How the Races Will Vote

Credit: Johnny Silvercloud via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Every election, we hear the same thing: This year, blacks will leave the Democratic planation and vote Republican. Naturally conservative Hispanics will join the GOP. Asian-Americans will revolt against affirmative action and back Republicans. There is another variation popular on the Dissident Right: The GOP will finally consolidate the white vote and build a nationalist majority.

None of these things ever happen; none will happen this year. Yet there are a few interesting trends. First, Donald Trump really does seem likely to win a larger of share of blacks and especially Hispanics. Second, the divide between men and women, or more accurately, between non-college-educated men and college-educated single women, is becoming as important as the divide between blacks and whites. Third, despite this, the racial divide will grow ever more salient as changing demographics in the South force the GOP to hunt for a new majority in the Midwest, especially in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

According to the RealClearPolitics average of national polls from October 11 – October 24, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are tied in the national popular vote. However, because of the Electoral College, former president Donald Trump is edging ahead in most projections of who will win, including from Nate Silver, 538, and the RealClearPolitics averages. Of course, this could change by the time you read this.

Larger patterns remain the same: Mr. Trump is leading the white vote, Mrs. Harris is winning blacks by a huge margin, and Democrats enjoy a big advantage among the most educated voters. The signs of change are at the margins.

According to the GenForward October 2024 Survey of voters 18–40, more than a quarter of black men will vote for Mr. Trump and 58 percent will back Mrs. Harris. Cornell West and Jill Stein both get miniscule support, with Robert F. Kennedy getting about 5 percent — absurd, given that he has endorsed President Trump. President Trump is actually winning young Hispanic men, while losing Hispanic women. The candidates are basically tied among young whites, while Vice President Harris has a strong lead among Asian-Americans. A story on the poll touted President Trump’s strong support among minorities (by historical standards) but buried the lead: He is struggling among young whites.

The most recent Morning Consult poll has better news for Kamala Harris, who gets 85 percent of the black vote compared to President Trump’s 13 percent.

An October 23, 2024 Suffolk poll includes the raw data for its findings. It gives Donald Trump just a six-point lead among white voters, but Kamala Harris leads by 72 percent to 17 percent among blacks. President Trump has a commanding 11-point lead among Hispanics. However, these polls have smaller sample sizes for blacks and Hispanics so the margins of error are greater. It is very unlikely President Trump is winning Hispanics by double digits. If that were true, there would be almost no way he could lose. Still, if Kamala Harris wins only about 70 percent of the black vote and just a slim majority of the Hispanic vote, she will surely lose. Joe Biden won an estimated 90 percent of the black vote and 66 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2020.

The New York Times/Siena Poll — considered one of the more reputable and accurate — offers a detailed breakdown of Hispanic and black voters polled in late September to early October. It gives Kamala Harris a 56 percent to 37 percent majority among Hispanics. However, Donald Trump is almost even with Kamala Harris among Hispanic men, losing by just three points, 48 percent to 45 percent. Hispanic women support her 62 to 31 percent. While a plurality of men say the economy is the most important issue, Hispanic women are split between abortion and the economy as the top issue. Small minorities believe “racism/racial issues” are the top issue, but the youngest cohort (18–24) is the most likely to believe this. Amusingly, no respondents seem think the war in Ukraine is a top issue and almost none feels that way about the war in Gaza.

Black voters are far more monolithic. A solid 83 percent of black women support Kamala Harris, compared to just 12 percent for Donald Trump. Black men back Mrs. Harris by a margin of 70 percent to 20 percent, giving her a 63 percent advantage among black voters. A plurality of black women rank abortion as the most important issue, compared to the economy for black men. Small minorities of black voters think racism/racial issues are the most important. Interestingly, among young black voters, none thinks crime is a top issue either.

The most recent New York Times/Siena poll, which just came out today, has a more favorable outlook for Mr. Trump. The contest is tied at 48 percent to 48 percent. Majorities of both white and non-white voters think the country is headed in the wrong direction, though the latter are more likely to have a favorable opinion. Whites support Mr. Trump by 54 percent to 43 percent. Blacks back Mrs. Harris by 81 percent to 12 percent. Hispanics support Mrs. Harris by 52 percent to 42 percent, while “others” back Mr. Trump by 50 percent to 44 percent. If Donald Trump can win more than 40 percent of the Hispanic vote, it will be a historic success for the GOP.

A recent Economist/YouGov poll taken from October 19–22 gives Vice President Harris a three-point overall lead. Among whites, Mr. Trump leads by 53 percent to 42 percent. However, Mrs. Harris enjoys 80 percent support from blacks, compared to 13 percent for Donald Trump. Hispanics also back Kamala Harris, 55 percent to 38 percent. All racial groups say inflation/prices is the most important issue. However, 13 percent of blacks say civil rights is most important, compared to small minorities of other groups. Fourteen percent of whites and 16 percent of Hispanics say immigration is the most important issue, though possibly for different reasons.

AtlasIntel gives Donald Trump a national lead, but its racial breakdowns seem questionable. Whites favor Donald Trump 54.9 percent to 44 percent. Kamala Harris wins the Hispanic vote by just 53.4 percent to 44.9 percent, and blacks by just 67.6 percent to 32.2 percent. Asian voters are remarkably close, 53.1 percent to 46.9 percent for Mrs. Harris. AtlasIntel also breaks with other polls, with Donald Trump maintaining a consistent, slim lead from July 2024 until the present, while others showed Kamala Harris surging over the summer. Donald Trump also apparently leads on who voters trust on every important issue except environmental protection, abortion, and medicine, with Mrs. Harris enjoying only an eight-point lead on abortion. This seems unrealistic, especially the black vote.

Nonetheless, the claim that President Trump is going to win many black voters has become a major part of campaign coverage. “Black voters drift from Democrats,” said The New York Times in mid-October, noting that a drop in black support could cost Kamala Harris the election. The Harris campaign is nervous, recently mobilizing Barack Obama to tell black voters to get in line. He blamed black men for not being enthusiastic about a woman president. “Part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that,” he said. The Harris campaign is also giving $3,750,000 to various civil rights and religious groups to rally black turnout. Whether blacks turn out, and whether they support Democrats by their traditional monolithic margins, will probably decide Georgia and North Carolina, and both are must-win states for Mr. Trump.

Why is Kamala Harris having such a hard time winning black voters, especially black men? Don Lemon said that when he toured swing states, black men told him they were voting Trump because he had given them stimulus checks. He said he had to “correct” them and explain that Democrats sent the checks. The loss of black men, means a sex gap is developing, though less than for whites. Blacks will still vote Democrat, but perhaps not by as great a percentage, and not as many in absolute terms.

When Mitt Romney lost in 2012, the Republican Party infamously decided in its “autopsy” that supporting amnesty was key to winning Hispanics, whom the GOP had lost by a crushing 71 to 27 percent. Yet it is President Donald Trump who has been increasing his share. After essentially tying Mitt Romney’s performance in 2016, he won 38 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2020 and is now polling higher. According to an NBC/Telemundo poll taken in September, Kamala Harris leads only by 54 percent to 40 percent. This is a much lower Democratic lead than usual. Donald Trump appears to be doing what George W. Bush and his repeated amnesty attempts could only dream of.

But if Mr. Trump is gaining among non-whites, why is the election even close? It’s his surprising weakness among some whites. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) infamously argued in January that MAGA could afford to lose “Karen” (white women) because for every Karen lost, a “Julio or Jamal” would sign up. That may be short-sighted. White women are 36 percent of the electorate, and CNN’s Harry Enten says that Donald Trump may turn in the worst performance among that group of any GOP candidate this century. For more than a quarter of women in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the most important issue is abortion.

The repeal of Roe v. Wade is possibly Mr. Trump’s greatest political liability. It is also the biggest reason to avoid assuming the polls are biased against Donald Trump the same way they were in 2016 and 2020 — because in the post-Roe mid-term election of 2022, they were biased against Democrats. The Trump campaign is clearly aware of this and is trying to blunt the issue, with Melania Trump explicitly saying she is pro-choice. Nontheless, abortion is possibly the Kamala Harris campaign’s most powerful weapon in swing states. Democrats are targeting white working-class women in those states with an expensive, years-long effort to win away former Trump supporters — especially by talking about abortion. A poll of moderate white women taken in August found that more than 80 percent of respondents would consider a candidate’s abortion stance when voting. Of all respondents, a plurality supported Kamala Harris by 46 percent to 34 percent.

The Harris campaign is also trying to hold its own beachhead in rural white areas, especially in swing states such as Pennsylvania, by appealing to moderate whites. The campaign’s pitch to them, touting the endorsement of Liz Cheney, fits with this strategy. The closing argument of the Kamala Harris campaign is, quite literally, that Donald Trump is a fascist and a threat to the Constitution. Such wild rhetoric is not meant for non-whites but for Republicans who might have been comfortable with Mitt Romney but not Mr. Trump. “I don’t want Trump,” said one older Republican interviewed by the Times. “He’s threatening our government, our way of life, and I’m really concerned about what happens should he win.”

As a bonus, they also had a breakdown of Carbon County – 63-37 Trump. He won it by 32 in ’20 via 65.4-33.3. *If true*, what these county numbers suggest is Harris holding up fine with rurals/whites, some further leftward shifts in the surburbs, and very little minority erosion.

— Joshua Smithley (@blockedfreq) October 24, 2024

The danger for Donald Trump is that the Republicans once again put winning minority voters over maximizing white, working-class turnout. President Trump won an increased share of the Hispanic vote in 2020, but it did him no good because he didn’t get enough white working-class voters. What the Republicans need is the kind of turnout machine for rural and working class whites that Democrats have with black churches. Though the messaging is far better than any white advocates would have expected a decade ago, Donald Trump’s campaign has failed to make the kind of targeted and explicit appeals to white voters that blacks, Hispanics, and other groups take for granted. If the Democrats win, it will be because they convinced just enough whites to refrain from voting for Donald Trump.

Jared Taylor has highlighted Mr. Trump’s failure to denounce open Democrat support for the worst parts of critical race theory and Mrs. Harris’s insistence that “we all [all races] end up in the same place.” Mr. Taylor argues that pushing these points will make whites angry enough to go out and vote but will not drive away many non-whites because the race preferences it would take to achieve “equity” are so obviously unfair.

Ultimately, with the election almost certain to come down to the heavily white states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, President Trump does not need “Jamal” or “Julio” as much as he needs the “Johns” and “Karens” to come out for him one last time. The question is whether he has done enough.