Shifting loyalties of these voters helped power Donald Trump to election win
WASHINGTON ? A realignment among Latino voters – and a smaller shift among Black voters in key swing states ? helped catapult Donald Trump to his victory over Kamala Harris as the Republican nominee expanded his support by peeling off voters from two core Democratic constituencies.
And the signs of a shift might have been there all along.
While Harris spent much of her campaign attacking Trump as a dangerous former president out for revenge and power, polling consistently showed voters preferred Trump over Harris to address their top priority: rising costs and inflation.
Although Trump didn’t win a majority of either group, he won support from about 13% of Black voters nationally and 45% of Latino voters, according to CNN exit polls. In the 2020 election, Trump won just 8% of Black voters and 32% of Latinos.
Black voters have long been the Democratic Party's most loyal voting bloc, often securing and catapulting Democrats to victory.
Trump made those inroads thanks mostly to support from Black and Latino men, helping him overperform his 2020 performance in Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit and other cities.
In a major shift, Trump won Latino men 54%-44% over Harris, according to NBC exit polls, after they backed President Joe Biden 59%-36% over Trump in 2020. Trump won 20% of male Black voters nationally against Harris, similar figures that the Republican nominee got in the 2020 election against President Joe Biden.
Together, the former president’s gains suggest his base of working-class voters has expanded beyond just white non-college-educated voters – a warning sign for Democrats that threatens their base in elections beyond this year.
Trump won blue-collar voters who lack college degrees 55%-42%, while Harris won more affluent voters with college degrees 57%-40%. In 2020, Trump won voters who lack college degrees by a narrow 50%-48% over Biden.
But perhaps the largest, and most consequential, shift from 2020 was support among Latino voters.
Trump’s gains with Latino voters came despite his hard-line rhetoric against illegal immigration. The Harris campaign tried to capitalize on comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in which he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage."
Arturo Munoz, a truck driver from Phoenix, said Trump’s overarching message to address high costs resonated with him, as well as other Latino men, who are still struggling to make ends meet. Munoz, 28, said he has felt a difference from how far his paycheck would stretch from 2016 to 2020 and 2020 to 2024.
He said the insult at the Madison Square Garden did not overshadow Trump’s larger message.
“Hispanic and Latino men are very physically hard-working,” Munoz said. “Hispanic guys are busting their butt manually every day. The difference in pay, the difference in hours, the difference in cuts, the difference in providing for their families. I've seen it.”
Latino men disproportionately work low-paying and hard-labor construction and maintenance jobs compared with all U.S. men.
Munoz worked at a gas station in 2016 to 2020 before becoming a truck driver, which was supposed to be a job that would offer better pay and more opportunities. But with the state of the economy, he said, he would rather be working his 2016-era job.
“I'm pretty sure that Hispanics feel the same way,” he said. “They'd rather take 2016 to 2020, pay, work hours, provisions, all that stuff, than what they have now for these past four years.”
Trump's inroads with Latino voters went beyond key battleground states like Arizona and Nevada. In South Texas, which used to be a Democratic stronghold, Trump flipped Starr County, which has gone Democratic in every presidential election since 1896.
Meanwhile, former President Barack Obama offered an early warning last month about Harris’ problem with Black men when he told them they are “coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses” to not support Harris. He suggested many weren’t backing Harris because she’s a woman.
In Pennsylvania, an even greater 24% of Black men supported Trump, while 73% of Black men supported Harris, according to a CNN exit poll of the state. That was more than double the amount of Black men who supported Trump in the state in 2020.
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Harris tried to make up ground with that group of voters by releasing an economic agenda for Black men that included legalizing marijuana for recreational use and offered 1 million "fully forgivable" loans to Black business owners and new federal regulations to protect investors in cryptocurrency.
Melvin Prince Johnakin, second vice president of the Philadelphia NAACP, said concerns about crime and immigration were among the reasons Black men moved away from Democrats, as well as a slow recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic.
"At the end of the day, we decided to make a stand," Johnakin said. "We had a strong leader in Donald Trump.”
There has been a drop in enrollment of higher education among Latino men after the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Only 1 in 5 Latino men ages 25 to 29 are likely to have a college degree, compared with 27% of Latinas that same age, according to the Pew Research Center.
Overall, 79% of Hispanic adults do not have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 62% of U.S. adults ages 25 and older.
New York State Sen. Gustavo Rivera, a Democrat who represents the Bronx, raised concerns in a recent interview about the lack of outreach to Latino voters beyond just election cycles. He said a better connection needs to be maintained to stop the erosion of support from the Democratic Party.
“There's no question about that,” Rivera said.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump's election win boosted by shifting loyalties of these voters