Donald Trump’s Rainbow Coalition
His biggest vote gains from 2020 came in states with the most immigrants. And he seems to have broken the Democratic monopoly on the black vote.
By Tunku Varadarajan
Nov. 29, 2024 1:06 pm ET
Michael Barone’s favorite word to describe Donald Trump is “demotic.” He has to tell his readers that he doesn’t mean demonic. “It’s a perfectly good word that 98% of our population is not familiar with. Of course, when you point out what demotic means—‘of the people,’ or something similar—they get the point.” Mr. Trump’s ability to connect with voters has “shaped and hastened” two developments that could portend a political realignment.
The first is the drift toward the Republican Party of a good many immigrants, a group “traditionally believed to be resistant to the party’s charms”; the second, the unraveling of “black political unity.” Polls tell us that 16% of black voters backed Mr. Trump, up from 8% in 2020; and that 83% voted for Kamala Harris, down from 91% for Joe Biden four years ago.
Mr. Barone, 80, is a senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner and an emeritus fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (where I am also a fellow). He is best known for the 40 years he spent as principal author of the Almanac of American Politics, which has been published every two years since 1972. For each edition, he recalls, he “needed to write 8,000 words a day every day, seven days a week, during a five-month period, which is a heavy load.” Anthony Trollope “only wrote 5,000 words a day for his novels,” Mr. Barone says.
An almost peerless sage on American elections, Mr. Barone has been studying voters since he was 16. As a teenager in Detroit, he was “curious” about the 1960 presidential election. “Before we had electronic calculators, I had a 1961 World Almanac, and it had the vote totals for Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon.” He calculated percentages for every county in every state. “I got myself a Rand McNally Road Atlas and colored all the counties carried by Kennedy with an orange magic marker.”
This year he used higher-tech methods to compare Mr. Trump’s vote percentages in 2020 and 2024. He lists the states where the jump was greatest: “New York, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, Massachusetts, California and Illinois.” They’re among the most populous states, and they’re not “politically homogeneous.” What do they have in common? “They’re basically the states with the highest percentage of immigrants to pre-existing population over the last 10 to 15 years since immigration got cut very much short after the 2007-08 financial crisis.”
In New York, Mr. Trump received 37.7% of the vote in 2020 and around 44% in 2024 (this year’s numbers aren’t yet final). The respective figures are 41.3% and 46% in New Jersey, 51.2% and 56% in Florida, and 32.1% and 37% in Massachusetts. There’s “almost a one-on-one relationship between the percentage increase for Trump and the number of immigrants,” Mr. Barone says.
He describes this pattern as “utterly contrary to what conventional wisdom was” when Mr. Trump announced his candidacy in 2015. After the famous escalator descent at Trump Tower, Mr. Trump warned against Mexican “rapists” and complained that Mexico wasn’t “sending their best.” As Mr. Barone recalls, “just about all commentators—and I won’t suggest I was an exception—said, ‘This man is going to have a hard time attracting votes from people from immigrant backgrounds.’ It was commonly said that he was a racist, usually without any attempt at documenting that charge.”
On this score, Mr. Barone sticks up for Mr. Trump. “It strikes me that you can say Donald Trump is many bad things, but I think racist is really not one of them.” He was born and raised in the New York City borough of Queens—a famous melting pot, by many calculations the most diverse place on earth—and “did business with all sorts of people. He doesn’t seem to discriminate on the basis of background when dealing with people.” Still, given his campaign rhetoric, “no one would have predicted that you would see a drawing power with immigrants.”
So how did it happen? Mr. Barone starts by establishing a cultural baseline: “We have to recognize that he’s not seen as somebody who has a particular dislike of people of foreign origin.” He contrasts Mr. Trump with Pete Wilson, who served as governor of California and supported Proposition 187, a ballot measure that would have denied public services to illegal aliens. (It passed in 1994, but a court struck it down in 1998.) Mr. Wilson was intensely unpopular with the state’s Hispanics, who are mostly of Mexican descent. “Wilson made Hispanics angry,” Mr. Barone says, “because he was saying, basically, that Mexicans don’t work hard, which contradicts the Mexican self-image. Trump doesn’t go there. His focus is on keeping out or deporting illegals who are criminals. And who among us, Hispanics included, is in favor of having criminals as neighbors?”
Many immigrants, Mr. Barone suggests, saw their American Dream souring and voted accordingly. “Part of what we’re looking at is bad central city governance. This may also have had to do with the Covid restrictions that were in place, and the fact that most of these states—though notoriously not Florida—were really shut down by Covid ukases, as some critics might call them.” In a nutshell, he says, “bad civic policies drove immigrants to Trump.”
Mr. Barone is particularly hard on California, which he describes as having “the most beautiful climate,” “breathtaking scenery” and “great cultural institutions” and a terrible government. “How do you get people to leave paradise?” he asks, then answers: crime, rampant vagrancy, the Covid nanny-state, bad public schools, high taxes and housing shortages caused by Nimbyism and environmentalist absolutism.
The immigrants who can’t afford to flee the state moved toward Mr. Trump. “It’s an interesting political experiment because there wasn’t a lot of electioneering in these states,” Mr. Barone says. Most of the campaign focused on the seven swing states, all of which Mr. Trump carried. “The 43 nontarget states”—of which Mr. Trump carried 24 and lost 19 three times in a row—“provide a proving ground for public opinion. And we see that in the biggest states, with the kind of governance there is, the Republican Party gained.” Republican Florida and Texas also moved toward the GOP, as illustrated by their Senate elections: “Rick Scott, who won by a hair in 2018, won comfortably in Florida. And Ted Cruz, hard-pressed in 2018, won by a wider margin this time.”
Mr. Barone insists that the apparent Republican turn among immigrants shouldn’t surprise us. “Of those who’ve said, ‘Well, Republicans can’t win immigrant votes,’ I ask: Which was the dominant political party during the years of Ellis Island immigration, 1892 to 1914, and then again from 1918 to 1924? The Republicans.” Mr. Trump’s policies, “including greater immigrant restriction, tariffs and protectionism, are reminiscent of the Republicans in their 1894 to 1930 position, when they were the dominant party.”
The other political shift that grabs Mr. Barone’s attention is the change among black voters. Democrats have dominated this racial cohort since 1964, winning by a 91-point margin in 2008, when Barack Obama was first elected. “But you can only elect the first black president once,” Mr. Barone says. The party’s victory margin among black voters in 2024 narrowed to 77 points. In Wisconsin, Mr. Trump won 21% of the black vote (up from 8% in 2020); and 21% of black men nationwide voted for the Republican. The Democratic Party should have foreseen these shifts: A 2023 Gallup poll revealed that the percentage of black adults who considered themselves Democrats was 66%, down from 77% in 2020.
Read More Weekend Interviews
The Woman Trying to Talk the U.K. off the LedgeNovember 22, 2024
Will Trump Help Ukraine Win?November 22, 2024
What’s driving the change? “I think that it is not natural for a demographic group to vote 90-10 for one party or the other over a long period of time,” Mr. Barone says. “But it’s pretty obvious why this happened with black Americans.” After the Civil War, “they voted almost unanimously, where they were allowed to vote, for the Republicans. For the party of Lincoln. For the president and the party that freed the slaves.”
This continued until the 1930s, when many black voters were attracted to the New Deal. “Black voters are now running 60% to 70% for the Democrats, with cognizable percentages for the Republicans.” Dwight D. Eisenhower had substantial black support, and so did Richard Nixon in 1960.
Then came 1964. “Barry Goldwater, just as he’s about to be nominated the Republican candidate for president, casts a vote against the Civil Rights Act,” Mr. Barone says. “And Democratic candidates for president have been basically getting about 85% to 90% of black Americans, North and South, ever since.”
One reason can be found in black churches. “Many political reporters think it’s terrible for churches to engage in electioneering, but they don’t think that about black churches,” Mr. Barone says. “And I think there are valid historical reasons why that’s so.” Black churches have been “a center of community, a place where black Americans have had autonomy and been able to run their own affairs. They’ve produced musical traditions that are one of the great glories of America.” Since the days of slavery, black preachers have talked “about unity—that we have to stick together.”
This is a “rational appeal” to people who are “aware that they’re ineluctably identified as members of a group that will be discriminated against.” But life for black people in America has improved “beyond recognition,” Mr. Barone says. “My observation over the last 60 years—and I’ve been to all 50 states, all 435 congressional districts, and all 3,141 counties—that the condition of black Americans is much better. Not perfect, but much, much better.”
That eventually has political consequences. “After a while, some black voters are going to decide, well, the need for political unity, the need for casting big margins for one side to increase political clout so we won’t be mistreated, is less great than my concern over inflation, or illegal immigration or, yes, government-sponsored transgender surgery for prison inmates and illegal immigrants,” an American Civil Liberties Union proposal to which Ms. Harris assented in 2019.
Black Americans, like anyone else, may decide that “on the basis of some other issue that has arisen, that they’re going to vote for a different party, a different candidate than they really would’ve considered before. And I think that’s happening.” That explains some of the panic among black activist organizations, he says—the “grifters” of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as “respectable legacy institutions like the NAACP”—to talk up issues like police brutality to keep black political unity from coming undone.
Mr. Barone sees parallels between today’s black voters and yesteryear’s Catholics. A Catholic in the 1950s was “a member of a group that was not entirely comfortably integrated into the larger society. You had to avoid meat on Fridays. You had people cross themselves. They wore the ash on Ash Wednesday. They sent their kids to Catholic schools.” A famous Catholic high school in Manhattan, Regis—a selective school for boys with high test scores—“would not forward your transcript to a non-Catholic university.”
John F. Kennedy got 78% of Catholic votes in 1960; Lyndon B. Johnson 76% in 1964. “It was really, in many ways, a referendum on the Kennedy-Johnson administration,” Mr. Barone says. But in the years that followed, “Catholics, or white Catholics, haven’t voted more than 55% for either party. They’ve been a split constituency.”
Will the black vote be close to a similar split? “I think it’s on its way to happening,” Mr. Barone says. “How far that will go remains to be seen. But I don’t think we’ll see 90-10 voting again from black Americans in presidential elections. We won’t return to a 90-10 state of mind. And that’s because I don’t think the causes of black unity are there anymore. America has changed. And that’s the truth.”
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at the Classical Liberal Institute at New York University Law School.
