President Trump appears determined to prevent his party from achieving a durable majority coalition anchored by a multiracial working-class base.
Trump’s posting of a video portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as apes is one of his more glaring miscalculations, which have given Democrats an opening to halt a steady erosion of support among minority voters crucial to their party’s chances for success.
In 2024, Trump demonstrated that a conservative Republican could make a dent in a seemingly immovable Black Democratic monolith while winning levels of Hispanic support unseen in decades. The moment seemed ripe for a realigned Republican coalition joining a base of working-class white voters with growing numbers of Black, Latino and Asian American defectors from the Democratic Party.
“The realignment is here,” Patrick Ruffini, a Republican political analyst, declared on Nov. 15, 2024, 10 days after the election. “The first G.O.P. popular vote win in 20 years; the red wave hit everywhere; 2024 realigned the electorate as much as 2016; less secure voters moved towards Trump; everything got more correlated.”
Since then, however, Trump — with the brutality of his drive to deport hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants and the counterproductivity of his economic policies — is doing everything in his power to destroy the opportunity he had to secure and strengthen the Republican coalition.
Now the conventional wisdom, including on the right, is that Trump has undercut his own ambitions.
On April 25, 2025, three months into Trump’s second term, Rich Lowry, the editor in chief of National Review, wrote in “Trump Shifts His Own Vibe”:
The president entered office with a bit of a wind at his back. His polling was better than the first time around, protesters weren’t in the streets, and federal investigators weren’t after him. The G.O.P. was more united than in 2016, and business leaders wanted to work with him, while the culture was generally heading in an anti-woke direction.
Since those halcyon days, what happened?
Lowry wrote:
Now, though, his polling is in a marked decline. His job approval rating is sliding. Depending on what poll you believe, it’s down to 44 percent (Fox News), 40 percent (Pew Research) or 42 percent (Reuters).
He added:
It’s hard to think of another example of a president changing the momentum of his administration from positive to negative so quickly and decisively. Trump did it literally in a matter of days.
More recently, on Jan. 28, Dan McLaughlin, who also writes for National Review, wrote in “Hubris Is Undoing Trump’s Second Term”:
Democrats have done precious little on their own to damage Trump. Their approval ratings are still in the tank with voters. Instead, they have had to rely upon Trump to overreach. He’s been all too willing to comply.
Trump’s disdainful treatment of his newfound supporters does not, however, mean the Democratic Party can breathe a sigh of relief.
“The 2024 election likely illuminated longstanding trepidation among Black voters about the Democratic Party,” Candis Watts Smith, a political scientist at Duke, wrote by email in response to my questions.
“As an increasing number of Black people feel a sense of distance from the civil rights era and/or suffer from a lack of understanding of structural racism,” Smith said, “we would expect an increasing number of Black voters to rely on some other decision-making rules — be it self-interest, sexism, anti-immigrant sentiment, machismo, prosperity Gospel or misinformation.”
What does the future look like for Black voting? Udi Sommer, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University and an author of the 2025 book “The Emerging Republican Minorities: Racial and Ethnic Realignment in the Trump Era,” wrote by email:
As we approach November 2026, the Republican Party faces a paradox. While they have successfully demystified the idea of voting Republican for a segment of Black men, they are struggling to maintain that momentum as the reality of Trump’s second-term policies takes hold (e.g., deportations, inflation and federal-state friction).
The 2024 election signaled the end of racial tribalism in voting: the idea that a group must vote as a monolith to protect its interests. It did not, however, signal a permanent migration to the G.O.P. Rather, it created a competitive marketplace where Democrats must now earn Black votes through performance rather than historical loyalty.
In her August 2025 paper, “Beyond the Bloc: Black Voter Subgroups & Declining Democratic Support,” Arica Schuett, a doctoral candidate in political science at Emory University, made the case that a new generation of Black voters with weaker ties to the civil rights movement is changing African American partisanship.
“Black Americans who came of age during or shortly after the civil rights movement now cast fewer votes as a result of generational turnover,” Schuett wrote. “Weakening sociopolitical norms — specifically, a decline in the social pressures that have historically reinforced Democratic voting among Black Republicans and conservatives.”
To buttress her argument, Schuett pointed out, “Today, half of the Black population was born after 1990, ushering in a cohort too young to vote in Obama’s first election or to have experienced 20th-century race-conscious policies.”
How about Latino voters? The evidence from elections held in 2025 suggests that Hispanic support for Republicans will drop from 2024 levels, but how much remains uncertain.
Marcel Roman, a political scientist at Harvard, wrote by email: “Precinct-level analysis of predominantly Latino areas in New Jersey and Virginia during the 2025 elections shows large swings back to the Democratic Party, which may generalize to the 2026 and 2028 elections if Trump maintains his current course.”
Roman cited data showing how Taylor Rehmet, a Democratic State Senate candidate in Texas, won decisively, carrying the district’s Hispanic electorate at 79 percent, compared with Kamala Harris’s 53 percent in 2024.
Along similar line, Roman pointed to “Latino State of Play: 2025 Elections and New Equis Polling,” a report combining analysis with a late-October survey of Hispanic voters in heavily Latino congressional districts conducted by Equis.
The report found:
The administration’s overreach on immigration has been a clear driver of discontent for many Latino voters. Both in July and October polls, immigration enforcement policies such as workplace raids and allowing ICE agents to use masks and civilian clothes during arrests were some of Trump’s least popular policies among Hispanic voters.
In the most recent poll, the majority of Latinos disagreed with deploying troops to cities to assist with immigration enforcement (62 percent disagree) and increasing work visa fees to reduce the number of immigrant workers (60 percent).
Compared with the Catalist estimate that Harris barely won among Latino voters, 51 to 49 percent, Equis found that Democrats in October 2025 held “a double-digit lead over Republicans (54-36) among Latino voters in competitive congressional districts.”
On a cautionary note for Democrats, the report also reported that “despite dissatisfaction with the Trump administration, Democrats have not managed to improve their favorability among Latinos (45 fav./45 unfav.) in the past three months.”
There are clear indications that Trump’s loss of support among Latino voters will have political consequences this November.
In Texas, Politico reported, a Republican congressional redistricting plan designed to add five seats for the party is now in danger because of threats to Republican incumbents in heavily Hispanic districts along the southern border, Samuel Benson and Liz Crampton reported. “Backlash to President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is putting vulnerable Republicans in a tough spot, forcing them to shift their tone to appease frustrated Hispanic voters — or risk losing key battleground seats,” they wrote.
“With the border secure and Latinos responding to ICE raids and government overreach,” Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist, told Politico, “the districts that Republicans thought were their future a year ago are likely to be their undoing.” He added that it’s “hard to find another situation in the past 50 years where a political party has squandered a generational opportunity like this.”
What does the demographic and partisan data show?
The next two sets of elections nationwide, this year and in 2028, will determine the scope of the damage Trump has inflicted on his party’s coalition. Polling shows substantial self-inflicted damage, but the data on the harm to the Republican Party and its candidates is more ambiguous.
Comparing data from the Feb. 24 to 26, 2025, NPR/PBS/Marist survey to its Jan. 27 to 30, 2026, poll reveals Trump’s declining support among minority voters.
The surveys showed Trump’s ratings among Black voters falling from 36 percent favorable and 55 percent unfavorable in February 2025 to 32 favorable and 64 unfavorable last month. Among Latino voters, Trump’s ratings fell from 44 percent favorable and 46 unfavorable to 38 favorable and 54 unfavorable.
Put another way, Trump’s net favorability fell by 13 percentage points among Black voters and by 14 points among Latinos.
But Trump will not be on the ballot in 2026 or 2028, so the crucial question becomes: Will his declines translate to Democratic gains?
This is where the numbers become somewhat murky.
Just a month into his second term, a Feb. 23 to 25 Economist/YouGov survey found Black voters had a 56 percent positive to 26 negative view of the Democratic Party, while Latino voters were almost evenly split, 42 positive and 45 negative.
By the end of 2025, a Dec. 12 to 15 Economist/YouGov survey found only marginal improvement among Black voters in their favorability ratings of the Democratic Party, 50 percent positive and 19 negative, and a decline in Hispanic favorability, 30 positive and 40 negative.
How about the changing views of Black and Hispanic voters toward the Republican Party?
In the 10 months between the two Economist/YouGov surveys, Black voters became decisively more negative, shifting from 23 percent favorable and 59 unfavorable toward the Republican Party to an overwhelming 8 favorable and 66 unfavorable.
Hispanics, however, changed very little, from 31 favorable and 54 unfavorable toward the Republicans to 24 favorable and 51 unfavorable.
Some of these shifts may seem so small as to be irrelevant. But the margin of victory in the national popular vote in 2024 was under 2 percentage points.
While the level of Democratic support among Latinos has fluctuated widely, the accepted common wisdom on Black voting has been that Democratic support of civil rights and favorable economic policies produced consistently high margins on Election Day.
This view formed the core premise of the 2020 book “Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior” by Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird, political scientists at Princeton and the University of Maryland.
White and Laird argued that Black people “as a group have succeeded in solving a basic sociopolitical dilemma: how to maintain group unity in political choices seen by most as helping the group in the face of individual incentives to behave otherwise.”
In the face of ideological pressure on conservative African Americans and economic pressure on the affluent, White and Laird wrote, “the steady reality that Black Americans’ kinship and social networks tend to be populated by other Blacks means they persistently anticipate social costs for failing to choose Democratic politics and social benefits for compliance.”
The two political scientists described “this process by which compliance with norms of Black political behavior gets enforced via social sanctioning within the Black community as racialized social constraint in politics.”
As it turned out, however, in the 2020 election, just months after publication of “Steadfast Democrats,” the power of those social constraints began to weaken for Black and Hispanic voters. The slow but steady fraying of Democratic support among minority voters is evident in major analyses of recent elections conducted by Catalist, Pew Research and the Cooperative Election Study.
From 2012 to 2024, Catalist showed a steady drop in the Black Democratic presidential share, from 96 percent in 2012 to 93 in 2016 to 89 in 2020 to 85 percent in 2024. The falloff is most acute among Black men, who went from 95 percent Democratic in 2012 to 79 percent in 2024.
Catalist found an even larger percentage-point drop among Hispanics, among whom the Democratic share fell from a high of 70 percent in 2016 to 54 percent in 2024.
Pew, in contrast, found that Democratic defections among minority voters were more recent, concentrated in the 2024 election.
In 2016 and 2020, Black Democratic support remained strong, just above 90 percent in both years. In 2024, however, it fell to 83 percent, Pew found.
Hispanic Democratic shares, according to Pew, nosedived through these three elections, from 66 percent in 2016 to 61 in 2020 to 51 in 2024. Over the same period, Republican voting shares among Hispanics grew from 28 to 36 to 48 percent.
The Hispanic electorate, according to the Cooperative Election Study data, has been divided by ideology far more than the Black electorate, and the divisions have widened over the years.
Liberal Latinos have remained loyal to the Democratic Party, with their share of support above 95 percent or more in most elections, including 95.6 in 2024. Moderates, however, cast 78.8 percent of their ballots for Hillary Clinton in 2016, a high point in the series, falling to 64.2 percent for Harris in 2024 — a 14.6-point drop.
Over the years covered by the study, conservative Latinos also cast the largest share of their votes for Democrats, 30.0 percent, in 2016 and their lowest share, 9.4 percent, in 2024 — a drop of 20.6 points. The Cooperative Election Study provides insight into the ideological factors that are contributing to shifting partisanship among Black people and Latinos.
The study showed moderate and conservative Black voters shifting away from voting Democratic after 2012. Moderate Black voting percentages fell from 93.9 percent in 2012 to 87.4 percent in 2024.
The drop over those 12 years was far more precipitous among conservative Black voters, who went from 84.2 percent Democratic in 2012 to 44.1 percent in 2024. Liberal Black voters remained consistent through the period, voting over 95 percent Democratic every time.
What, then, is the bottom line with all this data?
Some tentative conclusions:
First, Trump has inflicted serious damage on his party’s attempt to build an increasingly multiracial coalition. The elections this year and in 2028 will, in all likelihood, show a step backward on this front.
Second, a top issue facing Democrats among minority voters is that the party has not restored pre-2024 levels of trust and credibility.
Third, along the same lines, the Democrats clearly cannot depend on social constraints to limit minority defections to the Republican Party. The strength of those constraints has weakened, and as new generations displace their elders, those constraints will fray even more.
In other words, Democrats’ underlying problems with Black and Latino voters are very similar to their problems with the electorate in general: a continued wariness toward a party that cannot yet be trusted to do what’s in the interest of the nation as a whole.
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