Aisha Tukur
Donald Trump swept to victory on Tuesday by chipping away at groups of voters which Democrats once believed would help them win the White House for a generation.
After Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, many triumphantly claimed that the liberal voting coalition which had elected the first black president was growing more powerful, as the makeup of America changed.
Older, white conservatives were dying off, and non-white Americans were projected to be in the majority by 2044. College-educated professionals, younger people, blacks, Latinos and other ethnic minorities, and blue-collar workers were part of a “coalition of the ascendant”.
These voters were left-leaning on cultural issues and supportive of an active federal government and a strong social safety net. And they constituted a majority in enough states to ensure a Democratic lock on the Electoral College – and the presidency.
“Demography,” these left-wing optimists liked to say, “is destiny.” Sixteen years later, however, that destiny appears to have turned to dust.
Cracks began forming when non-college educated voters slipped away from the Democrats in midterm elections in 2010 and 2014. They then broke en masse to Trump in 2016. While Joe Biden, with his working-class-friendly reputation built over half a century, won enough back to take the White House in 2020, his success proved to be only a temporary reprieve.
This year, Trump supplemented his gains with the blue-collar workers by also cutting into the Democratic margins among young, Latino and black voters. He has carved up the coalition of the ascendant.
According to exit polls, Trump won:
– 13% of the black vote in 2024 compared to Republican John McCain’s 4% against Obama
– 46% of the Latino vote this time, while McCain got 31% in 2008
– 43% of voters under 30 against the 32% for McCain
– 56% of those without a college degree – back in 2008, it was Obama who won a majority
Speaking on Thursday after his comeback victory, Trump celebrated his own diverse coalition of voters.
“I started to see realignment could happen because the Democrats are not in line with the thinking of the country,” the president-elect told NBC News.
Immigration and identity politics
Trump did it with a hard-line message on immigration that included border enforcement and mass deportations – policies that Biden and the Democrats recoiled from when they took power back from Trump in 2021, lest they anger immigrant rights activists in their liberal base.
Illegal border crossings reached record levels under the Biden administration, with more than eight million encounters with migrants at the border with Mexico.
“If you watch a video from Hillary Clinton back in 2008 in the primaries, she talks about making sure there’s wall-building, making sure that that immigrants who violate the law get deported, making sure everybody learns English,” said Kevin Marino Cabrera, a Republican commissioner in Miami-Dade County. “It’s funny how far to the left [the Democrats] have gone.”
This week, Trump became the first Republican since 1988 to win that heavily Latino county in Florida. He also won Starr County in south Texas, with its 97% Latino population, with 57% of the vote. In 2008, only 15% of the county voted for McCain, the Republican.
Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican strategist who specialises in Latino voting trends, told the BBC that the problem with “demography is destiny” was that it risked treating all non-white Americans as an “aggrieved racial minority”. “But that is not and nor has it ever been the way Latinos have viewed themselves,” he added.
“I hate that if you’re black, you’ve got to be a Democrat or you hate black people and you hate your community,” Kenard Holmes, a 20-year-old student in South Carolina, told the BBC during the presidential primaries earlier this year. He said he agreed with Republicans on some things and felt Democratic politicians took black voters for granted.
