Dog vote goes to Trump, cat ladies not enough for Harris

Kamala’s cat women couldn’t save her.

Vice President Kamala Harris, derided as the candidate of choice for “childless cat ladies,” won over female cat owners vote by 7 percentage points in the presidential election, but it was nowhere near the lopsided margins she needed to overcome President-elect Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump won among male cat owners by a 9-point margin and among male and female dog owners.

Those numbers are just some demographic details from the Fox News/Associated Press Election Day survey covering tens of thousands of voters. The survey, along with traditional exit polling by a consortium led by CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC, sliced and diced the electorate in myriad ways to tease out who voted and what they thought about the issues.

The overall picture showed voters were deeply dissatisfied with the country, which benefited Mr. Trump. Voters also seemed to trust him more than Ms. Harris to handle their top priorities, such as immigration, crime and the economy.

Ms. Harris was more trusted on abortion, climate change and health care.

When presented with specific policy questions, voters seemed inclined toward the ones more associated with Ms. Harris than Mr. Trump.

Some 55% said they supported continuing U.S. aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia, and 53% said they opposed a ban on abortions after 15 weeks into a pregnancy. More than 60% said they support legalizing marijuana use nationwide, and 52% said they oppose laws in Republican-leaning states restricting gender treatment drugs for juveniles who identify as transgender.

Half the voters in the CNN poll said they want the government “more involved” in imposing vaccine mandates on children, while just 26% wanted less involvement.

Voters were about evenly divided on Mr. Trump’s idea of raising tariffs on foreign imports and equally split on President Biden’s student loan cancellation programs.

They tacked heavily in favor of Mr. Trump’s positions on the border. A startling 67% said they wanted the U.S. to cut the number of people using the asylum system to enter the country, according to the Fox survey.

The CNN exit poll asked whether illegal immigrants should be deported or given a path to “legal status,” and 56% backed the amnesty option.

Democrats’ attempts to argue that Mr. Trump was a unique threat to democracy fell flat. Although 73% of voters in CNN’s exit polling said democracy in the U.S. was “threatened,” Mr. Trump won them 51% to 48%.

Pollsters delved deeply into voters’ identities.

Fox said 10% of voters were Hispanic, and half of those were of Mexican origin. Just 2% were Middle Eastern or North African, and they broke for Ms. Harris 49% to 45%.

Fox said 8% of voters identified as LBGTQ, and Ms. Harris won that demographic 86% to 13%. CNN’s polling put the figure at 9% of the electorate, with Ms. Harris winning them 78% to 20%.

The Fox survey found that 28% of Election Day voters were regular users of TikTok, the social media platform popular among younger adults. Ms. Harris won a majority of their vote with 53%, but Mr. Trump was close at 46%.

The pet ownership questions were new to Fox’s survey and were perhaps prompted by Vice President-elect J.D. Vance’s comment years ago that Ms. Harris was part of a cabal of “childless cat ladies.” Pro-Harris signs with pictures of cats quickly sprung up in deep-blue neighborhoods, and singer Taylor Swift, in endorsing Ms. Harris, associated herself with the cat ladies.

The Guardian newspaper headlined a story before Election Day pondering whether Mr. Vance’s remark could “hold the key to the U.S. election.”

Exit polling shows it was not a key.

Female cat owners backed the vice president 53% to 46%, but Mr. Trump won male cat owners 54% to 45%. The survey did not break those down into parents and child-free.

Dog owners may have been more decisive, with half of the electorate saying they had a canine companion.

The men among them gave Mr. Trump a 16-point advantage, and he won over female dog owners by 4 points. Voters who did not have dogs went for Ms. Harris 53% to 45%.

The data punctured some conventional wisdom about the election.

Muslim voters, for example, did not abandon Democrats in droves despite Mr. Biden’s handling of Israel’s war with Hamas.

Fox’s survey showed that Muslims represented about 1% of the electorate and voted for Ms. Harris by a 63% to 32% margin. That was not substantially different from Mr. Biden’s 64% to 35% margin in 2020, though the share of Muslims who voted for an independent or third-party candidate did rise from 1% in 2020 to 4% this year.

In 2020, in an election held under the strict limits of the COVID-19 pandemic and months into a searing national conversation about race after the death of George Floyd and subsequent riots, 72% of voters said racism in policing was a serious issue.

Four years later, that slipped to 67%.

Meanwhile, confidence in elections ticked up.

In 2020, 84% of voters were confident that eligible voters could cast ballots. This year, that was 90%.

Amid worries about noncitizen voting, Fox and AP added a question this year about confidence that ineligible voters could be kept out of the polling place. Voters were less sure, with 68% saying they felt confident in election integrity.