Donald Trump is a racist. The Republican Party is racist. We’ve all heard this nonsense from the liberal echo chamber. The sad part is that white liberals believe it, but everyone else has hit the mute button.
In 2020, Donald Trump gained among all racial and gender groups. The only demographic where he lost support was white dudes, and marginal shifts in that demographic can cost you an election. It did in Trump’s case, where Joe Biden was able to cut into those margins with working-class whites in the Rust Belt. Trump came within 43,000 votes of winning a second term, so it just shows progressives that they shouldn’t count on demography to clinch a so-called permanent political majority. Most of Trump’s 2020 support came from women and people of color. Yes, you read that right. Trumpism appeals to all, which is why it’s sticking around (via Washington Examiner):
More important insights from today's Catalist data release. Trump increased his margins with all race+gender groups except white men. Women of color were the most swayed by Trump's style of governing. pic.twitter.com/dsmqb0oSJd
— Matt Bruenig (@MattBruenig) May 10, 2021
Newly released data show that the majority of former President Donald Trump’s supporters in the 2020 election were women and people of color.
The share of Trump voters who were women or people of color in last year’s election was 57.2%, up from 54.8% in 2016, according to newly released data from Catalist. The former president also increased his support among all racial demographics in 2020, with the exception of white men, making a 7-point gain among nonwhite women, a 4-point gain with nonwhite men, a 1-point gain with white women, and a 1-point loss among white men.
The data also showed that Trump enjoyed a large increase in support among Latino voters, though Democrats still captured a majority of the group.
“Along with massive increases in turnout, Latino vote share as a whole swung towards Trump by 8 points in two-way vote share compared to 2016, though Biden-Harris still enjoyed solid majority (61%) support among this group," Catalist wrote in its analysis of the data. “Some of the shift from 2016 appears to be a result of changing voting preferences among people who voted in both elections, and some may come from new voters who were more evenly split in their vote choice than previous Latino voters. This question presents particularly challenging data analysis problems, which we discuss more in a dedicated section below.”
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Donald Trump can stick around because his base of support is incredibly and efficiently spread out in terms of political geography. David Shor, a 2012 Obama campaign veteran and data scientist, noted this and warned Democrats that if the coalition is proven to be a durable one, Democrats could see themselves out of power for a very long time in the long run. It’s why he feels that Trumpism has been good for the GOP since it’s primed the party for institutional domination. It’s why he wants to add states and hopes Democrats can campaign on issues that are appealing to educated voters and working-class conservatives, which is how Obama won twice (via NY Mag):
…in this country, between 2012 and 2016, the Electoral College bias changed from being one percent biased toward Democrats to 3 percent biased toward Republicans, mainly because of education polarization. So Donald Trump is unpopular. And he does pay a penalty for that relative to a generic Republican. But the voters he’s popular with happen to be extremely efficiently distributed in political-geography terms.Imagine Hillary Clinton had run against Marco Rubio in 2016. Rubio is a less toxic figure to the public as a whole, so let’s say he performed as a generic Republican would have been expected to, and Hillary Clinton’s share of the two-party vote fell to 49.6 percent. If she had maintained Obama’s coalition — if her 49.6 percent had the same ratio of college-to-non-college-educated voters as Obama had in 2012 — she would have won that election. And then, if you look at the implications that would have had down-ballot, especially in the Senate, Republicans would have been a lot worse off with a narrow majority coalition — that had a Romney-esque split between college and non-college voters — than they were with the Trump coalition.
So I think the Trump era has been very good for the Republican Party, even if they now, momentarily, have to accept this very, very, very thin Democratic trifecta. Because if these coalition changes are durable, the GOP has very rosy long-term prospects for dominating America’s federal institutions.
The question is: Can they get all of the good parts of Trumpism without the bad parts? And I don’t know the answer to that question. But when I look at the 2020 election, I see that we ran against the most unpopular Republican ever to run for president — and we ran literally the most popular figure in our party whose last name is not Obama — and we only narrowly won the Electoral College. If Biden had done 0.3 percent worse, then Donald Trump would have won reelection with just 48 percent of the two-party vote. We can’t control what Trump or Republicans do. But we can add states, we can ban partisan redistricting, and we can elevate issues that appeal to both college-educated liberals and a lot of working-class “conservatives.” If we don’t, things could get very bleak, very fast.
Right now, Shor says the surge in college-educated whites had the party gearing for a "liberal vs. conservative mindset" regarding elections. That’s a bad idea since there aren’t that many people who call themselves liberals. Despite their voting trends, nonwhite voters do not consider themselves liberals and the white liberals’ penchant for defunding the police caused black and Hispanic voters to spring away from the Democrats in 2020. And since white liberals are swelling the ranks of the Democratic Party base, along with filling the war chests, they’re controlling more of the messaging, which is abjectly insane. Nonwhite and white liberals are miles upon miles apart on almost every issue, including ones dealing with "racial resentment." This is leading to white liberals projecting a voting narrative onto a group of voters where the data doesn’t exist. Shor noted how Hispanics being super liberal on immigration is pretty much a myth.
If voters in these blocs that have traditionally voted Democratic keep drifting away because they’re scared by the left-wing push from college-educated whites, then liberal America should embrace for pain — a lot of pain.
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