There are reasons to be cautious in interpreting the results of the 2024 election. The absolute numbers are not huge. Roughly six in 10 Hispanics voted for Joe Biden; five in 10 for Kamala Harris. Nine of 10 Black voters chose Biden; eight in 10 for Harris. More than four-fifths of Trump’s votes came from white people.
Close examination of the voting, however, reveals disturbing trends for the Democratic Party.
A large 2024 AP VoteCast survey of 110,000 voters shows that the biggest drops in support for Harris — 10 percentage points or more — were all among key minority Democratic constituencies.
The AP poll found that 66 percent of 18-to-44 year old nonwhite voters backed Harris in 2024, 11 points fewer than Biden’s 77 percent in 2020; nonwhite men without college degrees were 11 points less supportive of Harris than they had been of Biden; Black men with and without college degrees were even less supportive of Harris, backing her by 12 points less than Biden. In addition, young voters of all races aged 18 to 29, were 10 points less supportive of Harris than Biden.
From a broader perspective, these trends point toward a political future in which the bottom half of the income distribution, including voters of all races and ethnicities, will be increasingly dominated by Republicans and the top half by Democrats — a reversal of the New Deal coalition.
“The class realignment continues,” Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, wrote in an email:
Republican advantages among high-income voters have been replaced by Democratic advantages among high-education voters. Alongside these trends, racial group depolarization continues, with nonwhite voters becoming more divided between the parties. Polls and geographic returns show those patterns continuing or accelerating in 2024. Because this realignment follows global patterns and prior trends and has continued in down-ballot races, it is more likely to be stable.
The shifts have substantially altered the composition of the two parties. According to VoteCast estimates, Grossmann wrote,
College-educated whites now outnumber both nonwhites and non-college whites among Democratic voters for the first time. This is a pattern long in the making, but could be self-reinforcing: Democratic primary voters and activists are now even more disproportionately educated white voters with distinct values and priorities. And the external image of the party also reflects its changing coalition.
Have the cultural values of white progressives become a liability for the Democratic Party?
Grossmann:
White educated Democrats hold far more liberal views on the direction of American culture and institutions than other Americans. This has signaled to those who disagree with culturally liberal trends to side with Republicans. But the longstanding direction of public opinion on social and cultural issues is still leftward and could continue moving in that direction under Trump.
Representative Ritchie Torres of New York, a Democrat, in a Nov. 6 post on X, gave his opinion of the far left wing of the contemporary Democratic Party:
Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’ or ‘From the River to the Sea” or LatinX. There is more to lose than there is to gain politically from pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world. The working class is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling.
Developing trends favorable to the Republicans and threatening to Democrats have evolved over the last three presidential elections in a way that signals strength and durability. It will be difficult for Democrats to reverse these dynamics.
On Nov. 5, Democrats gave ground everywhere, from deep blue to dark red regions of the country, from Massachusetts to Oklahoma.
“The architecture of Trump’s victory is clear,” Charlie Mahtesian writes in the Nov. 8 edition of Politico Magazine, “The Stunning Geography of Trump’s Victory”:
He managed to squeeze even more votes out of rural America — and that includes gains with rural Black voters. He continued to make significant advances with Latino voters, from the Southwest to the Acela Corridor. In big, diverse urban places — like Houston’s Harris County or Chicago’s Cook County — he pared down traditionally large Democratic margins. Many of the populous suburbs that so thoroughly rejected him in 2020 lost their anti-Trump edge. Even the biggest college counties appeared to lose the sense of urgency and outrage that marked their 2020 results.
The most worrisome development for Democrats is the gradual deterioration of the party’s “upstairs-downstairs” coalition, which brings together relatively comfortable, well-educated, well-to-do and largely white voters with relatively less well-off, if not struggling, Black and Hispanic voters.
In the Congressional district in Queens and the Bronx represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, Trump’s 55-percentage point loss in 2020 was cut to 32 points in 2024, going from 77-22 to 65-33, one of the biggest shifts in New York.
Ocasio-Cortez was so taken aback by Trump’s gains in her district that she went on Instagram to ask constituents “who supported Trump & me OR voted Trump/Dem, tell us why,” adding “Sometimes you gotta dig in and see it to understand and adapt! Even if it makes you want to barf.”
As Democrats lose support among working- and middle-class minority voters, it sharpens the image of the party as dominated by college-educated, largely white, progressives. When Republicans have been successful in portraying the Democratic Party as dominated by voters seeking to impose left-wing racial and cultural politics on a moderate electorate, the results have been devastating: Just ask George McGovern, Michael Dukakis and Hillary Clinton.
“When we look at education and income simultaneously,” Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University, writes in a post-election analysis on his Substack, “it becomes even clearer that Democrats have become the party of elites. The class composition of the Democratic and Republican parties has basically flipped over the last 30 years.”
Al-Gharbi cited a host of data:
With respect to the electorate, wealthy voters shifted even further toward Harris than they did in 2020 — a significant feat given how heavily these voters were consolidated into the Democratic Party over the course of the last decade.
Harris was the clear choice for voters with six-figure salaries or higher, while Trump won with people earning less than $50,000 per year.
White progressives who dominate agenda-setting in the Democratic Party have in recent years moved far to the left, well beyond Black, Hispanic and Asian American Democrats, prompting a slow but steady rise in minority defections to Trump and the Republican Party.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, argued in an email that the left wing of the Democratic Party played a crucial role in the defeat of Kamala Harris:
The Democratic coalition appears extremely fragile, driven as it has been by highly educated white liberals whose values are far out of step with the country. The vast majority of Americans do not believe biological males should be playing in women’s sports, they do not believe taxpayers should be funding sex-change operations for prisoners and they sure don’t think you need to suggest that there is a pronoun to be used for both men and women.
Ayres wrote that he is uncertain whether
class outweighs racial and ethnic identity, but class (or more precisely, education) is at least as important now. Whether that has created a sustainable multiethnic coalition for Republicans depends on who follows Trump as the leader of the party. There is no one on the horizon who appears to have his magnetic appeal to those on the lower end of the income and educational ladder.
John Burn-Murdoch, a British expert on demography and statistics who writes for The Financial Times, contends in a prescient Oct. 11 essay, “The Left Is Losing Its Grip On Ethnic Minority Voters,” that
The sharp leftward turn among educated white liberals has caused white Democrats to overshoot the minority position on a growing number of issues, including immigration, racism, patriotism and meritocracy.
White progressive Americans now hold views on these culture questions that are completely out of line with the average Black or Hispanic voter, according to analysis from opinion research firm Echelon Insights.
Burn-Murdoch cites data showing that white progressives are well to the left not only of white conservatives but also of Hispanic and Black voters, when asked if they agree or disagree with such statements as “Most people can make it if they work hard,” “Racism is built into our society,” “America is the greatest country in the world” and “Government should increase border security and enforcement.”
In Burn-Murdoch’s view,
Where, historically, the left was the natural home for nonwhite Americans, that is now less obviously the case. In terms of self-reported political ideology, Americans of color are now roughly equidistant between white progressives and conservatives.
Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and author of the book “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP,” provided data showing how white college educated liberals stand apart not only from Republicans but also from other key Democratic constituencies.
In a March 2023 post on his Substack, “The Shape of Polarization in America,” Ruffini examines the major American political constituencies, measuring the ideological polarization of various voter groups on the basis of their answers to 50 policy questions in the 2020 Cooperative Election Study. “Giving the conservative or liberal answer more than 75 percent of the time places you” at the ideological extreme, Ruffini writes “If you’re above this threshold, you’re not persuadable in the slightest.”
Ruffini found:
In each group but for one, solid majorities are in the nonideological middle: 83 percent of Black voters, 77 percent of Hispanic voters, 69 percent of Asian American voters, 58 percent of white non-college voters, and 56 percent of Native and other voters. And here again, one of these groups is not like the other: just 38 percent of white college graduates are in the middle, with large groups of extremely polarized liberals and conservatives.
White college graduates also stand out in their representation of polarized liberals, with a concentration of them that’s nearly double that of any other group. And in the ranks of polarized liberals, there’s a notable absence of voters of color. Within a group of voters who agree with liberal positions more than 90 percent of the time, white voters with college degrees outnumber Black voters by 20-to-1, 60 to 3 percent.
How could growing numbers of Black and Hispanic voters support a Republican Party dominated by Donald Trump, a man who demonized minorities both before and after becoming a politician?
While some analyses have shown that the shift to the Republican Party among Black and Hispanic voters is primarily driven by young men, John Sides and Michael Tesler, political scientists at Vanderbilt and the University of California-Irvine, found that these minority-group defectors in fact hold racial and ethnic views relatively similar to those of white working-class Republicans.
In their April paper “America is Less Polarized by Race — But More Polarized About Race: The Pro-G. O. P. Shift Among People of Color is Making Racial Attitudes More Important to Politics, not Less,” Sides and Tesler write:
People of color are more likely than white respondents to believe that white people have advantages and to disagree that racial problems are rare and isolated. But not all people of color feel this way.
For example, in 2020 about 11 percent of Black people, 33 percent of Latinos, and 24 percent of Asian Americans either disagreed that white people have an advantage or expressed no opinion. Similarly, between 19-38 percent of these groups agreed that racial problems are isolated or expressed no opinion.
These are the voters of color who were more likely to shift to Trump between 2016 and 2020.
Sides and Tesler provide data in their paper showing that the biggest shifts to the Republican Party among Hispanic, Black and Asian American voters were consistently among those who agreed with the statement “racial problems in the United States are rare situations.”
In the case of Latino voters, Sides and Tesler cite trends in two Pew surveys, one in 2019 and the other in 2022, that show that among Hispanic voters who agreed with the statement “when it comes to giving Black people equal rights to whites, the United States has not gone far enough,” Democratic partisanship remained high and secure. In contrast, Democratic partisanship among Hispanics who said the drive for equal rights for African Americans “had gone too far” dropped precipitously.
Sides and Tesler conclude:
If voters of color are shifting durably toward the Republican Party, this most certainly does not make race less important, if race is defined as ‘what people think’ not just ‘what group they belong to.’ In fact, racial attitudes are becoming more strongly correlated with political attitudes, among white voters and voters of color alike.
How resilient is the emerging Trump coalition?
Udi Sommer is a political scientist at Tel Aviv University and co-author of “Solidarity in Question: Activation of Dormant Political Dispositions and Latino Support for Trump in 2020” and “Trump’s African Americans? Racial Resentment and Black Support for Trump in the 2020 Elections,” both published this year.
In an email, Sommer wrote:
2024 marked historically high levels of minority support for any Republican candidate in decades. Our research traces this phenomenon back to 2020, and even to 2016, when an ethnic and racial realignment in the Trump era started.
In 2016, Sommer pointed out, “neither Biden nor Harris was on the ticket, inflation was low, and still we observed those trends among minority voters.”
Minority voters, “did not vote for Trump despite his anti-minority rhetoric and policy,” in Sommer’s view:
Instead, they cast a Trump vote because of his positions on minorities; his perception of minority political identity matched their own. Just like the candidate himself, Latinos voting for Trump were high on anti-immigration sentiment.
Trump, Sommers wrote,
ran racially and ethnically explosive campaigns. Focusing on immigration, Trump forced Latinos to confront this aspect of their identity. Likewise, when he called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate,” he forced Blacks to think about their positions on race relations in America. For many in these groups, the automatic association made by political pundits and Democrats between their identities and issues like immigration and race was not well-received. Not all Latinos and Blacks feel this way about their groups.
While there is little prospect of a wholesale shift of minority voters to the Republican Party, Sommers pointed out that:
A significant number of Black individuals hold views closer to Clarence Thomas than to Ketanji Brown Jackson when it comes to their perspectives on what it means to be African American. A notable number of Latinos express anti-immigration sentiments. These voters not only struggle to identify with how a progressive Democratic elite defines them, but also feel patronized.
Republican success or failure in building a more durable coalition will depend in large part on how the public reacts to the policies adopted during Trump’s second term. Aaron Blake of The Washington Post, in a Nov. 11 article “Americans Elected Trump. They Might Not Like What Comes Next,” examines poll data on Trump’s announced plans.
Take Trump’s pledge to deport 11 million or more illegal immigrants. Surveys reveal considerable ambivalence among voters, Blake reports:
Polls showed Americans were about evenly split — and sometimes leaning in favor — of deporting most or all undocumented immigrants, of using the military to do it, and even of putting people in detention camps while they awaited their deportation hearings. An October ABC News-Ipsos poll showed Americans supported deporting all undocumented immigrants 56 percent to 43 percent.
But few proposals better demonstrate how Americans often hold contradictory feelings about policies. For example, polls have shown that many people who say they favor mass deportation also say they favor allowing undocumented immigrants to have a path to legal status — with the latter polling much better. A recent CNN poll asked people to choose between the two, and registered voters chose a path to legal status over deporting all undocumented immigrants by a 2-to-1 margin.
Blake points to the potential of Trump’s proposal to impose 10-to-20 percent across-the-board tariffs and a specific 60-to-100 percent tariff on Chinese imports:
A September Reuters-Ipsos poll showed that Americans said they were more likely to back a candidate who supported the lower numbers in those ranges (10 percent on all imports and 60 percent on Chinese ones) than one who didn’t, 53-42. But a February poll from YouGov showed just 61 percent of people who said they wanted increased tariffs stood by that support when tariffs were attached to higher prices for American consumers. Tariffs can protect American industry, but they generally do lead to inflation — possibly high inflation — depending on the scale of what Trump does.
Blake adds that “Americans tend to balk more when you dig into the details,” but if there is one thing Trump dislikes doing it’s digging into the details, a weakness that could prove a major liability given the extremity of his agenda and the uncertainty of the consequences of his proposals.
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