How the GOP Became a (More) Multicultural Party
It’s been decades since we last saw a winning Republican coalition as multicultural as this one. Not every vote has been counted yet and the exit polls aren’t identical, but we can cobble together enough numbers now for a picture to emerge.
Four years ago, according to NBC’s exit polls, Hispanics favored Democrat Joe Biden over Republican Donald Trump, 65 percent to 32 percent. This year, Vice President Kamala Harris appears to have gotten just 52 percent of the Latin vote, the worst showing for a Democrat since 2004, while Trump received 46 percent, the best showing for a Republican in modern times. (Yes: Trump did better than George W. Bush, a man whose Texas training always had him outperforming most Republicans among Latino voters.) Among Hispanic men, Trump won an outright majority of 55 percent. Trump carried several heavily Mexican-American counties in South Texas that used to be Democratic strongholds, including one—Starr County—that last went Republican in 1892.
NBC has Harris carrying the Asian vote, but it shifted five points to the right. African Americans are still overwhelmingly Democrats, but black men have gone from voting 13 percent Republican in 2016 to 19 percent in 2020 and now 20 percent in 2024, according to Edison Research. Overall this year, The Independent notes, about one in three nonwhite voters backed Trump.
The movement in this direction had been visible for a while—you’ll note that the real bump in Trump’s support among African-American men happened four years ago, not this time. But before this month, people had more room to dismiss it: to suggest that those Hispanic Republicans were mostly white Latinos, or refugees from socialist countries, or employees of the Border Patrol. This time the trend is almost impossible to ignore. Minority support for the GOP has grown, not shrunk, over the last decade. We may have to wait till the post-Trump era to find out to what extent that happened despite Donald Trump and to what extent it happened because of him. But more and more, this resembles the movement of many “white ethnic” constituencies—Irish, Italian, Polish, and so on—out of the New Deal coalition in the 1960s and ’70s.
Since Democrats often go out of their way to present themselves as the party of racial justice, many of them have a hard time making sense of this. But it shouldn’t be surprising that a Korean business owner would like Republican economic policies, that a Mexican pro-lifer would like Republican abortion policies, or that a black man living in a declining Democratic city would object to the ways his town is poorly run. If the GOP weren’t so prone to self-sabotage, those voters might have started shifting earlier. Nor should it be surprising if some of the people whose families have already immigrated to America are less interested in bringing in more newcomers behind them. That’s a familiar dynamic in immigration politics.
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