Trump’s Prospects in 2024: Winning Presidency Hinges on Support from Black and Hispanic Voters

TFD – Delve into the intriguing dynamics of Trump’s potential 2024 presidency, where his prospects rely heavily on support from Black and Hispanic voters. Explore the implications of these shifts on the upcoming election.

Public surveys indicating that former President Donald Trump is making historically large gains among Black and Hispanic voters have Democrats feeling more and more alarmed. However, there might be good reason for Republicans to be concerned about these polls as well.

Trump is currently regularly ahead of President Joe Biden in national polls as well as in nearly all of the crucial swing states. However, those same polls typically indicate that among White voters, Biden is matching or even surpassing his winning 2020 proportion of the vote. Trump’s lead in the polls is frequently due to the fact that he has much improved his performance among voters of color from 2020; in fact, he is currently leading all Republican presidential candidates among Blacks and Hispanics for the first time in decades.

The accuracy of those data has been the subject of a heated controversy sparked by these results. The bigger concern, though, would be whether Trump can maintain the level of support he currently enjoys among non-White voters if more of them become aware of his hardline racial agenda.

Now, the presumed GOP nominee is enjoying the best of both worlds in politics: he is drawing historically high numbers of non-White voters on other issues, primarily the economy, and energizing his base of White social conservatives with provocative ideas like the largest deportation drive against undocumented migrants in American history. Should Trump maintain these two qualities through November, he will be extremely difficult to defeat. If Democrats can cause anxiety in minority communities regarding the former president’s most radical policies and statements—such as his assertion that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”—Biden’s standing will be considerably improved.

Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann said of Biden’s chances of recovery, “I don’t want to say it’s going to come down to any one group, but to me getting these voters of color, especially Hispanic voters, back to the margins where they have been historically for Democrats may be the most important thing.”

In any case, White voters will give Trump the great majority of his votes in 2024. However, the slight uptick from 2020 that might help him win a second term currently appears to be primarily focused among non-White voters.

Public surveys conducted in battleground states and nationally consistently indicate that Black and Hispanic voters are currently supporting Trump at higher rates than any other Republican nominee since at least 1960. Earlier this month, a number of national polls were released by The New York Times/Siena College, NBC News, Wall Street Journal, and CBS News/YouGov. All of them revealed that Trump was winning between 20% and 28% of Black votes and 45% and 48% of Hispanic voters. That’s far more than the 12% of Black, and 32% of Hispanic, voters he won in 2020, according to the Edison Research exit polls conducted for a consortium of news organizations including TFD. (The Pew Validated Voters study found Trump winning slightly fewer Black, and slightly more Hispanic, voters in the 2020 election.) A CNBC poll released Tuesday showed Biden drawing just 57% of all voters of color, compared to 71% in the 2020 exit poll.

Results from polls conducted in the important swing states are comparable. Just 55% of non-White voters in Michigan and 69% in Pennsylvania supported Biden in the CNN/SSRS surveys that were released last week; in both states, this is a decrease from about 80% in 2020. Marist College polls released last week showed Biden winning three-fourths of Black voters in Georgia and about four-fifths in North Carolina, well below the roughly 9-in-10 exit polls showed him winning in each state last time. A recent Fox News Poll in Arizona showed Biden winning only about half of Hispanics there, down from over 3-in-5 in the 2020 exit poll. Biden won over 9-in-10 Black voters in Wisconsin according to the 2020 exit poll, but a compilation of the two most recent Marquette Law School polls in the state showed him holding only a little more than 6-in-10 of them.

A number of Democratic pollsters that target voters of color contest the size of the minority polling samples used to generate these findings, claiming in their own surveys they do not detect quite this level of erosion for Biden. However, some party members admit that there is a real trend toward non-White support for Biden declining (although though they do not think it is always as pronounced as these public polls reveal.)

This is a dangerous place for Biden, where long- and short-term trends are converging. Hispanics are merely following in the footsteps of previous immigrant groups like the Italians and Irish, who became less likely to naturally align with the Democratic Party as each successive generation assimilated more fully into American society, according to Alfonso Aguilar, director of Hispanic engagement for the conservative American Principles Project. “They identified with the Democratic Party at first, but over time they started voting like other Americans, and I think that is happening with Hispanics,” Aguilar said of the earlier immigrant groups. As the cultural identification with Democrats has waned, Hispanics who hold conservative views have become more willing to “vote their principles and values” by supporting Republicans, Aguilar said; his assessment is supported by Edison exit poll data showing that Trump in 2020 won a much higher share of Hispanics who identify as conservative than he did in 2016.

The other long-term trend that is helping Trump is the growing perception among non-White voters that they are more vulnerable to the same long-term educational realignment that has influenced White people’ voting choices for more than 50 years. Based on comprehensive voting estimates by the Democratic targeting firm Catalist and exit surveys, Republicans have gained more votes among non-White voters without college degrees since 2016 than they did among those with advanced education. Minority voters now more closely resemble White voters in what I’ve dubbed the “class inversion,” where Democrats do better among voters who have higher levels of education than among those who do not.

These long-term changes have been exacerbated by Biden’s current difficulties. The president’s poor performance among younger Black and Hispanic voters is indicative of his struggles to engage this demographic. In the words of Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, the author of “Party of the People,” a new book on the GOP’s gains among non-White voters, Biden is “a poor fit generationally for a non-White electorate that skews young.” “His appeal to various Democratic electorate segments makes him the anti-Obama,” he continued.

Both partisan analysts concur that Biden has suffered disproportionately from inflation among Black and Hispanic voters, a large section of whom are low-income individuals. Furthermore, according to conservative analysts, Biden is suffering because a large portion of non-White voters perceive Democrats as being too liberal on cultural issues such as LGBTQ rights, crime, and border control, even though polls show that most non-White voters support Democrats on other important social issues like abortion and gun control.

All of these elements have come together to cause Biden’s decline with non-White voters, which has garnered a great deal of attention in the political community. But there’s been much less focus on the other column in the racial ledger: the polls that now mostly show Biden matching, or even exceeding, his support level among Whites from 2020 – when he comfortably won the national popular vote and carried six of the seven most closely contested states.

Both of those results virtually replicate the 2020 exit polls that showed him winning 51% of White voters with a degree and 32% of White voters without one. The same four national polls that earlier this month showed erosion for Biden with minority voters also showed him between 30% and 34% among White voters without a college degree and 50% to 56% among White voters with a degree. Biden was around his 2020 proportion of the White vote according to the most recent CNN survey in Pennsylvania, Marist polls in North Carolina and Georgia, the Fox poll in Arizona, and Marquette polls in Wisconsin. In some of these polls, Biden declined slightly compared to 2020 among Whites without a degree and gained slightly among Whites with a degree, but after those small offsetting shifts, his totals among Whites showed little overall change. In the CNBC national poll released this week, Biden drew 40% of the vote among all Whites, virtually unchanged from his 41% in the 2020 exit poll. (The biggest exception to this trend was the latest CNN Michigan poll, which did show a meaningful decline for Biden among Whites there, although another recent Quinnipiac University survey in the state did not.)

According to GOP pollster Ruffini, one of the main reasons Biden’s support among White voters is so steady is because the two previous presidential elections have essentially reached the limit of White people’s educational aspirations. “After two consecutive cycles of education polarization, white voters are pretty well sorted,” Ruffini remarked.

Biden could be doomed if there was even a slight further drop in the non-college White voting base, which is so prevalent in the major industrial states. However, a lot of Democrats now think that Trump has less chance to gain ground among White voters who do not attend college than Biden does to widen his lead among college-educated White voters, who tend to lean left on social issues like abortion and are more open to Democratic claims that Trump poses a threat to democracy.

Should Biden maintain his current level of support among White voters, the crucial question in the contest would shift to whether Trump can maintain his support among non-White voters while presenting such a divisive platform and messaging on racial matters.

Trump is promising the largest deportation drive of undocumented migrants in American history, the establishment of detention camps and the use of the National Guard in mass roundups; military action against Mexico, including a naval blockade to combat drug cartels; the abolition of birthright citizenship; and the potential reinstatement of his policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border, despite polls showing him posting historically high Republican numbers among Hispanics.

Community activists claim that relatively few Hispanic people are aware of the proposals Trump is making on any of these issues. “I don’t think people are really tuned into it at all,” stated Melissa Morales, the president and founder of the Hispanic voter mobilization organization Somos Votantes.

As more people become familiar with Trump’s policies and language, Matt Barreto, a Democratic pollster and political scientist who advises the Biden campaign on Hispanic voters, stated that “there is no chance” Trump can sustain his high level of support in the community. According to Barreto, Trump’s performance among Hispanic voters in 2020 was enhanced when he softened his anti-immigrant remarks from 2016 and instead concentrated on recovering the economy from the Covid epidemic. This stance resonated with many Hispanics who were facing financial difficulties. However, Trump is “definitely running a more extreme cultural White supremacist… agenda than he did in ’16,” according to Barreto.

Barreto thinks the fear of mass deportations and detention camps will prove particularly harmful to Trump’s support when more people become aware of it, since two-thirds of Hispanics in his survey say they know someone who is undocumented. Barreto stated, “I’m not saying Trump is going to lose all of his voters, but it is harder for a financially conservative Latino… to stick with Trump the worse and louder he gets on immigration.”

Given that Hispanics also believe Biden has lost control of the border, Ruffini and Aguilar both express optimism that Trump will not suffer nearly as much from Hispanic support as Democrats anticipate. In 2016, when Trump discussed mass deportations, “that became an issue immediately.” It’s not this time,” Aguilar remarked. And why does that stand the reason? I think it’s because the circumstances have changed and people are open to a deportation campaign because of this mass wave” of asylum seekers at the border.

Though they think Trump’s immigration proposals will hurt him, leaders of several Hispanic mobilization organizations told me they still expect the main focus of their message this year to be the populist economic contrast with Trump that Biden drew in his State of the Union address this month. According to Morales, “I think people are really top of mind with the economic arguments.”

For an extended period, the Culinary Workers Union Local 226—which advocates for 60,000 laborers on the Las Vegas strip and in Reno—has been the most efficient entity in Nevada at recruiting and mobilizing Hispanic voters. Ted Pappageorge, the local secretary-treasurer, told me in an interview that his primarily Hispanic membership’s top concerns are rising food, rent, and gas expenses. “Democrats are in their element when it comes to taking on Wall Street landlords, big food, and big oil,” Pappageorge remarked. He continued, saying that the union would argue to its members that “Trump is a boss and a landlord, and those are all his buddies.”

“The path to victory here is when we roll out our program and talk to working class voters face to face, workers talking to workers,” Pappageorge stated. “It won’t happen overnight, but we can defeat Trump just as we have in the past.”

It’s the same story with Black voters. Even though Trump is leading the Black population in numbers, he has suggested that in order for school districts to receive federal funding, they should not discuss “critical race theory” in the classroom. Additionally, local police departments should be required to use “stop and frisk” procedures, which civil rights leaders claim unfairly target young Black men. Many Black leaders view Trump’s unwavering support of White nationalists, like those who sparked gallows construction outside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as a clear indication of his embrace of these groups.

Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who helped Barack Obama’s campaigns on addressing Black voters, thinks Trump will not gain nearly as much Black support on Election Day as current polls indicate for him for all of these reasons and more. Belcher stated, “You have to question a story if it doesn’t make sense.” “An individual with a thoroughly recorded background of prejudice, bigotry, and corruption, combined with a fundamentally incorrect stance on nearly all African American matters… that individual is going to outperform George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, John McCain, and every other Republican over the previous forty years?” stated Belcher. “It’s absurd on its face.”

Ruffini concurs, saying he wouldn’t be shocked “to see some movement among Black voters back to the previous historical norm.” But he added that emphasizing the claim that Trump is racially biased is unlikely to provoke the turnout Democrats need unless they can also convince Black voters that Biden has a plan to improve their economic condition – which polls show many of them now doubt. According to Ruffini, “relying on one’s cultural and racial identity as a motivator has been a losing strategy.”

Belcher and other Democratic strategists who target Black voters recognize that, even if Trump’s vulnerabilities ultimately prevent him from winning over African Americans, anger over high costs and a feeling that Biden has not made significant progress for the community might still pose a threat. “In reality, individuals are seeking a way out because they believe the president hasn’t gone far enough, and third-party candidates provide that way,” stated Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPAC, an organization that unites Black voters. “That’s what [the Biden campaign] really needs to focus on.”

The majority of the arguments put forth by Democrats aim to contrast what Biden and Trump would do in a second term in order to win back minority voters. Democrats run the risk of many people, regardless of race, essentially looking backward and contrasting their actual economic experiences under Trump’s presidency with that of Biden.

Democratic pollster Fernand Amandi, who counseled Obama’s team on reaching out to Latino voters, already sees the analogy as pushing more Latino voters toward Trump. The most common response to Trump in focus groups, according to Amandi, is, “I really dislike him, I don’t like what he says, I don’t like what he stands for, but if I’m being honest, prices were a lot lower and I was doing a lot better economically.”

Certainly, Biden’s dissatisfaction with his performance is far more profound than what Democratic presidents have often had to deal with in minority areas. But Trump has consistently used divisive and racist rhetoric to inflame White racial animosities throughout his political career, from calling Obama a “birther” to mimicking Nazi imagery about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the nation.

The greatest irony developing is that Trump’s prospects of winning the presidency in 2024 may depend on his ability to maintain, for an additional seven months, a higher percentage of support from Black and Hispanic voters than any other Republican presidential nominee since the Civil Rights Movement sixty years prior.