In the days since Donald Trumpâ€s victory became official, one of the great debates about Trumpism has come roaring back: To what extent can his rise to power be seen as a product of Americaâ€s divisions over race?
One side, focusing on Trumpâ€s gains with Black and especially Hispanic voters, argues that it makes little sense to believe his victory was primarily a product of racism. The other, noting that both groups still went for Harris in absolute terms, argues that the election results still must be viewed as primarily revolving around the countryâ€s racial divide.
A closer look at the data suggests that both takes are wrong — or, at least, require more nuance. Trumpâ€s victory was and wasnâ€t about race, as his winning coalition included many different groups with many different motivations. Understanding which kind of voter mattered, and in what ways, is crucial to getting the racial politics of 2024 right.
We can safely say itâ€s difficult to explain the shifts in the electorate between 2020 and 2024 by claiming that voters were motivated by Trumpâ€s incendiary racial rhetoric.
Itâ€s not just that Trump gained with minorities; itâ€s that he gained with nearly everyone, winning new votes in places with all sorts of different kinds of voters. To explain such a consistent national shift to the right, you need to look to factors that unite the population rather than divide it. This is why the best post-election analyses have given pride of place to inflation and anti-incumbent sentiment, two factors that appear to be present across many different groups in the American electorate.
At the same time, we can also say that race played an essential role in Trump being atop the Republican ticket in the first place.
There was a moment in 2021, right after January 6, when it looked as though Trump might finally be exiled from the Republican Party. The reason the GOP elite blanched is the same reason why Trump walked to victory in the 2024 primary: He has a devoted, unshakeable fan base among Republican primary voters. The research is crystal clear that many of these voters really are motivated by racial antagonism.
The 2024 election saw a Trump base motivated in large part by fear of a changing America entering into a coalition with many economically minded voters who represent that change. Both groups voted for Trump, albeit for very different reasons.
Such a coalition might represent a fundamental realignment in American politics, the “multiracial working-class conservatism†long dreamed of by Republican strategists. Or it could represent a temporary alliance that will be severely tested, perhaps even sundered, when the reality of Trumpâ€s policy agenda becomes clear to the electorate. At this point, we donâ€t know.
But we can at least say, with confidence, that Trumpâ€s racial support in 2024 is more complicated than simplistic analyses might lead you to believe.
No, race and racism didnâ€t cause the 2024 pro-GOP swing
The argument for a race-focused explanation of 2024 focuses primarily on the well-documented fact that America is politically polarized by race. Trump won a clear majority of white voters while Harris won a massive majority of Black voters. In this argument, what happened in 2024 was a reflection primarily of anti-Blackness, directed at the first Black woman to run for president, by a country in the grips of reactionary racial panic.
“[The] vote was about perceived loss of status,†Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Timesâ€s star reporter on racial issues, posted on X. “What elected Trump was demographic anxiety — his campaign ran explicitly on it, explicitly! — and so many people whose job it is to dispassionately deal with facts still do not want to deal with that.â€
Iâ€m sympathetic to the underlying theory of Trumpâ€s support. So sympathetic, in fact, that I argue in my book that itâ€s the most important reason he rose to power back in 2016.
But if what weâ€re trying to explain is the top-line election result — why enough voters shifted from Biden to Trump to swing the election — itâ€s only of limited utility.
Were the big shifts between 2020 and 2024 to be driven by the kind of backlash Hannah-Jones is describing, youâ€d expect a specific kind of uneven distribution in the vote patterns. Youâ€d expect Trump to run up the score with white voters in rural red areas while facing some backlash from Latino and especially Black voters.
Thatâ€s not what happened. Trump improved on his 2020 performance with nearly every demographic group across the country. His biggest improvements came in heavily non-white and urban areas — precisely the places where a race-focused explanation would expect him to do the worst. And white voters swung inconsistently, rather than as a rule.
Currently, the best way to understand these demographic swings comes from county-level reporting of results. You can look at the tallies in counties that are heavily made up of one group or another, compare to other counties and previous election results, and draw some (limited) inferences about whatâ€s happened. In the coming months and years, weâ€ll get more useful data on individuals through databases like the Catalist voter file; but for now, we have to make do.
While the US electorate is still polarized by race — Harris won a clear national majority of non-white voters and Trump won a clear majority of white voters — racial polarization declined significantly in 2024. A tally by the New York Times found that Trump improved his margin in Latino-majority counties by 13.3 percentage points, Native American-majority counties by 10 points, and Black-majority counties by 2.7 points. (Note that these numbers will likely change as data from California, an extremely slow-counting state, continues to trickle in).
The pro-Trump shift across majority-minority counties was strikingly consistent. Texas border counties with largely Mexican American residents lurched hard toward Trump; Starr County, which is 97 percent Latino, moved a staggering 75 points in his direction between 2016 and 2024. There were also notable 2020-2024 swings in Florida counties with different Latino populations, like Miami-Dade (where half the Latino population is Cuban) and Osceola (home to many of the stateâ€s Puerto Rican residents).
Itâ€s possible that some of these minority voters themselves had racially conservative — maybe even racist — views. This is an election that featured Mark “Iâ€m a Black Nazi†Robinson as the GOP candidate for North Carolina governor. Previous research has found that Trumpâ€s support among non-whites is correlated with support for existing social hierarchies.
I donâ€t want to deny that this is part of the story of the 2020-2024 shift; itâ€s the kind of thing that will be hard to prove or disprove until we have much more granular data. But the evidence we have suggests anti-minority sentiment among minorities isnâ€t the entirety, or even the biggest part, of what happened.
There are a few good reasons to think this is so.
First, the uniformity of the shift. We didnâ€t see some minority groups swing toward Trump and some toward Harris; we saw a uniform move toward Trump across different racial minority demographics. Black people, Native Americans, Arab Americans, Latinos, and Asians of all national origins — every single one moved in a pro-Trump direction.
Second, we can look to the white population as a benchmark. If whites shifted toward Trump even more dramatically than minorities, that would be consistent with an election whose shifts were triggered by activated racial resentment. If whites shifted by a smaller margin or even moved toward Harris, then that would suggest something else is at work.
What we saw looks more like the latter. While Trump saw overall gains among white voters, they were smaller than his gains among Latinos and far more uneven, with Harris actually making gains in certain demographics and areas. An analysis of Michigan results by the Guardian, for example, found that “the only areas in Michigan in which there were swings to the Democrats were areas with a higher proportion of white voters.â€
There are two other demographic trends worth looking at: urbanicity and college education.
Generally speaking, urban counties and counties with large numbers of college graduates tend to have larger percentages of residents with left-wing views on cultural issues like race than rural and lower-educated ones. In a racial backlash election, youâ€d expect those counties to swing in Harrisâ€s direction while rural and less college-educated ones moved more into Trumpâ€s column.
Yet in 2024, urban counties actually swung harder to Trump than rural counties (where he was already extremely strong and thus had only limited room to make gains). Meanwhile, counties with relatively high levels of residents with college graduates (35 percent or over) swung to Trump by relatively similar margins as counties with fewer college graduates.
Of course, these results are not the final word. When doing county-level analysis, political scientists often warn against something called the ecological fallacy — making inferences about individual residents of an area based on the characteristics of the whole. It could be, for example, that a chunk of racist voters who live in majority-minority counties, cities, and highly educated areas swung hard for Trump in 2024.
At this point, that seems far less probable than a well-documented alternative explanation: that Trumpâ€s big gains come from a combination of anti-incumbent sentiment and a voter backlash to inflation.
The 2024 election might not be about race, but Trumpism is
As much as I think the 2024 results werenâ€t primarily about race, some observers are taking this observation way too far by arguing that it disproves the idea that racism drives any part of Trumpâ€s support.
“Trump has run three times. Each time he has gotten a higher share of the black and Hispanic vote than the last. Indeed, he has done better with these demos than any Republican in 50 years. The â€کracism†theory of Trumpâ€s appeal belongs in the graveyard of [political science],†the prominent commentator Coleman Hughes posted on X.
This is far too sweeping. “Trumpâ€s appeal†is not just one thing; like any candidate, he appeals to different voters for different reasons. Changes in minority vote totals canâ€t tell us, for example, why white support for Trump remains so durable inside the Republican Party.
This is a crucial question because it explains why Trump is on the ballot this time despite real intra-party resistance. And the most important answer, though by no means the only one, has to do with the Republican baseâ€s reactionary racial politics.
After January 6, 2021, Republican elites seem poised to kick him to the curb. Yet when Republicans had a chance to act — by voting to convict him in the Senate and declare him ineligible for public office — they didnâ€t. They backed down for the same reason Trump would romp through the primary despite a robust-on-paper challenge from Gov. Ron DeSantis: Republican voters love him. They love him so much that any Republican who openly defied him would face serious political blowback, and potentially even physical harm.
There are many, many reasons why Trump has secured such a hold on the GOP; it is not fair to term all of his base presumptive racists. And yet, the uncomfortable fact remains: The evidence that Trumpâ€s support stems primarily from the racial resentments of the Republican base is overwhelming.
Unlike the limited county-level analyses of the 2024 election results, research tying Trumpâ€s base support to racial factors has been able to employ complete and granular datasets on individual voters. Scholars have used gold-standard political science tools, things like natural experiments and regression analyses of massive national surveys. Theyâ€ve tested theories of Trump support against competing explanations, like economic deprivation and general anti-system sentiment, and overwhelmingly found that racial issues provide the stronger explanation. Theyâ€ve even uncovered good evidence that the turn against democracy among Republicans, including the willingness to accept the Big Lie about the 2020 elections, is primarily concentrated among Trump supporters who hold high levels of anti-minority resentment.
Nothing about the 2024 results should cause us to doubt these well-established findings. Instead, they should give us an opportunity to take a more sophisticated understanding of the role race plays in the Trump coalition.
Given the longstanding and well-documented body of research on Trump and race, it is fair to say that Trumpism as a political movement is in large part driven by white racial anxiety. It is one factor among many driving Republicans to back Trump to the hilt, but clearly the most influential.
This suggests the 2024 Trump coalition is an alliance between a critical mass of racially resentful whites and others with very different motivations, including minority voters who physically represent the social change his base despises. Some Trump general election supporters were racially resentful; others were simply fed up with inflation and the Biden-Harris administration. For others, it might be some combination of both.
This is how politics works in a large and diverse country. People who differ, perhaps even hate each other, can end up voting for the same candidate for different reasons. And if we fail to appreciate that, we will fail to truly grasp what just happened and what it might mean about Americaâ€s future.
