More Black and Latino voters turned out for President-elect Donald Trump this year compared to his last two runs at the White House. Whether we’re seeing a “racial realignment” of national politics is up to interpretation.
“If by realignment, all you mean is gradual changes in party coalitions, sure, that’s absolutely happening,” said John Sides, a politics professor at Vanderbilt University. “If by realignment you mean sudden and extraordinarily dramatic changes in party coalitions, well, for my taste, no, that’s not what we’re experiencing.”
Trump did better among Latino voters and, to a lesser extent, Black voters, compared to 2020. Those gains were built upon increases in support Trump saw among those groups between 2016 and 2020.
Voter surveys from The Associated Press show that Trump received 43% of Latino support this year, up from 35% in 2020. He got 16% of the Black vote this year, up from 8% in 2020.
Data from the Pew Research Center showed Trump got 6% of the Black vote during his first run in 2016. He got 28% of the Hispanic vote that year, as well.
“The trend is real,” Oklahoma State University political scientist Seth McKee said. “There’s no denying it.”
McKee, who previously published research on Hispanic voters, said the evidence is strong that “nontrivial shares of Latinos” are switching parties.
While the long-term trend for Black voters is less convincing, McKee said the traditional split for Black voters was “demolished” this year.
Since the Civil Rights era, Black voters have been the Democrats’ most loyal supporters, typically voting about 90% on the left.
Vice President Kamala Harris got 83% of the Black vote in this election, according to AP’s data.
Both men said most Republican voters are white, but they said the GOP is an increasingly multiethnic party.
The changes appear to largely be based on identity and ideology. The growing support from Latino and possibly Black voters isn’t likely to push the Republican Party further to the left, Sides said.
The existing version of the GOP is what those folks found appealing, he said.
Is it Trump’s populist message or the conservative ideology of the Republicans that attracted the Latino and Black voters?
“All we can show with the data that we have is (that) a set of political attitudes and policy preferences are becoming more aligned with partisanship, even among Black and Latino voters,” Sides said. “I think we do capture aspects of Trump’s populism by looking at questions related to race and immigration. So, a more restrictionist approach to those issues is certainly consistent with right-wing populism. But there may be other aspects of Trump’s appeal that the available research hasn’t yet fully tapped into.”
McKee said the changes speak to identity politics. Some Hispanics who support Trump view themselves as white just as much as they view themselves as Hispanic, he said.
Democrats have a “reputation as sort of a welfare party,” which can turn off some Latino voters who value hard work and “don’t like this idea of handouts,” McKee said.
And there could be alignment on issues of life and abortion, he said, the “weather vane tilted in the Republican direction” this election.
Voters were broadly concerned about inflation and jobs, and those factors played in Trump’s favor.
Sides and McKee said it’s hard at this point to know how much of these demographic shifts were part of a lasting trend and how much they were influenced by the economic environment and dissatisfaction with the incumbent party.
“We could stand for a couple more election cycles to sort of see how things shake out,” Sides said.
McKee said as real as some of these demographic shifts appear to be, particularly Latinos, he said it’s incorrect to see them as deep or sweeping changes.
What we’re seeing are marginal changes, he said, and demographics are not destiny, meaning we’re limited in our ability to predict future elections based on the shifts we saw in 2020 and 2024.
“The coalition that wins an election in one presidential year is not necessarily the one that’s guaranteed to win four years later,” he said. “There’s no magic coalition. There’s no one way to build a winning coalition.”
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