An election night watch party for President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday.
Credit...Jordan Gale for The New York Times

In Trump’s Win, G.O.P. Sees Signs of a Game-Changing New Coalition

Donald J. Trump picked up support among Latino and Black working-class voters, giving the party hope for a new way to win in a diversifying nation.

by · NY Times

Republicans have sounded alarms for more than a decade about the limits of their overwhelmingly white party. To stay competitive for the White House, strategists warned, they would need to bring more Black, Latino and other voters of color into the fold.

On Tuesday, Donald J. Trump showed how it could be done.

His victory over Vice President Kamala Harris was decisive, broad and dependent on voters from core Democratic constituencies. Results showed that Mr. Trump continued his dominance with the white, working-class voters who first propelled his political rise. But he also made modest gains in the suburbs and cities, and with Black voters, and even more significant inroads with Latinos.

Mr. Trump’s performance did not suddenly transform the Republican Party into the multiracial alliance of working-class voters that some strategists say is necessary for survival in the rapidly changing country. But he nudged it in that direction.

At a time when the nation is sharply divided — particularly between rich and poor, and between those with and without a college degree — even incremental shifts were enough to sweep Mr. Trump back into power and put him on track to win the popular vote. Conservative strategists who have pushed the party to broaden its appeal pointed to the changes as proof of concept. Democrats, who have long relied on the support of minority voters, agonized over the trends.

“The losses among Latinos is nothing short of catastrophic for the party,” said Representative Ritchie Torres, an Afro-Latino Democrat whose Bronx-based district is heavily Hispanic. Mr. Torres worried that Democrats were increasingly captive to “a college-educated far left that is in danger of causing us to fall out of touch with working-class voters.”

There was evidence of Mr. Trump’s inroads across the country. In the heavily blue-collar community of Fayette County, Pa., outside Pittsburgh, Mr. Trump won nearly 70 percent of the vote, expanding his margins by about five percentage points since 2020.

Nationally, Hispanic-majority counties on average shifted toward Mr. Trump by 10 percentage points. That included Yuma County, Ariz., a heavily Latino county along the southern border with Mexico, where Mr. Trump is on track to win by nearly 30 percentage points.

Mr. Trump’s gains with Black voters were less significant but still notable in smaller communities across Georgia. Hancock, Talbot and Jefferson Counties, all majority-Black counties with no more than 15,000 people, shifted toward Mr. Trump. The Trump campaign celebrated a victory in Baldwin County, Ga., where 42 percent of the population is Black. Republicans had not won the county for decades.

Asian American voters, who make up the fastest-growing eligible electorate in the country, also appeared to have drifted away from Democrats, according to exit polls and unofficial returns.

“The strength of Trump’s reach into the traditional Democratic coalition of voters of color was stunning,” said Daniel HoSang, a professor at Yale who has written about the rise of right-wing political attitudes among minority groups.

Ms. Harris’s defeat is not entirely explained by these voters’ embrace of Mr. Trump. After months of flagging voter enthusiasm, there were signs that many Democrats simply failed to show up in key party strongholds.

In Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit, unofficial results showed Ms. Harris had won 6 percent fewer votes than President Biden had four years ago.

And turnout declined about 6 percentage points in Philadelphia County, Pa., according to unofficial results. Ms. Harris’s vote total slipped while Mr. Trump’s increased.

But the common thread among those who did gravitate toward Mr. Trump appeared to be a working-class identity — regardless of neighborhood. Mr. Trump appeared to perform slightly better in some suburban areas, primarily those with large numbers of voters without a college degree.

“People kind of have this oversimplified narrative about suburbs,” said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster who has focused on his party’s appeal to Black and Latino voters.

Not all suburbs are filled with upper-income white moderates resistant to Mr. Trump, he suggested, adding that those areas are also home to many first- and second-generation immigrants who are bothered by illegal immigration.

Working-class voters were once aligned behind Democrats, while the Republican Party catered to the upper-income and business interests.

Mr. Trump made a point of shifting his policies to speak to these new Republican voters, although it was unclear how these new proposals would dovetail with the party’s longstanding aims to cut taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and to trim the social safety net.

He proposed eliminating the tax on tips, but, as president, he tried to make it easier for employers to pocket their workers’ tips. He said on the campaign trail that he would increase the number of tax deductions, which would directly undermine a central provision of his 2017 tax law. He vowed to increase manufacturing jobs across the country, even though the industry cut nearly 200,000 positions during his four years in office.

And yet, many working-class voters said Mr. Trump was a better bet to help their wallets.

Daniel Quiñones, 44, a real estate agent who also runs a dog kennel in Allentown, Pa., said he had voted for Democrats most of his life. This year, he cast his ballot for Mr. Trump because he now views the party as “pandering to the people — smiling, kissing babies, lying to your face.”

“They get in office and they literally do nothing for you,” he said about Democrats.

The former president and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, eschewed traditional efforts to reach minority voters. The campaign shut down “community centers” the Republican Party had created to build relationships in Black, Latino and Asian American communities. Instead, the Trump campaign focused on putting the candidate in people’s social media feeds, relying on podcasters, influencers and hip-hop artists to help spread its message.

The effect was that an often-rambling, blunt-speaking former president largely avoided conversations about race, and when he did engage, often prompted criticism. Speaking to the National Association of Black Journalists in July, Mr. Trump questioned Ms. Harris’s race and referred to himself as “the best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln.”

More often, Mr. Trump invited Latino and Black voters into his us-versus-them campaign, rallying them against elites, out-of-touch liberals and the undocumented immigrants he claimed were taking “Black jobs” and “totally destroying our Hispanic population.”

He used cultural issues like gender-affirming surgery for prisoners and transgender female participation in sports — issues that affect relatively few people — as broad metaphors for a left-wing ideology run amok.

At one point last month, about one-third of the Trump campaign’s television budget was devoted to a commercial that played on anti-trans prejudices. The campaign ran a similar ad in Spanish and another aimed at Black voters.

“Kamala is for they/them,” the narrator said at the end of the spot. “President Trump is for you.”

Many Latino voters were not turned off by Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. Polling showed that about one-third of Latino voters supported his policies for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

“Voters wanted responsible borders and an economy that worked for them,” said John Ashbrook, an adviser to the Preserve America PAC, a Republican super PAC that spent more than $115 million in crucial battlegrounds in the presidential contest.

Mr. Ashbrook said his group had found that its anti-immigration ads consistently tipped persuadable Latino and male voters to Mr. Trump. Latino voters were looking for more economic security and safer neighborhoods “just like everybody else,” he said.

The result was a far cry from the party’s infamous “autopsy” report following Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, which urged Republicans to adopt more compassionate immigration policies and paths to citizenship for certain undocumented people already in the country.

Instead, Mr. HoSang said, the winning formula was much closer to what Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist in the White House, has called “inclusive nationalism.”

“All of the most aggressive tones of the Trump campaign around gender, immigration and crime seemed to effectively broaden the MAGA base,” Mr. HoSang said. “The results challenge the foundations of racial liberalism that have been dominant since the civil rights movement.”

Amy Qin contributed reporting from Las Vegas.

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