How the GOP Became a (More) Multicultural Party

It’s been decades since we last saw a winning Republican coalition as multicultural as this one. Not every vote has been counted yet and the exit polls aren’t identical, but we can cobble together enough numbers now for a picture to emerge.

Four years ago, according to NBC’s exit polls, Hispanics favored Democrat Joe Biden over Republican Donald Trump, 65 percent to 32 percent. This year, Vice President Kamala Harris appears to have gotten just 52 percent of the Latin vote, the worst showing for a Democrat since 2004, while Trump received 46 percent, the best showing for a Republican in modern times. (Yes: Trump did better than George W. Bush, a man whose Texas training always had him outperforming most Republicans among Latino voters.) Among Hispanic men, Trump won an outright majority of 55 percent. Trump carried several heavily Mexican-American counties in South Texas that used to be Democratic strongholds, including one—Starr County—that last went Republican in 1892.

NBC has Harris carrying the Asian vote, but it shifted five points to the right. African Americans are still overwhelmingly Democrats, but black men have gone from voting 13 percent Republican in 2016 to 19 percent in 2020 and now 20 percent in 2024, according to Edison Research. Overall this year, The Independent notes, about one in three nonwhite voters backed Trump.

The movement in this direction had been visible for a while—you’ll note that the real bump in Trump’s support among African-American men happened four years ago, not this time. But before this month, people had more room to dismiss it: to suggest that those Hispanic Republicans were mostly white Latinos, or refugees from socialist countries, or employees of the Border Patrol. This time the trend is almost impossible to ignore. Minority support for the GOP has grown, not shrunk, over the last year. We may have to wait till the post-Trump era to find out to what extent that happened despite Donald Trump and to what extent it happened because of him. But more and more, this resembles the movement of many “white ethnic” constituencies—Irish, Italian, Polish, and so on—out of the New Deal coalition in the 1960s and ’70s.

Since Democrats often go out of their way to present themselves as the party of racial justice, many of them have a hard time making sense of this. But it shouldn’t be surprising that a Korean business owner would like Republican economic policies, that a Mexican pro-lifer would like Republican abortion policies, or that a black man living in a declining Democratic city would object to the ways his town is poorly run. If the GOP weren’t so prone to self-sabotage, those voters might have started shifting earlier. Nor should it be surprising if some of the people whose families have already immigrated to America are less interested in bringing in more newcomers behind them. That’s a familiar dynamic in immigration politics.

Above all, it shouldn’t be surprising if one of the biggest recent political developments in the U.S. (and elsewhere) has started to seep across racial lines. Voters with college degrees have become increasingly likely to be Democrats, and those without college degrees have become increasingly likely to be Republicans. This is not, as some of the crasser interpretations would have it, because Democrats are smarter. It is because that there are politically salient differences between people in professions that require college degrees and people in professions that don’t: different material interests, different languages for discussing the issues that don’t directly affect those interests, different cultural influences shaping those discussions. And those divisions have become more central to electoral politics.

This does not mean anything so crude as “people who went to college are on one side of the culture wars, and people who didn’t are on the other.” There are, after all, plenty of degreeless Americans who like to have sex with people whose genitals match their own. And indeed, survey data suggest that the general population, including the Republican part of it, is more socially liberal on questions of race and sexual orientation than it was a decade ago. But there is the sort of social liberalism that is summed up by the phrase live and let live, and there is the sort summed up by a middle manager briskly strolling into a room, dropping a six-pound tome on the table, and announcing: Here are the new rules. We will email you the updates each Tuesday. To a lot of people outside that college-educated tome-dropper’s social class, including some of the people the fat rulebook is theoretically there to help, that second approach looks more like micromanagement than liberation. The more Democrats are associated with it, the worse for them—and the worse for the buried live-and-let-live cause.

Needless to say, knowledge-class Republicans have countless ways to alienate people too. The number of Americans interested in listening to the ramblings of an anti-trans obsessive probably isn’t much larger than the number interested in listening to a lecture on how to make punctuation more inclusive. But after years of keeping culturally or economically conservative minorities pent up in their party, the Democrats currently have more to lose.

The wildest thing about this development may be the number of the Republicans who don’t seem any more capable than the Democrats of wrapping their heads around it. I still see right-wingers warning that immigration is a plot to import a blue majority. Trump’s gains with minorities are not just a rebuke to all the progressives who assumed nonwhite voters would belong to them forever; they’re a rebuke to all the conservatives who agreed with them.

Along those lines, let’s check in with the group that loomed largest in the right-wing fears of the first two decades of this century. At the end of the 20th century, there were some tentative moves on the right to expand the alliance of socially conservative Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, and Jews to include socially conservative Muslims as well, inching toward the day when the sorts of folks who talk about “Judeo-Christian values” start invoking “Abrahamic values” instead. 9/11 brought that effort to a crashing halt. But then the Gaza war scrambled the picture yet again, opening a space not just for protest votes against an administration funding Israel’s side of the war but for Islamoconservatives to rethink their alliances on a deeper level.

There hasn’t been a clear-cut nationwide Muslim movement toward Trump, who isn’t exactly a Gaza dove himself; the data we have so far on the Muslim vote is contradictory, with different organizations offering different tentative results. But we can see how people cast their ballots in the two Michigan towns that in the 2010s were most likely to send SHARIA LAW IS COMING TO THE U.S.!!! stories rippling through the right-wing press. In Hamtramck, America’s first majority-Muslim city, Harris just barely squeaked by Trump, 46 percent to 43 percent, with 9 percent backing the Green Party’s Jill Stein. (One of Trump’s supporters in Hamtramck was Mayor Ameer Ghalib, who endorsed him in September.) In nearby Dearborn—America’s first majority-Arab city, though not all of those Arabs are Muslims—Trump won outright: He got 42 percent and Harris got 36 percent. A full 18 percent voted for Stein, a Jew picking up Islamic support like she was Evan McMullin among the Mormons.

Depending on what happens next in the Middle East, it’s not hard to imagine a future where a lot of those Muslim votes move back into the Democratic column. But it’s also not that hard to imagine a future where the next SHARIA LAW IS COMING TO THE U.S.!!! screed appears on the Occupy Democrats Facebook feed. Me, I’ll hope for a future where neither major party thinks of minority voters as either something to take for granted or a no-go zone.

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