This is from the New York Times. They point out that race only played a part in Trump’s 2016 win, and there was a more pervasive cause, the shift of working class non white people to the right. This is an excerpt:
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Skewed polls?
Since Trump’s victory, a defining feature of American politics has been the rightward shift of voters of color. Asian, Black and Hispanic voters have all become less likely to support Democratic candidates and more likely to support Republicans, including Trump.
In each group, the trend is pronounced among working-class voters, defined as those without a four-year college degree. (The Democrats’ performance among nonwhite voters with a college degree has held fairly stable.)
By The New York Times | Source: CatalistIf anything, Democrats’ weakness among voters of colors appears to have intensified since 2022. Among white voters, President Biden has about as much support as he did four years ago, Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, has pointed out. But Biden’s support among Black, Hispanic and Asian voters has plummeted. (My colleagues Jennifer Medina and Ruth Igielnik focused on the Latino shift in a recent article.)
This chart compares the 2020 results with the findings from the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll:
By The New York Times | Sources: Catalist (2020) and New York Times/Siena College poll (2024)As John Burn-Murdoch, the chief data reporter at The Financial Times, wrote last week: “I think this is simultaneously one of the most important social trends in the U.S. today, and one of the most poorly understood.”
This newsletter is the first of a two-part series about the development. Today, I hope to convince you that the trend is real and not simply, as some Democrats hope, a reflection of inaccurate poll numbers. In part two, I’ll look more closely at the likely causes.