Are so many voters of color becoming Republicans that U.S. politics is on the verge of a dramatic change? Maybe.
The Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch wrote a thread on X last week that went viral, with charts showing increased Republican support with voters of color. He also published an article with the headline, “American politics is undergoing a racial realignment.”
Burn-Murdoch isn’t the only person noticing these trends. And he’s right — something important is happening. In 2020, many more Latino Americans voted for Donald Trump (about 37 percent), compared with Mitt Romney (29 percent) eight years earlier. Twenty-five percent of Asian, Black and Latino voters combined backed Donald Trump in 2020, according to the left-leaning data firm Catalist, while 73 percent favored Joe Biden. That was a big increase from the 17 percent of voters of color who supported Romney in 2012, compared with 81 percent for Barack Obama.
In the 2022 congressional elections, about 41 percent of Asian Americans voted for a Republican, up from 33 percent in 2020.
And at least based on early polling in this year’s race between Biden and Trump, the only question is how many more voters of color will turn to the Republicans in November. Around 10 percent of Black voters have supported the Republican candidate in recent presidential elections. But several surveys have shown Trump doing much better than that, including a New York Times-Siena College poll in which 21 percent of African Americans were backing him (compared with about 70 percent for Biden).
If 21 percent of Black voters end up supporting Trump, it would historic. Since exit polls started being conducted in 1972, the highest Black support for a Republican candidate was Richard M. Nixon’s 18 percent that same year.
In another sign that Black voters are swinging to the right, Gallup recently released data showing that 19 percent of Black Americans identified themselves as Republicans in 2023, compared with 11 percent on average from 1999 to 2022.
In that New York Times-Siena poll, 46 percent of Latinos supported Trump, compared with 43 percent for Biden. No Republican presidential candidate has ever finished ahead of the Democratic candidate in the exit polls. The estimated 44 percent of Latinos who voted for George W. Bush in 2004 was the previous high.
Put all that together, and it’s possible this year that Trump wins 20 percent of the Black vote and half of both the Asian and Latino votes. That would put him at around 38 percent among voters of color, doubling Romney’s number from 12 years ago.
Big. Right? Well, kind of.
Even if the Republicans made those gains among all three groups, they would still be winning only about 50 percent of the total national vote. Black (about 12 percent), Latino (12 percent) and Asian (5 percent) Americans are small parts of the electorate, so even substantial shifts in their voting patterns don’t have outsize results. After all, despite all of the talk about voters of color shifting right, Biden was elected in 2020, Republicans only very narrowly won the House two years ago and Biden and Trump are very close in most polls of the 2024 race.
U.S. politics would really be reshaped if Latinos started voting overwhelmingly Republican. Then, they would have real clout within a party, the way African Americans do among Democrats and southern Whites among Republicans. And the Republican Party would be dominant in the Southwest.
Alternatively, if 40 percent or half of African Americans started voting Republican, Black people would be a much smaller bloc within the Democratic Party and therefore less influential. Purple states such as Georgia and North Carolina with large Black populations would be even harder for Democrats to win. (This is assuming the majority of White Americans in most states kept voting Republican.)
In his column, Burn-Murdoch suggested that American politics might be moving to an era in which racial identities aren’t that connected to voting patterns. That would also be a big change. Perhaps it’s coming.
But I’m somewhat skeptical that racial politics are changing that dramatically. First of all, the current racial-party coalitions reflect policy and material differences. The Democratic Party is generally trying to reduce inequalities of income, wealth and power. That makes it a logical home in particular for Black Americans, who because of past and current discrimination generally have less money and power than White Americans. The Republican Party’s opposition to redistributive policies aligns with the interests of many White Americans.
So I doubt we will see a full severing of race and voting, particularly among Black and White Americans, as long as there are substantial economic and power differences that align with racial categories.
Second, the polls Burn-Murdoch and others are citing might be overstating how much voters of color support Republicans. Other surveys show Trump stuck at the normal Republican levels: about 10 percent among Black voters and well below 50 percent with Latinos.
Polls with more conventional findings are less likely to go viral. That’s partly because people are more interested in what is new or unusual. Black voters overwhelmingly backing Democrats isn’t fresh. But another factor is that many across the ideological spectrum long for a post-racial politics and are excited to share evidence that it might finally be arriving. Leftists want politics to be entirely about class. For Republicans, the more voters of color in their camp, the easier it is to dismiss claims that the party has some racist elements.
Many White, male center-left Democrats don’t like how their party has over the last decade focused more on issues of race and gender. (I will be happy to stop writing about race and gender when we stop having racial- and gender-based oppression and disparities.)
A third reason to be skeptical of these polls is that they might be accurately describing voter opinions in March 2024, but not their actions in November. Biden will have hundreds of millions of dollars to woo Trump-leaning voters of color, many of whom have backed Democrats and perhaps even him in the past.
And Biden is not Trump’s only competition for these voters. This election is shaping up to be similar to 2016, when many Americans hated the two major-party nominees. Polls suggest Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West could pull Black voters in particular from both Biden and Trump. If millions of voters of color move from the Democratic camp to a third party, that’s significant, but it’s not a realignment to the Republicans.
Fourth, it’s possible that we aren’t seeing a broader Republican-Democratic paradigm but simply a Biden-Trump one. Maybe Biden is less appealing to voters of color — particularly younger African Americans and Latinos — than other Democrats. Alternatively, Trump is more appealing than previous Republican presidential candidates were. Because Trump has been the Republican candidate the last three cycles, it’s hard to tell.
Finally, perhaps we are in the midst of a political realignment but not a racial one. The Democratic Party of today, pushing more strongly than it did a decade ago for abortion rights, economic redistribution and policies that make up for past discrimination against African Americans, might appeal to most Black people, but not 90 percent as before; to a majority of Asians and Latinos but not the 70 percent of the Obama era; to a growing number of secular, suburban and/or college-educated White people; to more voters in the Atlanta and Detroit suburbs but fewer in rural, heavily White Kentucky and rural, heavily Latino parts of Texas.
But I’m not confident about any of this — and no one should be. Twelve years ago, after Obama easily defeated Romney in part because of his overwhelming support among voters of color, it seemed like Republicans were doomed to lose every national election in the future. Now, it seems voters of color are shifting right — so Democrats are doomed.
It’s possible that we look back upon the 2020 and 2024 elections as the start of a mass movement of Asian, Black and Latino voters to the Republican Party. But it’s more likely that American politics are changing in ways that are not so clear-cut, decisive and easy to predict.