Trump’s Multiracial Coalition of Men Is Here
The Republicans’ best shot at racial parity with the Democrats has long been to become a multiracial men’s party, given the persistence of the gender gap in how Americans vote. It seems that vision is coming to pass sooner than anyone expected.
Exit polls should always be interpreted with caution, but Donald Trump appears to have made dramatic inroads with Latino male voters, accelerating a rightward shift that had become evident in the last two elections. If the early numbers are accurate, Trump will have effectively flipped Joe Biden’s margin with that demographic, which supported Biden at a rate of 57 percent in 2020, into his own 54 percent advantage.
Indications of a roughly 30-point national swing in Trump’s favor among Latino men seem especially plausible when looking at his county-level performances: Heavily Cuban American Miami-Dade County, one of the Democratic Party’s most reliable Florida strongholds, turned red. So did heavily Mexican American Hidalgo County, Texas, which Biden carried with almost 60 percent of the vote in 2020, along with several other South Texas counties that Biden and Hillary Clinton each won by double digits. Even Passaic County, one of the most heavily Hispanic regions of deep-blue New Jersey, broke for Trump.
To a lesser degree, Black men in a pair of key swing states also supported Trump at higher rates than they did in 2020. Multiple network exit polls show the former president nearly or more than doubling his Black male support in Georgia and North Carolina.
There will be plenty of Democratic finger-pointing over the next four years, with strategists anguishing over what went wrong and who is to blame. But if demographics are indeed destiny, as many Democrats once assumed, then the GOP has to feel especially good about its standing among men of all races and particularly Latinos — a problem that Democrats will have to solve if they are to have any hope of winning back the White House.
When Barack Obama notched a high watermark of 71 percent with Latino voters during his 2012 reelection campaign, Republicans were convinced they were on the verge of losing non-white voters for generations to come. “[In] 2050, whites will be 47 percent of the country while Hispanics will grow to 29 percent and Asians to 9 percent,” wrote the authors of the party’s election postmortem, who included President George W. Bush’s press secretary Ari Fleischer and Jeb Bush’s 2016 senior presidential campaign adviser Sally Bradshaw. “If we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we have to engage them and show our sincerity.”
Nominating Trump for president in 2016 seemed like a disastrous misstep. He announced his bid by referring to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and continued to demonize people from Latin American countries for the duration of his campaign and presidency. In 2018 and 2020, you could mark election season by his fearmongering about migrant caravans from Central America. A national outcry over the harrowing images of children he had locked in immigration detention centers did not deter him from continuing the cruel deterrence policy.
Both parties now seem to have overestimated how much Latinos identified with the people Trump was abusing. In 2024, he once again made immigration one of his top campaign issues. His broken promise to “build a wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border and make Mexico foot the bill gave way to sweeping vows to deport undocumented immigrants en masse. Trump and his surrogates succeeded in casting Kamala Harris as Joe Biden’s “border czar” responsible for a recent surge in attempted border crossings that she actually had little authority to resolve, which she responded to by pivoting rightward on the issue.
Rather than exacerbating his party’s demographic conundrum, Trump appears to be the best thing to happen to the Republican brand among Latino voters in several decades. This dynamic seems evident even among undocumented people. “Several of the migrants I’ve been speaking with say they would have voted for Trump themselves,” tweeted the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Lautaro Grinspan, reporting outside Atlanta’s ICE field office the day after the election. “Most are folks who crossed the border illegally in the last 2-3 years. They don’t believe Trump will deport them, because they are here to work and are ‘not criminals.’”
Some prominent Latino Democrats have been sounding alarm bells for years. “There are clearly some gaps we have as a party when it comes to Latino outreach and investment,” former San Antonio mayor and HUD secretary Julián Castro told CNN after Biden’s uninspiring performance with Latinos in 2020. “We need to look at where we fell short on our messaging and investment. And as a party we need to develop a 365-day full-court press for Latino outreach so that we don’t lose this critical constituency.”
The drift among Black men tracks with a mounting sense of disillusionment toward Democrats felt among all Black voters, as evidenced by their declining support for the party’s presidential candidates in every race since 2008. The feeling that post-civil-rights Democratic politicians have failed to deliver meaningful gains for Black men, paired with nostalgia for Trump’s pre-COVID economy, also cast a shadow on Harris’s anemic appeals for their vote, which included pledges to legalize weed and safeguard cryptocurrency assets.
Some of the details from Trump’s victory are at least clarifying. The first is that there continue to be profound political and ideological variances among the Latino electorate, shaped by factors like race, ethnicity, and ancestral country of origin, to the point that blanket outreach efforts have limited applicability. The term “Latino vote” itself is overly broad and obscures how localized and narrowly targeted most of the party’s strategy will have to be.
The second is that the stubbornness of classic election-year fundamentals seems to have been underrated. For all his ostentatious bigotry, crudeness, and corruption, Trump had plausibly recast himself as a normal Republican who could benefit from an unpopular Democratic incumbent and widespread disenchantment with the economy. Latino and Black male voters were not immune to his appeals on that basis.
The third is that Trump’s victory, distressing as it is, could be merely the beginning of something much worse for Democrats. While it appears that Black male voters overall defied some of the preelection shaming and hand-wringing over their softening support for the party, their long term loyalty is not guaranteed. The post-civil-rights political order that once transformed the Black electorate into a reliable blue bloc is crumbling everywhere you look. Voting rights have been eroded, affirmative action is dead, and a credibly accused Fair Housing Act scofflaw is headed back to the White House.
Whether that means Democrats drive harder to the right, as they have in the past, or opt to more meaningfully differentiate themselves from the GOP remains to be seen. But what’s clear is that when people feel like the systems around them are broken, they might just vote for the person who promises to take them apart.