Jason Riley, as usual nails it!
Trump Might Have Won the First Postracial Election
Black and Hispanic voters defect from Democrats, who have long relied on identity-politics appeals.
By Jason L. Riley, WSJ
Nov. 12, 2024 5:32 pm ET
When Barack Obama won the White House in 2008, it was the first time since 1992 that a Democratic president’s party also ran Congress. Democrats were giddy in anticipation of a political realignment reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 or Ronald Reagan in 1980, but it never emerged. Republicans took the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014. Then came Donald Trump.
Republicans ran the table last week, though this recent history might serve as a cautionary tale for reading too much into the results. What’s clear is that Mr. Trump’s popularity has grown since he left office, to the astonishment of liberal journalists, who refuse to let facts interfere with their worldview. Democrats thought they could use the courts to keep the former president off the ballot, bankrupt him and possibly put him in prison. Those efforts not only failed but were counterproductive. Voters saw Mr. Trump as the victim of partisan prosecutions. Worse for Democrats, they also saw him as the answer to four years of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
In 2016, Mr. Trump won in part by bringing new voters to the polls. This year he won by taking votes from the other team. Democrats used to carry people who made less than $50,000 and who lacked a college degree. Republicans now win both groups, and they have cut the Democratic advantage among voters under 30 in half since the Obama presidency. To woo more female voters, Democrats elevated the abortion issue this year, but the result was disappointing.
“Harris performed much worse than Biden among voters who said they thought abortion should be legal in most cases—even though the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in between the two elections,” CNN reported. “Four years ago, 26% of the electorate held that opinion, and Biden won them by 38 points. This year, 33% held that opinion, and Harris won them by just 3 points.” The media hammered away at the supposed threat to reproductive rights, but polling consistently showed that the issue was never as big a concern as the economy, inflation and border security.
Much is rightly being made of Mr. Trump’s appeal to nonwhite voters and his ability to diversify the GOP coalition. According to NBC News, since 2012 there has been a 15-point shift toward Republicans among black voters, a 32-point shift among Asians, and a 38-point shift among Latinos. That this trend continued in a presidential election with a woman of black and Indian heritage at the top of the Democratic ticket is even more remarkable. Mr. Trump won more than 20% of black men and more than half of Hispanic men, according to exit polls. If this wasn’t the country’s first postracial election, voters took a big step in that direction.
For liberals this is a terrifying thought, because so much of the Democratic Party’s infrastructure is built around appeals to racial and ethnic identity. Have you noticed how the left is trying to turn “colorblind” into a dirty word? If economic status and cultural sensibilities are replacing race and ethnicity as the more reliable lens for discerning voter preferences, the left has its work cut out. What Mr. Trump understood and Democrats didn’t is that what distinguishes black and Hispanic voters in 2024 is their working-class status more so than their skin color. And what determined their vote is their economic well-being, not fear that Mr. Trump is a raging bigot who threatens democracy.
The Biden administration’s biggest mistake with minority voters was almost certainly the neglect of the border, which it assumed voters would write off as a Fox News obsession. Those who study the economics of immigration, however, know that migrants are far more likely to compete with one another than with the native population for jobs, wages and housing. Millions of unvetted foreign nationals flooded the country in the past four years, and the lion’s share settled in migrant communities, where they caused the most disruption.
It’s no surprise that Latinos responded in frustration. When Eastern European Jews began migrating to the U.S. in large numbers in the 1800s, they met resistance from German Jews who had come decades earlier and put down roots. And when rural blacks began migrating out of the South by the millions in the first part of the 20th century and transforming Northern cities both economically and culturally, Northern blacks resented the newcomers. Mr. Trump turned Hispanics into swing voters for the first time in decades, but he got a lot of help from Democrats. If black voters are headed in the same direction, it’s another welcome political trend.
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