Donald Trump’s triumph among minority voters is a nightmare for the Left.
His surge in support among Latinos, in particular, will shake progressives to their foundations
Donald Trump may be heading back to the White House. And one of the explosive sub-plots for the Left is that it was a surge in ethnic minority support – particularly among Latinos – that may have propelled his campaign to victory.
Although exit polls showed Kamala Harris capturing a larger proportion of the Latino vote overall, Trump seems to have increased his share by eight points compared to 2020. There had, of course, been furious speculation about whether he had alienated swathes of Latino voters – and ultimately botched his chances of triumphing in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania – when a comedian at one of his rallies called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”. Although Pennsylvanian votes are still being counted, the very opposite seems to be transpiring: several counties with sizeable Latino populations have trended towards Trump.
Amid an apparent doubling of his support among black voters in the key battleground state of Wisconsin, it also seems that Trump’s voter share among African-Americans is up since 2020.
Such numbers threaten to shake the Democratic Left to its foundations. They challenge many of their assumptions about the “minority vote”, as well as the dominant progressive identitarian ideology.
One is that the voting inclinations of ethnic minorities are rigidly, predictably Left-leaning “in line with historic norms”. In fact, in recent years, such “historic norms” have slowly but surely started to crumble. Latinos have been gravitating towards Trump since 2016, and the voting preferences of African-American males have been diverging from their female counterparts for several years. Neither group inevitably sees themselves as structural victims who require a benevolent Left to protect their interests.
The second, closely linked Leftist assumption is that Right-wing inclinations among ethnic minorities are isolated deviations, rather than generalised trends. But minority voters have been, in line with national trends, slowly but steadfastly shifting to the Right on issues like mass immigration, due to concerns about the impact on wages and the cohesion of their communities.
It really shouldn’t come as any surprise to Democrats that minorities prioritise the same bread-and-butter issues as white voters. This applies not only to immigration but also to the economy. It is notable that Trump’s outreach campaign targeting Latinos heavily leaned into a message of prosperity and sought to generate a feeling of nostalgia for the pre-pandemic economy under his last presidency. It seems to have paid off.
If a Trump victory is confirmed, there will be an attempt by the Left to pathologise “deviant” minority voters. Implicit in such discussions will be the sentiment that people of colour – particularly young males – are so “disenfranchised”, “angry”, “brainwashed” and “marginalised” that they have somehow allowed themselves to be duped by a white supremacist party, at the same time as betraying one of their own.
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