In his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas recounted his days as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. “I offered my assistance to President Reagan’s reelection campaign, only to be met with near-total indifference,” he wrote. “One political consultant was honest enough to tell me straight out that since the president’s reelection campaign didn’t include the black vote, there was no role for me.”
How times have changed.
When Donald Trump won this year’s presidential election, he not only became the first Republican to win the popular vote in two decades but did so with key support from blacks and other ethnic minority groups. And contra those GOP presidential candidates in an earlier era, Trump made time to court votes in racially diverse communities. He showed up.
According to exit polls, Trump carried 46 percent of the Latino vote, a 14-point increase from 2020. Asian support rose to 39 percent from 34 percent four years ago. And though overall black support for Trump ticked up by only a point, his gains among subsets of black voters were notable. The Associated Press reported that Trump won a quarter of all black men and a third of black men ages 18 to 44. MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki recently observed that since 2012, black voters have shifted 15 points toward the GOP.
Trump’s increased appeal to minority voters, along with poor turnout for Kamala Harris, helped give him an edge in swing states that decided the election. In Pennsylvania, for example, Harris won Philadelphia by 59 points, but that represented a drop from the 63-point margin that Joe Biden secured in 2020. Latinos are 16 percent of Philadelphia residents, and “Trump’s gains in the city were heavily concentrated in majority-Latino neighborhoods,” according to an NBC News analysis.
Likewise in Michigan, another battleground that Trump narrowly lost in 2020 and narrowly won in 2024. In Wayne County, which includes heavily black Detroit, Harris won by 29 points, but here again she underperformed Biden, who won the county by 38 points four years ago. The upshot was a net reduction of about 85,000 votes for Democrats in the state’s most populous region.
Trump also made remarkable inroads in large blue states that he lost. Biden carried California by 29 points in 2020, but Harris won it by just 20 points this year. In New York, another liberal stronghold, Harris beat Trump by 11.7 points, or roughly half of Biden’s margin in the Empire State four years earlier. Nor was this a matter of Trump simply turning out more registered Republicans and independents. A New York Times analysis of voter patterns in New York City found that Trump performed in minority areas long regarded as home to the Democratic Party’s base voters.
“In every neighborhood in New York City, from Red Hook in Brooklyn to Riverdale in the Bronx, Vice President Kamala Harris received markedly fewer votes than Joseph R. Biden, Jr. did in 2020, while in most neighborhoods, Mr. Trump notched modest increases compared with his last run,” the Times reported last week. In minority communities, Trump’s gains were the most impressive. Heavily Asian neighborhoods shifted 19 points toward Trump; majority black neighborhoods moved 46 points in his direction; predominantly Hispanic parts of the city shifted 55 points his way.
These achievements were even more impressive given that Trump was running against a woman of black and Asian descent who made overt racial appeals to voters. In the final month of the campaign, Harris and her top surrogates—including former president Barack Obama—made impassioned pleas to black men to back the Democratic nominee. Yet Harris wound up losing ground with racial minorities in general, and with black and Hispanic men in particular.
One lesson here for Republicans: stop ceding votes to Democrats. Even in the bluest precincts, show up and make your case. Trump made campaign stops in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. He visited black churches in Detroit and met with black entrepreneurs and civic leaders in Philadelphia. This attention paid dividends on Election Day.
What we don’t know for certain is whether these GOP gains are unique to Donald Trump or whether they will endure once he exits the political scene. My guess is the shift is bigger than the candidate and part of a broader, decade-long trend that shows blue-collar voters fleeing the Democratic Party. Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be working class, and larger numbers of them have started to vote like working-class whites. Increasingly, economic status matters more than ethnic identity when filling out a ballot.
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