How Trump Is Dividing Minority Voters

The most succinct explanation for how Republicans expect Donald Trump to win in November may have come from, of all people, the firebrand Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida.

“What I can tell you,” Gaetz said earlier this year, “is for every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement.”

What Gaetz is saying, in his somewhat stereotypical racial shorthand, is that even if Trump alienates a growing number of well-educated white women (“Karen”), he can overcome those losses by attracting more blue-collar, nonwhite men (“Julio and Jamal”).

Even most Democrats agree that Trump appears positioned to gain ground this year among Black and Latino men without a college degree—groups that already moved in his direction from 2016 to 2020, according to studies of the vote such as the analysis of the results released by Catalist, a Democratic voter-targeting firm. And even many Republicans acknowledge that Trump in 2024 could face an even bigger deficit among college-educated white women, who already voted against him in larger numbers in 2020 than in 2016, according to those same studies.

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Those offsetting movements among white women with a college degree and nonwhite men without one point toward the shifting demographic dynamics that could settle the rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden.

The differences in political allegiance across racial groups has long been one of the central divides in American elections, and it will remain crucial in 2024. But the differences within each racial group along the lines of education and gender may prove at least as important this year.

For Trump, the most likely path to victory in 2024 is maximizing his support among voters without a college degree, especially men, in every racial group. Victory for Biden will likely require him to maximize his backing among voters with a four-year degree or more, especially women, in each racial group.

Early polling about the 2024 presidential race mostly shows a continuation of the complex interplay between race, education, and gender that has reshaped the two parties’ coalitions over the past generation.

Since the 1980s, the consistent trend among white voters is that Democrats have run better among men than women, and better among those with at least a four-year college degree than those without one. These effects are reinforcing: Democrats typically perform best among white women with a degree and worst among men without one. The men with a degree, and the women without one, are the most closely contested groups among white voters, though those women usually lean red and those men have tilted more toward Democrats in the Trump era.

Traditionally, minority voters did not divide as much along these axes of gender and education. But more of these cross pressures have surfaced since Trump’s emergence as the GOP’s dominant figure. In 2016, Hillary Clinton drew much less support among Latino men than among Latinas, according to the analysis by Catalist. In 2020, Trump improved substantially among Latino men and Latina women, but this time his gains were greatest among those without degrees. Those cumulative changes moved Latinos closer to the pattern familiar among white voters: Though Biden carried 67 percent of Latina voters with a college degree, he won only 56 percent of Latino men without one, Catalist found.

Black voters didn’t differ much along educational lines in either Trump campaign, but those contests opened a consistent gender gap: Each time, Trump ran a few points better among Black men than among Black women, according to the Catalist results.

All of these movements have stirred Republican hopes that they are now poised to advance in minority communities among the same groups where they have gained the most over the past generation among white people—voters without a college degree, especially men. A wide array of national polls, as well as surveys in the swing states, have consistently shown Trump now attracting about 20 percent support among Black voters, and as much as 45 percent among Latinos. That’s well above his 2020 showing with both groups and a better performance than any GOP presidential nominee since the civil-rights era.

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“People will ask you: Why is it? It’s because of the issues these people care about. It’s crime, it’s affordability, and it’s also immigration,” Jim McLaughlin, a pollster for Trump, told me.

Biden’s support is drooping in these surveys among nonwhite voters of almost every description. But detailed results from the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll show that, among minority voters, Biden now faces the greatest vulnerability with the same group that is toughest for him among white people: men without a college degree. That survey, released early in March, found Trump, stunningly, running even with Biden among those blue-collar nonwhite men, according to the results provided by Don Levy, the director of the Siena Research Institute, which conducts the poll.

In that same poll, only one in seven nonwhite men without a degree said that Biden’s policies had helped them personally, while more than one in three said his policies had hurt them. For Trump, the proportions were reversed: More than one in three of those men said his policies had helped them, while only about one in seven said they had been hurt by his agenda.

Like many Democratic strategists, the longtime party consultant Chuck Rocha believes that Biden risks losing ground among blue-collar, nonwhite men, especially those who are younger to early middle age. “I’ve never seen more of a disconnect when I do focus groups of people who don’t give him credit for any of that shit he’s done,” Rocha told me. “He gets no credit with nobody.”

If Biden can hold his losses among nonwhite voters primarily to men without a college degree, Democrats would likely breathe a sigh of relief. That’s because those men cast less than 9 percent of all votes in 2020, according to calculations from census data by William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro, shared exclusively with The Atlantic. Partly because their turnout is so low, they are not a rapidly growing group in the electorate: Frey projects that only about 500,000 more of those noncollege, nonwhite men will vote in 2024 than 2020.

Biden will face much greater risk if Trump can extend his gains to other segments of the nonwhite community. Polls now suggest that’s possible.

Looking through the lenses of gender and education, the largest group of nonwhite voters are women without a college degree. They cast more than 10 percent of all votes in 2020, according to Frey’s calculations (although he expects that they will add only a modest 225,000 more voters in 2024).

These blue-collar women of color are not an intrinsically easy audience for Republicans. Nearly three-fifths of them agreed that the Republican Party “has been taken over by racists,” and a comparable number supported legal abortion in all or most circumstances, according to polling provided by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). In surveys by the Pew Research Center, four-fifths of non-college-educated Black women said they had an unfavorable view of Trump, as did two-thirds of Latina women without a degree.

Yet economic discontent has left a clear opening for Trump. In last month’s New York Times/Siena survey, fewer than one in 10 of these women said Biden’s policies had helped them personally; more than three times as many said they had benefited from Trump’s policies.

College-educated nonwhite men are another obvious target for Trump, though they are a relatively small group. These men are highly liberal on social issues. But they also express substantial economic discontent: More of them say that they personally benefited from Trump’s policies rather than Biden’s.

Among voters of color, women with a college degree provide Biden his best chance to improve on his 2020 support. Those women cast about 6 percent of all votes in 2020, Frey calculates, but he expects they will add more voters in 2024 than will any other segment of the minority community.

In PRRI’s polling, college-educated women consistently take the most liberal positions of any minority group: Nearly three-fourths of them, for instance, say abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. High percentages of both Black and Latina college-educated women express negative views about Trump in Pew’s polling. And in contrast to the other minority groups, significantly more nonwhite women with a college degree said in the New York Times/Siena poll that they had been helped rather than hurt by Biden’s policies, while slightly more of them said the opposite about Trump.

White women with a college degree may be even more important as an offset for Biden if he loses ground among nonwhite men, as polls now suggest he will. These well-educated white women cast more than 16 percent of all votes in 2020, and with women now composing three-fifths of all college graduates, Frey projects that 1.1 million more of them will vote in 2024 than in 2020. These women tilt strongly left on most social issues and were far more likely than any of the other groups in the New York Times/Siena poll to say that Trump’s policies had hurt them personally.

McLaughlin said Trump has an opportunity to improve among these women compared with 2020 because they are concerned about the same issues moving men toward Trump, particularly crime and immigration. But Democrats believe these women’s strong support for abortion rights should allow Biden to expand his already substantial margin among them.

There’s evidence to justify those hopes. The 2022 midterm election was the first campaign after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision rescinding the constitutional right to abortion. In those races, Democratic gubernatorial candidates supporting abortion rights ran even better than Biden did in 2020 among these college-educated white women in the key swing states of Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, according to exit polls. “Biden could do better among college white women and get more of them out to vote,” the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who worked for Biden’s 2020 campaign, told me. “He’s not tapped out in the number of women [he can win] on the abortion issue.”

Mike Madrid, a GOP strategist who has become a prominent Trump opponent in the party, told me Trump faces “a conundrum” as he tries to hold down his losses with these white women while securing more support among nonwhite men. Madrid said that “the only bulwark” Trump has against white college-educated women deserting him over abortion is to heighten their fears about illegal immigration.

But pressing those buttons with inflammatory language, and proposals such as mass deportation of undocumented migrants, risks endangering his gains among Latinos, said Madrid, the author of the upcoming book The Latino Century. Madrid said that Biden may not rebound to the margins Democrats enjoyed among Latinos a decade ago, but that once more of them become aware of Trump’s proposals on immigration, the former president’s high poll numbers with the group “are going to come back down to Earth.”

Robert P. Jones, the president of the PRRI, told me that Trump so far “has had the luxury of running two parallel campaigns.” All of his belligerent proposals and dehumanizing language about immigrants are reaching his base of socially conservative white voters through conservative media, while little is getting through to nonwhite voters, who are mostly less attuned to the election. Like Madrid, Jones believes that more nonwhite voters will recoil from Trump’s harshest policies and words when they learn more about them. “The question is whether he is going to be able to keep up this two-track strategy,” Jones said.

Demographic change will provide another thumb on the scale for Biden. White voters without a college degree, now the GOP’s best group, have declined about two percentage points as a share of voters in each presidential election for decades, and Frey expects that pattern to continue in 2024. In all, Frey predicts that the number of college-educated voters of all races will increase by about 4 million this year compared with 2020, while the number of noncollege voters will decline by about a million. If Frey is right, the share of college-educated voters of all races in the 2024 electorate will increase by about two percentage points from 2020, while voters of color will increase their share by about one percentage point.

These small changes in the electorate’s composition should marginally boost Biden. But they are not enough to overcome the level of defection polls show him now facing among nonwhite voters. Democratic strategists such as Rocha working in minority communities believe that Biden can claw back some of that support, particularly among women, by focusing more attention on abortion and Trump’s racially confrontational policies and language. Yet these cultural and race-related issues may work better for Biden with college-educated white voters, who consistently express much less concern in polls about their immediate economic situation than other Americans do.

Matt Morrison, the executive director of Working America, a group that organizes working-class voters who are not in unions, told me that the key for Biden with blue-collar voters of color will be to make them more aware of policies he has pursued to help them make ends meet, such as his programs to reduce prescription-drug costs. The nonwhite voters leaning toward Trump, Morrison noted, are not nearly as attracted to his policies and persona as most working-class white voters are. “I am looking at who Biden has lost support from, and they are not MAGA Republicans,” Morrison told me. “They are people who have not gotten a reason to vote for the president.”

If Biden can’t effectively communicate such a reason to more nonwhite voters, the 2024 election could produce a historic irony. After a political career in which Trump has relentlessly stoked white racial grievances, his ability to fracture the nonwhite community along lines of gender and education could be the decisive factor that propels him to a second term.