Kamala Harris’s replacement of Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee in July made a contest that Donald Trump seemed to be winning dead even, with Harris perhaps holding a slight advantage in momentum, money, and even enthusiasm. A big part of her improved performance has been the return to her column of Democratically inclined voter groups — including Black and Hispanic voters — among which Trump had been polling shockingly well against Biden. Numbers aside, it was psychologically painful for Democrats to watch as the overtly race-baiting and xenophobic 45th president began to put up historic levels of support among voters of color.
That nightmare has passed, right? Well, not exactly. As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn recently observed, while Trump has lost considerable ground to Harris among nonwhite voters, he’s still doing quite well by historical standards:
In the past month of high-quality polls, Ms. Harris has a 78-14 lead among Black voters and a 52-41 lead among Hispanic voters. Our New York Times/Siena College battleground state surveys showed similar results, with Ms. Harris ahead 80-15 among Black voters and 52-42 among Hispanic ones. In each case, Ms. Harris is about halfway between Mr. Biden’s weakened standing before he dropped out of the race and his stronger estimated finish in the 2020 election.
While this is certainly closer to typical, “normal” is not quite the right term for the current numbers. Mr. Trump’s tallies today — 14 percent support among Black voters and 41 percent among Hispanic voters — would still represent the highest level of backing a Republican presidential candidate has received in pre-election polls since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
The question of Hispanic voter preferences is shrouded a bit by disagreements over exactly how you define “Hispanic” and whether a group that varies so much in historical and geographical origins, language use, and eligibility to vote is really a distinct community. But Cohn is more or less right about the recent history. According to a Roper Center analysis, the Republican share of the Hispanic vote has ranged from a high of 44 percent in George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection to a low of 21 percent when Bill Clinton defeated Bob Dole in 1996. Pew’s analysis of validated voters in 2020 showed Biden defeating Trump among Hispanics by a 66 to 28 percent margin, pretty much in the mid-range of recent presidential results. So if Trump winds up winning 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in November, that would be both impressive and potentially decisive, given the rising percentage of the total vote cast by Hispanics (according to exit polls, 11 percent of the 2016 electorate was Hispanic, as was 13 percent in 2020).
The mid-teens levels of Black support for Trump in the most recent polls sound less impressive but would still be historic. Pew’s validated-voter studies showed Trump winning 6 percent of the Black vote in 2016 and 8 percent in 2020. It created quite a stir when George W. Bush won 11 percent of the Black vote in 2004 (allegedly attributable in part to heavy promotion of anti-gay-marriage ballot measures targeting Black churchgoers). The last previous Republican to win a double-digit percentage (13 percent) of the Black vote was Richard Nixon in his landslide reelection of 1972.
So what’s going on? Why is Trump not getting waxed by historic margins in these sectors of the electorate, particularly with a woman of color from hyperdiverse California opposing him?
There’s no easy answer, and the explanations may differ with respect to Hispanic and Black voters. Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg offered the Washington Post a few ideas based on demographic trends:
[T]he composition of voters of color is not static. If you take Hispanic voters, for example, 10 or 15 years ago, it’s probable that more of them were, say, first generation and Spanish-speaking. As you have Hispanic voters who have been here longer and are more assimilated and are English-speaking, you would expect them to become politically more like everybody else.
Similarly, if you look at younger Black voters, none of them were around for the civil rights movement. Many of them don’t go to church, which is a major organizer and incubator of political activity and participation.
There’s been a lot of talk this year about a big gender gap among voters of color with Trump making especially big gains among Black and Hispanic men. But looking at the actual 2020 vote, there was almost no gender gap among Hispanic voters, and the Black gender gap was pretty much the same as among white voters (Biden actually won Black men by a 75-point margin).
Aside from the factors Greenberg noted, it’s been obvious for years that a host of demographic trends have boosted Republican prospects among Hispanic voters, including improved (but fragile) economic prospects, an increase in Evangelical Protestant (and especially Pentecostal) religious preferences, and conservative ideological concerns (e.g., the strong anti-socialist views of immigrants from Cuba and South America). In some places (notably Florida and Texas), Republicans have simply outworked Democrats in outreach to these voters. It might behoove Democrats this year to spend a lot of time reminding Hispanic citizens that Trump’s pledge to conduct a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants could mean official and unofficial harassment of anyone who looks or sounds “foreign.”
As for Black voters, what may be taking place is simply an inevitable shift away from monolithic support for the Democratic Party, forged in the emergencies of the civil-rights era and then temporarily extended and even expanded by Barack Obama’s presidency. In 1960, Richard Nixon won 29 percent of the Black vote. Four years later, Barry Goldwater, fresh from voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, made the GOP the party of southern segregationists, and the two parties have more or less remained polarized on race-related issues ever since. Still, Democrats in power have disappointed Black supporters in large and small ways just enough to ensure a flagging sense of allegiance and an opportunity for Republicans even under Trump’s command. Among the many tasks Kamala Harris must address in the short sprint to Election Day should be to restore a sense that the Democratic Party has a valued place for Black voters and their interests. And without question, her ability to sharply limit Trump’s gains among people of color will matter a lot to the outcome — especially in the diverse battleground states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina.
