For decades, pundits predicted that the Republican Party will eventually wither and die due to changing demographics. This thesis was the basis for a highly regarded book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. The authors of this book posited that the Democratic hold upon racial and religious minorities, immigrants, college educated voters, and women would drive the Democrats to a permanent progressive majority. While there has been some evidence in the past that substantiated this theory, this month’s results have shown that changing demographics and high voter turnout in minority communities will not always benefit the Democratic Party and their candidates.
Even after countless allegations of racism, President Trump performed better in minority communities than any Republican presidential candidate has in decades: according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research, President Trump received the highest share of the minority vote since Richard Nixon’s first campaign in 1960. This claim is further supported by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, an online academic study that includes over fifty thousand likely voters. According to their findings, which actually underestimated Trump’s levels of support, President Trump would perform eleven percent better amongst the Latino community and three percent better amongst the Black community.
President Trump’s increased levels of support among minorities is excellent news for the future of the Republican Party, and if the trends continue in this direction, they are ominous for Democratic chances in our rapidly diversifying nation. However, Republicans should not take these voters for granted. In fact, they are the least stable component of the Republican coalition. If the Republicans go back to the establishmentarian politics expressed by George Bush, Mitt Romney, and now Nikki Haley, they will lose these voters. Many of these voters are first-time voters who specifically registered to vote for Donald Trump and against elements within the Democratic Party that are moving to the far-left especially on abortion and energy issues. They voted for the economic nationalism championed by Trump and against the growing left-wing of the Democratic Party.
An example of this realignment is the small city of Central Falls, Rhode Island where President Trump performed nineteen and half percentage points better than he did in 2016. Central Falls is a poor, densely populated, immigrant-heavy community that is primarily composed of Puerto Ricans, Guatamelans, and Colombians. These are not your stereotypical Trump supporters, not even your stereotypical Latino Trump supporters. However, Trump did better in this community (which was ravaged by the coronavirus) than any Republican since 1988, when it had a significantly lower Latino population. James Diossa, the Mayor of Central Falls and a young, progressive Latino, has attributed this massive shift to controversy over abortion and increasing levels of support for socialism in the Democratic Party.
This massive vote shift is not just happening in Central Falls. It is in every corner of our nation. From Lawrence, Massachusetts-- where there was a twenty-one point shift towards Trump-- to the South Bronx, to Doral, Florida,--the home of the Venezuelan exile community which Clinton won by forty points in 2016 and Trump won by a single point this year—and to the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas. In fact, the swing was nowhere as pronounced than in South Texas.
The Rio Grande Valley and South Texas have historically been the most Democratic areas of the Lone Star State. Many of these counties have never voted for a Republican. President Obama carried this area with over seventy percent of the votes, and in 2016, Donald Trump even underperformed Romney’s drastically bad numbers. However, something changed in the last four years, and it does not seem to be a historical aberration. There seems to be a beginning of a long-term trend towards the Republican Party in the most Hispanic area of the nation. For example, in the 2018 Texas Senatorial Election, Beto O’Rourke massively overperformed Hillary Clinton in every suburban area of the state and achieved the highest Democratic vote shares in many suburban counties since the days of the Solid South. However, he massively underperformed Clinton in the Hispanic counties of South Texas. In Maverick County, where over ninety percent of people speak Spanish at home, O’Rourke underperformed Clinton by over ten percent. This pattern is evident throughout the entire Rio Grande Valley—where he underperformed Clinton in every single county.
This trend continued and massively accelerated in the 2020 Presidential Election. Many analysts expected Trump to slightly outperform his 2016 numbers in the area due to his increased share of the Hispanic vote in the polls. However, he blew past all expectations. In 2016, Trump lost this region by about thirty-three points. This year, he only lost it by seventeen points. Going back to Maverick County, Trump improved his vote share by twenty-four percent, even when turnout increased by over twelve percent. These new voters that Democrats hoped would flip Texas blue actually voted for Trump. This pattern was found throughout the entirety of South Texas, where Trump flipped counties that are over ninety-five percent Hispanic and hadn’t voted for a Republican in over a century. Some counties had an over fifty-five percent swing in the vote that benefitted President Trump. This swing is practically unheard of and virtually impossible in politics. However, it happened, and if it continues to happen throughout the nation, it will spell disaster for the Democratic Party and the stability of their coalition.
Donald Trump did not just increase his vote share amongst Hispanic communities. The swings in Asian communities, especially Vietnamese and Korean communities, were almost as large as the ones in Hispanic communities. For example, in Westminster, California, the home of Little Saigon and the capital of the Vietnamese diaspora in the nation, saw a twenty-three percent swing towards Trump. Similarly, Garden Grove, California, a rapidly diversifying city where less than twenty-five percent of the population is white, saw a twenty-one percent swing towards Trump. This pattern was also replicated in Black and Native American communities, especially in rural areas.
Robeson County, North Carolina is one of the most racially diverse counties in the nation, and it is also heavily voted to elect President Trump. Robeson is approximately forty percent Native American, twenty-five percent black, thirty percent white, and the rest identify with other races or as mixed-race. This area is not stereotypical Trump territory. Before 2016, it only voted for a single Republican candidate in its entire history, however, Trump won it in 2016 by around four percent. This economically depressed area with a large minority population was perfect ground for a Trump surge, and it happened. On Election Day, Trump won Robeson County by around eighteen points, and it voted straight Republican in almost every single down-ballot race.
The typical consensus during this election, and especially in Texas, was that higher turnout, specifically minority turnout, would dramatically benefit the left and usher in a blue wave that would wash across the nation. However, it should be obvious to anyone who has paid attention to the results that this did not happen. In fact, the unprecedented wave of minority turnout actually helped Trump. Trump improved his margins and vote share in almost every single American city including Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Miami, and Milwaukee. He also improved in minority-heavy rural areas like the Black Belt, Robeson County, and South Texas. These results show that the consensus was just wrong, and that there is a shift up and down ballot for the Party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Trump. While Trump definitely did not win this election, he laid the groundwork for the party’s future electoral success.
It is sort of ironic that Donald Trump of all people was able to collect the highest share of the minority vote in the past sixty years of Republican electoral history. The man who ran as the antithesis of the famed 2012 Republican autopsy by campaigning on limiting immigration, law and order, and building a wall won the very voters that Republicans have been wanting for decades. If anything, it shows that the political class honestly does not understand the voters of this nation, and they really do not want to. A typical Republican would have run on increasing legal immigration and lowering cultural tensions. However, Trump, to his credit, threw out this playbook and created the least racially polarized electorate in American history. One must admit that it truly is bizarre that this happened, but it honestly should have been expected. Many of these voters are working class, culturally conservative, economically moderate, and fled from nations that have a history of popular right-wing populist caudillos and unpopular socialist leaders. It should have been obvious that Trump, who is personally more economically moderate and culturally conservative than most Republican politicians, would win these voters over. However, most prognosticators, once again, got it wrong, and if this trend of minorities towards the Republicans continues it is only bad news for the Democrats unless they can drag a sizable part of the Republican coalition into their party.