In the 2020 election, Trump did better with minority voters than he did in 2016. In 2024, the shift is expected to be even bigger.
For several years now, pundits have suggested that minority voters are drifting away from Democrats but a significant change has failed to materialize.
This year, pundits on both sides are saying the shift is real.
Conservative columnist Matthew Continetti writes at the Washington Free Beacon:
America’s Political Realignment Is Real
If Donald Trump is elected president in November, he will have assembled a coalition unlike any Republican nominee in my lifetime.
For decades, GOP success has depended on support from college-educated white voters in the suburbs and non-college-educated white voters in manufacturing centers and rural areas. Republican candidates tried to maximize turnout among this electoral base, while adding a majority of independent voters to the GOP column. Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and the two Bushes used this strategy to great effect. Donald Trump did, too…
My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute Ruy Teixeira, as well as GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini, have storehouses of data that show Democrats losing non-college-educated minority voters—Hispanic voters in particular—to Republicans. Each new survey confirms their findings. The evidence is overwhelming…
“The migration we’re seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned,” writes Burn-Murdoch, “but natural Republicans realising they’ve been voting for the wrong party.” That has made Trump’s GOP more diverse, more non-college, and more conservative.
On the liberal side, pollster Nate Silver writes at Substack:
Democrats are hemorrhaging support with voters of color
Earlier this week, John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times posted a thread that purported to show substantial losses for Democrats among non-white voters, which he termed a “racial realignment”. If you’re an election data junkie, you’ve probably seen it; it’s been viewed more than 7 million times on Twitter. Here is the graphic that kicked it off:
It’s worth reading the whole thread. There’s a lot of data, and Burn-Murdoch notes that the problems are particularly bad for Democrats among working-class voters of color, and younger ones. Many Black, Hispanic and Asian American voters have long identified as moderate or conservative rather than liberal, and Burn-Murdoch theorizes that Democrats’ tilt toward more liberal policies (though I’d prefer to call them “left” or “progressive” rather than “liberal”) is catching up with them, especially as memory of the Civil Rights Era fades.
This is the graphic that Silver is referring to:
NEW :
American politics is in the midst of a racial realignment.
I think this is simultaneously one of the most important social trends in the US today, and one of the most poorly understood. pic.twitter.com/QeRsuMSKaL
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 11, 2024
The real danger for Democrats is that it won’t even take a massive shift to destroy their coalition. If Trump takes even 15 to 20 percent of minority voters, it’s over.