Trump’s Vaunted Multiracial Coalition Is Dead

After Donald Trump’s victory in 2024, one narrative in particular was pervasive throughout the pundit class: Democrats were declining among voters of color. The Republicans were becoming a more multiracial party, many political experts claimed, and it had been silly to assume that Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant conduct would hurt him with minority voters. America’s paper of record was particularly invested in this account. “In 2024, he built the very thing the Democratic Party once tried to build—a multiracial, working-class majority,” then–New York Times columnist David Brooks declared the day after the election. “Democrats are seeing their margins among non-white voters erode and vanish,” said Times columnist Ezra Klein in March 2025. A month later, Times polling analyst Nate Cohn wrote, “The Democratic Party has major problems, from big-picture messaging and policy questions to its struggles among specific demographic groups, like young men and nonwhite voters.” The next week his colleague Thomas Edsall wrote, “Trump didn’t just defy the liberal assumption that his demonization of immigrants would cost him Hispanic voters; he turned those expectations upside down.” “Inside the Rise of the Multiracial Right” was the title of a July 2025 piece in the paper’s opinion section, complete with splashy graphics. Never mind some (or all) of that. Exit polls and other surveys suggest that around 90 percent of Black voters, 70 percent of Asian Americans, and 64 to 70 percent of Latinos backed Democrats in this year’s elections. Combining those three groups, about 72 percent of voters of color backed Democrats, 26 percent Republicans. Around 40 percent of Democratic voters were people of color, compared to 20 percent of Republicans. We have a multiracial party—it’s the same one as long before. Looking at some key state races, Texas Democrat James Talarico trailed his Republican opponent Ken Paxton 38–59 among white voters, according to a Times analysis. But Talarico won 89 percent of Black voters, 70 percent of Latinos, 67 percent of Asians, all of whom combined to put him over the top. In Georgia, Jon Ossoff lost the white vote 37–63, according to the Times, but won more 95 percent of the state’s large Black electorate. Those numbers are fairly similar to elections from 2012–2020. It is not unusual or surprising that the majority of white voters in competitive states chose Republicans while voters of color delivered the winning margins for Democratic candidates. But the post-2024 coverage implied that America’s racial politics had fundamentally changed. None of these writers could have anticipated that Trump would start a war with Iran that spiked gas prices. That obviously hurt him badly with all voters, including those of color. But it was fairly obvious that the results in 2024 among voters of color (and Americans overall) were in part driven by inflation during Joe Biden’s presidency and by anti-incumbency sentiment. So Democrats would likely rebound among voters of color in 2026 and perhaps in the future. And it wasn’t hard to anticipate Latino voters being turned off by Trump’s immigration policies once he enacted them in office. I suspect these pundits and other experts will either cite Iran and gas prices as the explanation for their narrative being wrong or argue that the Democrats “moved to the center” to better appeal to voters of color. Or they might say, wait until 2028, when one Democrat has to win the presidency. But the reason I’m harping on how wrong their analyses look 18 months later is because it reflects broader problems in how U.S. politics is covered. Even in 2024, at the height of GOP success with voters of color, minority voters weren’t the ones putting Trump and Republicans in power. Trump won the white vote nationally by 16 percentage points in 2024, while losing among African Americans (by 73), Asians (by 23), and Latinos (11). Cohn highlighting Democrats’ “major problems” with nonwhite voters but not whites creates a misleading picture of the electorate. A group of 10 Trump 2024 voters would include eight white people. It wasn’t a particularly multiracial right.Despite continued claims from many pundits that American politics is largely about an education divide (college graduates back Democrats; those without degrees Republicans), the data keeps rejecting that explanation. Sixty-six percent of white people without degrees backed Trump in 2024, compared to 34 percent of people of color without degrees. In 2026, Republican candidates won the votes of 59 percent of white people without college degrees, compared to 22 percent of voters of color without degrees. “Non-college voters” is a coherent political group only in the minds of some commentators. It is entirely obvious to anyone who resides in the real world that Black women and white men without degrees vote entirely differently.Why does political analysis that diminishes the enormous racial divides in U.S. elections and amplifies the small number of Republican voters of color persist? The most innocent explanation is that journalists and other experts simply want to tell new stories. That people of color, particularly African Americans, favor Democrats, and whites, particularly in the South, favor Republicans are decades-long patterns. Now the more damning explanation. If race is a huge factor in American politics, the journalists and other experts chronicling elections would need to be well versed in racial issues and fairly eager to discuss them. Politicians would need to address racial issues—or explain why they aren’t. And if white people are consistently providing the margin of victory for an authoritarian, plutocratic party, you would need to regularly state that America’s largest racial group either doesn’t value freedom and equality or is so uninformed that it can’t tell which party would provide that. Since U.S. political discourse is largely white journalists covering white politicians (and politicians of color beholden to white donors) for white audiences, the incentives to tell a more honest, racially conscious story of American politics are low. I have lived this. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2014–2020 at first spurred more demand in the news media for stories about racial issues and therefore great prominence for journalists of color, who were often more informed about such issues than their white colleagues. But there was a backlash within news organizations and then diminished opportunities for journalists of color as they keep trying to tell a more racial-centric story of America. I’m not asking journalists or experts to ignore changes or shifting dynamics in the electorate. I suspect over time that these racial voting patterns will diminish. Perhaps Latinos and Asians will become majority Republican in my lifetime. It would be great for the country if we had a Republican Party interested in creating a more socially and economically equal nation and thereby competing for and winning Black voters at a large scale. But at this moment in time, let’s face it—that’s a fantasy. In the real world, I’m asking and really demanding prominent political commentators stop ignoring and downplaying fundamental realities of American politics. Black men who voted for Trump in 2024 are 1 percent of the American electorate. White college graduates who voted for him are 15 percent of the electorate. People who spent 2025 constantly mentioning the former and never the latter should start covering politics better or stop being read by people who want to actually understand American politics. America had a blue wave because voters of color voted so overwhelmingly Democratic that they made up for America’s white majority voting Republican. Like every other recent blue wave.