Americans of color have moved to the right over the past decade 

By David Leonhardt  October 14, 2024

Good morning. We are covering a Times poll of Black and Hispanic Americans — as well as the Middle East, Russian disinformation in Africa and millennial spending habits.

Donald Trump supporters in the South Bronx, New York.  Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

A political misdiagnosis

The Democratic Party has spent years hoping that demography would equal destiny. As the country became more racially diverse, Democrats imagined that they would become the majority party thanks to support from Asian, Black, and Hispanic voters. The politics of America, according to this vision, would start to resemble the liberal politics of California.

It is not working out that way. Instead, Americans of color have moved to the right over the past decade.

The latest New York Times/Siena College poll offers detailed evidence. The poll reached almost 1,500 Black and Hispanic Americans, far more than most surveys do. (Our poll didn't focus on Asian voters, but they have shifted, too.)

A key fact is that the rightward drift is concentrated among working-class voters, defined as those without a four-year college degree:

By The New York Times | Sources: Catalist (2016 election) and New York Times/Siena College poll (Oct. 2024)

I know that many Democrats find this pattern to be maddening. They wonder how voters of color could have moved right during the era of Donald Trump, a man with a long history of racism. But the chart above points to a partial explanation: For most Americans, race is a less significant political force than many progressives believe it is — and economic class is more significant.

Most isn't enough

The past four years have highlighted the ways that Democrats exaggerate the political importance of racial identity. Joe Biden, after all, promised to nominate the first Black female Supreme Court justice (which he did) and chose Kamala Harris as the first Black vice president — who has now succeeded him as the Democratic nominee. Yet Harris has less support from Black voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

Biden also adopted the sort of welcoming immigration policies that Democrats have long believed Hispanic voters' support. He loosened border rules early in his term, which helped millions of people enter the country. Despite that change — or maybe partly because of it — Democrats have also lost Hispanic support.

Harris is still winning most voters of color. But the Democratic Party typically needs landslide margins among these groups to win elections. Today, a significant share of them views the Democratic Party with deep skepticism — roughly one in five Black voters, two in five Hispanic voters and one in three Asian voters, polls suggest.

Elite vibes

Their skepticism is linked to class in two main ways. First, most working-class voters are frustrated with the economy, having experienced sluggish income growth for decades. (Black men have especially struggled, Charles Coleman Jr. wrote in a Times Opinion essay, and Black men have shifted right more than Black women.)

The years just before the Covid pandemic — the end of Barack Obama's presidency and the first three years of Trump's — were a happy exception, when wages rose broadly. But the inflation during Biden's presidency further angered many people. In our poll, only 21 percent of Hispanic working-class voters said that Biden's policies helped them personally, compared with 38 percent who said Trump's policies did.

More generally, many voters have come to see the Democratic Party as the party of the establishment. That may sound vague and vibesy, but it is real. Trump's disdain for the establishment appeals to dissatisfied voters of all races. As my colleague Nate Cohn points out, a sizable minority of Black and Hispanic voters think “people who are offended by Donald Trump take his words too seriously.”

In Washington, D.C.  Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

The Democrats' second big problem is that they have wrongly imagined voters of colors to be classic progressives. In reality, the most left-wing segment of the population is heavily white, the Pew Research Center has found. While white Democrats have become even more liberal in recent decades, many working-class voters of color remain moderate to conservative.

These voters say crime is a major problem, for instance. They are uncomfortable with the speed of change on gender issues (which helps explain why Trump is running so many ads that mention high school trans athletes). On foreign policy, Black and Hispanic voters have isolationist instincts, with the Times poll showing that most believe the U.S. “should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems here at home.”

Immigration may be the clearest example. Many voters of color are unhappy about the high immigration of the last few years. They worry about the impact on their communities and worry that new arrivals are unfairly skipping the line. In our poll, more than 40 percent of Black and Hispanic voters support “deporting immigrants living in the United States illegally back to their home countries.” Support for a border wall was similar:

By The New York Times | Source: New York Times/Siena College poll (Oct. 2024)

Multiracial similarities

The bad news for Democrats is that they adopted the wrong diagnosis of the American electorate. It is not divided neatly by race, in which people of color are overwhelmingly similar to one another and liberal. That misdiagnosis has been a gift to Republicans.

The good news for Democrats is that some of their weaknesses — with white, Hispanic, Black, and Asian voters alike — overlap. If the party can find a way to stem its losses with voters of color, it may also win back a slice of white working-class voters. Remember: Americans without a bachelor's degree still make up about 65 percent of U.S. adults. The share is even higher in swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Related: Democrats' challenges with Black and Hispanic voters have left the party more reliant on college-educated white voters and suburbanites, write my colleagues Jennifer Medina, Katie Glueck and Ruth Igielnik.

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My brief comments：

It is true that the established fake-leftist Dems have failed to continue their captivated power of monopoly in so-called support of the minorities. Their fake progressiveness spelled the colored people in the U.S. for too long, it is about time to break such a spell now.   

The Americans of color have no future of their own except that they will unite with the white non-college lower-working-class people who make up about 65 percent of U.S. adults, namely, most of the working class. As most of the working class have spoken loud and clear on to the end to support the MAGA faction led by Donald J. Trump, any hesitation means betrayal of democracy for the working-class mainstream. [Mark Wain 10/14/2024]

For Translation into the Chinese, see: