In the 2020 election, Trump performed better with minority voters than he did in 2016. In 2024, the shift is expected to be even bigger.
For several years now, experts have suggested that minority voters have been moving away from Democrats, but a significant shift has failed to materialize.
This year, experts on both sides say the change is real.
Conservative columnist Matthew Continetti writes to 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 candidate in my lifetime.
For decades, the GOP’s success has depended on the support of college-educated white voters in the suburbs and non-college-educated white voters in manufacturing hubs and rural areas. Republican candidates sought to maximize turnout among this voter 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. Even Donald Trump did it…
My American Enterprise Institute colleague Ruy Teixeira, as well as GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini, have archives of data showing that Democrats are 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 are witnessing today is not so much the natural disillusionment of Democrats,” writes Burn-Murdoch, “but the natural awareness of Republicans that they voted for the wrong party.” This has made Trump’s GOP more diverse, more non-university, and more conservative.
On the liberal side, pollster Nate Silver writes on Substack:
Democrats are losing support among voters of color
Earlier this week, the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch published a thread purporting to show substantial losses for Democrats among non-white voters, which he called a “racial realignment.” If you’re an election data junkie, you’ve probably seen it; it has been viewed more than 7 million times on Twitter. Here’s the graphic that started it all:
The whole thread is worth reading. There’s a lot of data, and Burn-Murdoch notes that the problems are especially acute for Democrats among working-class and younger voters of color. Many black, Hispanic, and Asian American voters have long identified as moderate or conservative rather than liberal, and Burn-Murdoch theorizes that Democrats are trending toward more liberal policies (though I would prefer to call them “left” or “progressive” rather than “liberal” ”) is reaching them, especially as the memory of the civil rights era fades.
This is the graphic 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 United States today, and one of the least understood. pic.twitter.com/QeRsuMSKaL
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 11, 2024
The real danger for Democrats is that it won’t even take massive change to destroy their coalition. If Trump got even 15-20% of minority voters, it would be over.