Indian voters shifted to the DA in large numbers, helping the party unseat the Inkatha Freedom Party as the opposition in KwaZulu-Natal.

The two areas with the largest concentration of Indian voters in South Africa are Chatsworth and Phoenix in Durban, where the DA increased its share of the vote to about 73%. In 2009, it struggled to capture 50% of the Indian vote.

The DA benefited from the implosion of the Minority Front and a drop in ANC support among Indians after Chatsworth ANC leader Visvin Reddy's comment that Indians who complained about ANC rule should move back to India.

White voters maintained their 2009 voting patterns, favouring the DA by a margin of more than 85%. The expected switch in white support from the Freedom Front Plus to the DA following FF+ leader Pieter Mulder's inclusion in the national government was stalled by the DA's policy decisions on land and employment equity, and by four serving DA MPs endorsing the FF+ shortly before the election.

The FF+ has maintained its four seats in parliament and its single representative each in the legislatures of the Free State and Gauteng. It is now also represented in the North West legislature.

There were significant shifts in the vote in predominantly coloured areas.

Urban coloured voters in the Western Cape solidified their support for the DA to such an extent that the voting patterns in predominantly coloured and white wards now mirror one another.

Gauteng's urban coloured vote shifted towards the DA to resemble the Eastern and Western Cape urban coloured vote .

The ANC held on to its rural coloured support base in the Western, Northern and Eastern Cape, edging out the DA in Namaqualand and defending its turf in the Karoo regions of the Eastern Cape.

Significantly, it won in the Northern Cape municipality of Hantam, based in Calvinia and controlled by the DA.