2018 to 2024. NORC at the University of Chicago surveyed more than 120,000 voters for it over eight days. The fieldwork ended as polls closed, according to PBS NewsHour . AP sponsored both surveys and says the new one draws on VoteCast’s methods. Different firms still ran the two studies, so treat small moves between them with care. About 7 in 10 voters under 30 backed the Democrat in their House race, the AP Voter Poll found . In 2024, voters aged 18 to 29 split 51% for Kamala Harris and 47% for Trump. Those figures come from the Fox News Voter Analysis results page. It carries the full tables of the NORC survey that AP released as VoteCast. Turnout limits what that swing could do. Only about 1 in 10 voters in the 2026 electorate was under 30, AP says. About half of them said they were “angry” about the country’s direction. About a third of voters 65 and older said the same. Among Hispanic voters, only about one-third backed the Republican in their House race, AP found. About 6 in 10 backed the Democrat. In 2024, VoteCast had 43% of Latino or Hispanic voters choosing Trump. About 7 in 10 Hispanic voters told the 2026 poll that Trump’s policies have made economic conditions worse. About 9 in 10 Black voters supported the Democratic House candidate, up from roughly 8 in 10 for Harris, says AP’s five-group analysis . The bigger change was among Black men. Only about 1 in 10 nationally backed a Republican for the House, against 25% who voted for Trump in 2024. Moderates moved as well. Roughly two-thirds backed the Democrat in their House race, up from 57% for Harris. AP’s state numbers show larger gains in some Senate races. In Kansas, Democrat Adam Hamilton won about 7 in 10 moderates. In Iowa, Democrat Josh Turek won about two-thirds. Harris had won roughly half in each state. We set AP’s 2026 House figures beside VoteCast’s 2024 presidential figures. The 2024 numbers are exact percentages. AP reports the 2026 numbers only in rounded terms such as “about 3 in 10”. We treat those as 30%, 33% and so on, so every change is approximate. Where AP gave only a Democratic share for 2026, we compare Democratic shares. Three caveats apply to every row. The 2024 column is a vote for president and the 2026 column is a vote for a local House candidate. Different firms ran the surveys. And the income question covered 2023 in the 2024 survey but 2025 in this one. Even with those limits, every group moved the same way. The largest Republican drops came among voters under 30 and Black men. About 3 in 10 voters reported a household income under $50,000. More than half of them voted for the Democrat in their House race, AP found. In 2024 that group split almost evenly, 50% for Trump and 48% for Harris. About 6 in 10 of them called the cost of living central to their vote, against about half of voters earning more. NPR made a separate comparison against a different 2024 baseline, the Edison Research exit poll. Its numbers belong in their own column, not ours. On that basis, NPR reported that Latinos swung 21 points toward Democratic House candidates and that Republicans won only 38% of independents. AP’s poll also asked about Trump directly. About 4 in 10 voters said they cast their House vote to oppose him. Just under 2 in 10 voted to show support, and roughly 4 in 10 said he was not a factor. Losing House seats is the norm for a president’s party: it has happened in 18 of 20 midterms since 1946 . The Democratic majorities these voters elected take control at noon on Jan. 3, 2027 .