Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
This U.S. election cycle has already been unusual in any number of ways: President Joe Biden’s decision to not seek a second term in office; Vice-President Kamala Harris’s quick consolidation of Democratic support; not one, but two assassination attempts on former president Donald Trump.
Another less spectacular but highly consequential development in the electoral calculus has caught the eye of pundits and pollsters alike. The backbone of the Democratic Party has long been young, Black, and Hispanic voters. Republicans win over white voters – some working class, but also many suburban, college-educated and wealthy.
These long-standing racial alignments of the electoral landscape are dissolving before our eyes.
Early polls showed numbers as high as 23 per cent of Black voters poised to vote for Mr. Trump while a new national poll shows that support for Mr. Trump sits at 40 per cent of registered Latino voters. These are substantial increases from the 8 per cent of Black voters and 32 per cent of Latino voters who backed Mr. Trump in 2020. Another recent poll revealed that 28 per cent of Asian Americans plan to vote for Mr. Trump, though Ms. Harris’s lead with this demographic remains substantial.
In fact, Ms. Harris is still ahead of Mr. Trump with all these groups, and the advantage has grown more substantial since she became the Democratic nominee than it was under President Biden. Moreover, polls can be misleading, especially those that rely on small samples of minority groups.
Nevertheless, the decline in the Democrats’ advantage among these once stalwart supporters should be reason for concern. Young voters of colour were a formidable force in the Obama coalition of 2008. In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton won 91 per cent of Black voters and 66 per cent of Hispanic voters. In 2020, Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans cast four-in-10 of Joe Biden’s votes.
Every vote (in swing states) matters in 2024, and these shifting patterns have the potential to change everything.
In some (weird) ways, the growth in the potential Republican vote share among voters of colour is a triumph of colour-blind politics. We should want both parties to appeal to the entire electorate, regardless of race, gender, wealth, occupation or otherwise. If Republicans (or Democrats) were to win a fair, reasonable, representative share of the non-white electorate, that would be a sign that issues such as the funding of public schools, the generosity and redistributive function of the welfare state, accessible and affordable higher education, or criminal justice reform were not intimately tied to race, either in design or effect.
But we don’t live in this world. Far from it.
According to political scientists Joseph Lowndes and Daniel HoSang, a curious fact of the rise of the multiracial right is that it occurs alongside Republicans’ continuing appeals to a sense of grievance and victimhood among white voters. They note that, according to one poll, 70 per cent of Republicans believe in the “great replacement theory,” a conspiratorial myth that Democrats are trying to replace the white-majority electorate with racialized immigrants. Republicans have also not abandoned their attacks on DEI, affirmative action, voting rights or any initiative that would have the outcome of reducing the persistent racial wealth gap.
If anything, Mr. Trump has continued to lean into his appeal to whites’ racial resentment and anxieties. It’s just not as newsworthy today as it once was. We now react to Mr. Trump’s ridiculous claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating their neighbours’ cats by shaking our heads rather with collective outrage at the implicit racism and dehumanization contained in Mr. Trump’s statements.
The rightward shift among communities of colour is significant in part because they used to be the most reliable Democratic constituency. Research by political scientists Ismail White and Chryl Laird demonstrates that even Black voters who ideologically agree with Republicans’ conservative views on gun rights, abortion or religiosity, still, election after election, vote Democrat.
Unlike white voters, voters of colour – the incredible ethnic and economic diversity within their communities notwithstanding – are expected to vote Democrat. Defection from the Democratic Party is perceived as a betrayal of the core values of these communities.
Two to three generations removed from the attack dogs and water hoses faced by the civil rights movement or the struggles of their parents and grandparents to build wealth, these Black, Latino and Asian-American voters now embody the logical outcome of assimilation. They can buy into the nativist appeals of Republicans, never quite realizing that they still aren’t part of the America that Mr. Trump claims he wants to make great again.