Introduction
The Democratic Party has been the party of choice for most ethnic and racial minority voters for nearly a century. Yet, in recent elections, Republicans have made inroads with some minority communities. In spite of being both Black and Asian American, Kamala Harris had the worst performance with minority voters of any Democratic presidential candidate since the 1960s. In contrast, in spite of his hostile rhetoric and policies towards immigrants, Donald Trump has made gains with some racial and ethnic minority voters.
This dynamic is prima facie surprising, so much so that some commentators even wonder if it can be real. After the 2016 election, sceptics claimed that the exit poll, which showed Trump performing better than Mitt Romney among Latinos, must have been wrong.Footnote 1 Yet a host of other data and the results of the 2020 and 2024 elections showed that Trump has indeed improved Republican support among Latinos and Asian Americans.Footnote 2
There are, then, two questions to be answered. First, to what extent are ethnic and racial minorities leaving the Democratic Party? As this article will show, the Democrats remain the party of choice for the majority of African Americans. They are still, marginally, preferred by Asian and Latino voters, although the party’s advantage within these groups is now quite small. The data are inconclusive with Indigenous Americans. Therefore, when we speak about Democratic losses among racial and ethnic minorities, this is relative to the historic norm, not in absolute terms, and varies substantially according to ethnic and racial group.
The second question is, why are ethnic and racial minorities voting less ardently for the Democrats than in previous elections? The answers to this question are complex, but they can be broadly explained by taking into account the large structural changes that have occurred in the US party system overall. This article will focus on three such changes: ideological sorting, class realignment, and partisan socialization. The contribution of this article is to move away from a focus on candidates’ personal and descriptive characteristics, such as Trump’s apparent “machismo” or Harris’s Jamaican and Indian parentage. Major changes have been taking place in the US party system over the past generation, whereby the parties’ underlying class and racial coalitions have been shifting in profound ways. Trump may have contributed to and accelerated some of these trends, but they did not originate with him. They are likely to outlive him too.
Racial minorities’ historic partisanship
Until the mid-nineteenth century, US electoral politics was almost entirely a white man’s enterprise. Even northern states which had allowed free Black citizens to vote at the start of the republic progressively stripped African Americans of their voting rights in the first decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote 3 In the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1856, the Supreme Court declared that only whites could be US citizens, stripping citizenship from all African Americans, whether enslaved or free, US- or foreign-born, and other minorities such as Asian Americans and Indigenous Americans.Footnote 4 It took the Civil War of 1861–65 and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of 1868 and 1870 to begin to overturn this racially restrictive conception of US citizenship, although Asian Americans would not become eligible for naturalized US citizenship until 1952.Footnote 5
In the Reconstruction era following the Civil War, the newly enfranchised Black electorate overwhelmingly supported the Republican Party, which delivered emancipation, civil rights, and employment.Footnote 6 America’s first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, fatally shot on Good Friday 1865, became the lodestar for Black voters, and the party’s association with the Union victory and liberation was strengthened during the eight-year presidency of General Ulysses S. Grant (1869–77). The Republican Party produced nearly all of the United States’ first Black elected officials in the nineteenth century: members of Congress, state legislators, mayors, state-level officials, councilmen, and myriad public appointees from ambassadors to postmistresses.Footnote 7 At the 1892 Republican national convention, 13 percent of delegates were Black and the temporary chairman was a Black state legislator from Mississippi.Footnote 8
As the curtain of the Reconstruction era drew to a bloody close at the end of the nineteenth century, millions of African Americans moved north during the Great Migration. In just two years (1916–18), more than 400,000 African Americans left the South, nearly the same as the number of Africans who were imported to the United States in bondage during the Atlantic slave trade over two centuries.Footnote 9 These internal migrants carried their Republican partisanship with them. The first Black Congressman elected from a northern city, Oscar de Priest in Chicago in 1928, was a Republican. However, by the interwar period, Black loyalty to the Republican Party was fading.Footnote 10 Walter White, the director of the NAACP, contemptuously referred to Republican President Herbert Hoover as “the man in the lily-White House,” a reference to Hoover’s “lily-white” strategy of purging African American party officials in an attempt to win over southern whites.Footnote 11 This was the “southern strategy” avant la lettre. A majority of Black voters backed Hoover over Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 election but through gritted teeth.
In spite of their exclusion from many New Deal policies, the relative economic gains experienced by African Americans in the 1930s, especially those in the industrial North, drew them to the Democratic Party in significant numbers for the first time.Footnote 12 In addition, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt became a lightning rod for Black Democratic support. She joined the NAACP in 1934 and became active in the campaign to pass an antilynching bill, inviting Walter White to the White House to lobby her husband directly. This led the President to scold White, “Somebody’s been priming you. Was it my wife?”Footnote 13
At the subsequent election in 1936, millions of African American voters in northern cities began “turning their pictures of Lincoln to the wall.”Footnote 14 For the first time, the Democrats won the majority of the African American vote, a record the party has held in the subsequent twenty-two presidential elections, without exception. In the 1930s–1950s, Republicans could still command as much as a third of the Black vote, but in the 1960s the party’s support among Black voters dropped off a cliff (Figure 1). In 1964, after the nomination of Barry Goldwater, an opponent of that year’s Civil Rights Act, Black support for the Republicans sunk to just 6 percent.Footnote 15 Since then, no Democratic presidential nominee has won less than 80 percent of the African American vote. In their classic book Issue Evolution, Edward Carmines and James Stimson write, “It is difficult to overestimate the significance of Barry Goldwater in this partisan transformation.”Footnote 16
Figure 1. Estimated Black support for Republican and Democratic presidential nominees, 1936–76. Leah Wright Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 311. Created by the author.
Democratic partisanship among Asian and Hispanic/Latino voters has been more variable, but since exit polls began in 1972, Democratic presidential candidates have always captured a majority of the Hispanic/Latino vote. However, Republicans have historically won about a quarter to a third of this electorate. Before 2024, the only Republican presidential candidate to reach above 40 percent support among Latinos was George W. Bush in 2004.Footnote 17 In 2024, Donald Trump captured 46 percent of the Latino vote, a Republican record since the first exit poll.
However, the Hispanic/Latino electorate is internally diverse, and partisanship can vary based on national origin and generation. Indeed, the concept of this group as a pan-ethnic voting bloc only emerged about half a century ago; previously voters were usually analysed in terms of national origin, such as Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban.Footnote 18 Natalie Masuoka shows that sentiments of a Latino “linked fate,” a way of measuring group solidarity, are weaker than among African Americans.Footnote 19 The vocabulary used to describe this group is even more complicated. “Latino” is sometimes viewed as a more inclusive term. It refers to geography – people from Latin America – rather than to a particular European heritage or language. However, “Latino” is less commonly used than “Hispanic” by those in the United States who originate from Latin America. According to a 2015 Pew Research poll of people of Latin American heritage, 32 percent say they prefer the term “Hispanic,” just 15 percent say they prefer the term “Latino,” and the remaining majority (51 percent) say that they have no preference between the two. Moreover, many Hispanics/Latinos identify as white, even though they are counted separately from whites in most political polling. In the 2019 American Community Survey, the US government’s measure of population in between census decades, a staggering 66 percent of Latinos identified as white.Footnote 20 In surveys, more say their “American” identity is of greater importance to them than their “Hispanic” identity.Footnote 21
Exit polls only began reporting Asian voting behaviour from the 1992 election. In that election and the subsequent one, Republicans won a majority of the Asian vote; however, at every presidential election in the twenty-first century, a majority of Asian Americans have backed the Democratic presidential nominee. Like the Latino electorate, the Asian American electorate is diverse, with national origin often carrying greater meaning for individuals than the pan-ethnic category. Indeed, Wong et al. found that fewer than a third of Asian Americans actually identified with the label, preferring their national origin as their principal ethnic/racial signifier instead.Footnote 22
There are scarce data on Indigenous American voting behaviour. In general, Native American attachment to the Democratic Party has been shown to be relatively weaker than among other racial minority voters.Footnote 23 The 2024 exit poll was the first to disaggregate Native voting behaviour, showing Trump winning this group with 68 percent support.Footnote 24 By contrast, Kamala Harris won seven of the eight counties which are at least 85 percent Native American (mixed or alone) (Table 1).Footnote 25 The difference might be explained by the fact that Native Americans living on reservations have tended to be more Democratic than Native Americans living off reservations, but ultimately the data are too limited to say with certainty. Because of these and other regrettable difficulties with the data, this paper will tend to omit Indigenous Americans from its analysis, but Indigenous voting behaviour is a topic worthy of increased scholarly attention.
Table 1. Trump/Harris support in mostly heavily Native US counties, 2024. US Census Bureau.
Under the Obama presidency, race and voters’ attitudes about race became more polarized than at any election since polling began.Footnote 26 In 2008 and 2012, Obama won record support from African American and Asian American voters, and he recovered Democrats’ support among Latinos from Democratic nominee John Kerry’s low against President George W. Bush in the 2004 election. Obama’s reelection in 2012 can be credited to historically high racial and ethnic minority voters’ support and turnout compensating for Obama’s losses among white voters (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Democratic support by race and ethnicity, 2008–12. Roper Center US national election day exit polls. Created by the author.
Barack Obama’s tremendous success with ethnic and racial minority voters, combined with demographic data which showed a steadily declining (non-Hispanic) white population in the United States, led some commentators to make prognostications of an emerging, permanent Democratic majority.Footnote 27 The simplistic view was that as the US became less white, it would become more Democratic. Many Republicans subscribed to this logic as well. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said at the 2012 Republican convention, “The demographics race we’re losing badly … We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”Footnote 28
The seeming demographic challenge led the Republican National Committee (RNC) to commission its famous “autopsy” of its 2012 result, known as the Growth and Opportunity Project. “Many minorities,” the 2013 report warned, “think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.” The Growth and Opportunity Project report concluded, “unless changes are made, it will be increasingly difficult to win another presidential election in the near future.”Footnote 29 It proposed that the party explore staking out a more liberal position on immigration policy as a key way of winning over racial and ethnic minority voters.
Democrats’ declining support among racial and ethnic minority voters
In 2016, Donald Trump blatantly disregarded the advice from the RNC report, yet, to the surprise of many commentators, he managed to reverse Democrats’ Obama-era gains among Black, Latino, and Asian voters. In 2016, Trump made small improvements among racial and ethnic minority voters relative to 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, and in 2020 and 2024 he significantly built on these gains. For example, between 2012 and 2020, Trump doubled Republican support among African Americans from 6 to 12 percent. Mitt Romney won 27 percent and 28 percent support from Latinos and Asians respectively. In 2024, Trump won 46 percent and 40 percent respectively. Republican support among Latinos has almost doubled since 2012.
Although Democrats continue to lead in each of these three biggest racial/ethnic minority groups (Figure 3), their advantage has shrunk considerably. In 2008, Obama enjoyed a 91-point lead among African Americans over John McCain. In 2024, Kamala Harris’s lead was down to 74 points. Even more dramatically, Obama’s 47-point lead with Asian Americans in 2012 was cut to 15 points in 2024. Obama’s 44-point lead with Hispanic/Latino voters almost evaporated in 2024, with Harris leading this group by just 5 percentage points.
Figure 3. Democratic margin of victory among nonwhite voters, 2008–24. Roper Center US national election day exit polls, 2008–16; National Election Pool, 2020–24. Created by the author.
Much of the commentary has focussed on the individual candidates’ (especially Trump’s) personal appeals to racial and ethnic minority voters.Footnote 30 Many commentators, for instance, have argued that Trump’s success with Latinos is due to his “machismo.”Footnote 31 This article, however, is sceptical of studies which place too much emphasis on the presidential candidates themselves. For one thing, Kamala Harris’s nomination was unable to reverse the overall trend. In a highly partisan and polarized context, the nominee may be of only limited influence in shaping voting behaviour.
Moreover, the individual power of candidate Trump may be somewhat exaggerated. Trump is, of course, difficult to isolate from the changes to the Republican Party in the last decade. It would be like trying to explain change in Democratic partisanship in the mid-1930s without Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, even when Trump has not been on the ballot, Republicans have done unusually well among racial and ethnic minority voters in recent electoral cycles. For instance, according to the 2022 midterm exit poll, Republicans won 39 percent of the Latino vote and 13 percent of the African American vote, some of their best results with Black and Latino voters in midterm elections since the 1960s. In those midterms, Republicans even won a majority (54 percent) of “Other racial/ethnic voters,” which primarily consists of Native Americans and mixed-race voters.Footnote 32
Although Barack Obama, as the first Black President, had a unique historic pull for some racial and ethnic minority voters, Republican advances among these communities cannot simply be ascribed to Obama’s absence from the top of the ticket. Indeed, if such voters’ attraction to the Democratic ticket had been purely a function of aspirations for descriptive representation, one would have expected to see Kamala Harris, the first Black woman and first Asian American nominee, to generate similar enthusiasm. We must look beyond the racial and ethnic characteristics of individual nominees to understand the deeper trends which are taking place in US politics.
Inter- and intraracial dynamics: ideology, class, and intergenerational socialization
The reasons for the relative disaffection of ethnic and racial minority voters with the Democratic Party are myriad and complex. This article proposes three structural explanations, which look beyond the individual merits of the presidential nominees. The article points to (1) the movement of ideologically conservative racial and ethnic minority voters to the Republican fold, (2) the movement of racial and ethnic minority voters without college degrees to the Republicans, (3) the relative openness to partisan change among Latino and Asian cohorts due to weaker intergenerational partisan socialization. The article does not propose to test these explanations systematically but rather to lay out the patterns in the voting data as a basis for future analysis.
Ideological sorting
Today, the two main parties are broadly “ideologically sorted,” a term which refers to when voters of similar ideological positions support the same political party.Footnote 33 Liberals vote Democratic; conservatives vote Republican. This may seem a rather obvious point, but it is actually a fairly recent phenomenon.
Until the twenty-first century, both parties contained substantial ideological minorities, often varying by geography, religion, and other idiosyncratic factors. In the mid-twentieth century, the Democratic House caucus contained conservative Howard Smith and liberal Adam Clayton Powell. The Republican Senate caucus included liberal Edward Brooke and conservative Jesse Helms. Today, the parties are much less ideologically heterogeneous, at both an elite and a mass level. Even contemporary party “mavericks,” like former West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin or Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins, are ideologically closer to their fellow caucus members than they are to members of the opposite party.
In the mid-twentieth century, the parties’ ideological heterogeneity led political scientists to conclude that parties were of limited relevance in US politics. How meaningful was a party label if, in the 1940s, a Democrat could be a pro-civil rights liberal like Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey or a racist conservative like Georgia governor Herman Talmadge? Party affiliation alone could not reliably inform a voter about a candidate’s policy preferences. In 1950, the American Political Science Association famously released a report entitled “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” which called on the parties to adopt a clearer and more coherent policy agenda.Footnote 34
As the US party system has nationalized as a result of cultural, economic, technological, and media transformations, regional variation in party cultures has declined significantly.Footnote 35 Today, the ideological differences among Democrats and Republicans are far smaller than the differences between the parties. This ideological sorting has been a slow process, operating differently at local and national levels.Footnote 36 Presidential vote choice tended to sort before Congressional vote choice, and local-level vote choice sorted even later.Footnote 37
This story is well known to political scientists, but much of the literature has failed to disaggregate the great partisan sort by race and ethnicity. When we do this, we can see that ideological sorting has been, until recently, driven mainly by white Americans (Figure 4). In the 1970s, just 60 percent of white conservatives voted Republican. In 1972, when Joe Biden was first elected to the US Senate, a quarter of liberal whites voted for Republican Richard Nixon to be President.Footnote 38 The idea of a quarter of liberal whites voting for any Republican presidential nominee today would seem preposterous. In 2024, 94 percent of white conservatives voted for Trump, and 92 percent of white liberals voted for Harris, a highly sorted electorate.
Figure 4. Support for Trump by self-identified conservatives, sorted by race (2020). Roper Center US national election day exit polls. Created by the author.
After whites, Asians are the next most ideologically sorted group (Figure 5). Just under a fifth of Asians identified as conservative in the 2020 election, and 86 percent of these Asian conservatives backed Donald Trump, the same proportion as the Asian liberals who voted for Joe Biden. Asians have a higher proportion of self-identified moderates (43 percent in 2020), and these skew Democratic (71 percent).
Figure 5. Asian vote choice by ideology (2020). Roper Center US national election day exit polls. Created by the author.
There has been rapid ideological sorting among Hispanic/Latino voters since the Obama era. In 2012, 48 percent of Latino conservatives voted for Barack Obama.Footnote 39 In 2020, about a quarter of the Latino electorate identified as conservative, and nearly 70 percent of these voters supported Trump. In 2024, a higher proportion of Latinos identified as conservative (28 percent), and just 13 percent of them voted for Harris (Figure 6). For the first time, in 2024, the conservative Latino electorate was as well sorted as the liberal Latino electorate: 85 percent of Latino liberals voted Democratic, and 86 percent of Latino conservatives voted Republican. This dramatic shift of conservative Latinos into the Republican fold is particularly consequential electorally because the Latino population is now larger than the Black and Asian populations combined, and it continues to grow. Moreover, most of the ethnic change in the US population is driven by the growing Hispanic/Latino community.
Figure 6. Latino support for Democrats by ideology, 2020 versus 2024. National exit polls. Created by the author.
Ideological sorting is least pronounced among African Americans. It is still generally true, as Tasha Philpot put it, that “most Black people vote alike” regardless of ideology.Footnote 40 In the 1990s, nearly 50 percent of African Americans identified as conservative, yet nearly 90 percent of African Americans voted Democratic overall.Footnote 41 In 2004, 83 percent of Black conservatives voted for Democratic nominee John Kerry. In 2012, a staggering 89 percent of Black conservatives voted for Barack Obama.Footnote 42 The proportion of conservative African Americans has declined, which may be a consequence of cohort replacement, whereby younger generations have different ideological compositions than older generations. Today, about one Black voter in five identifies as conservative, yet Black conservatives remain a predominantly Democratic-voting electorate. In 2020, 70 percent of these conservative African Americans voted for Joe Biden (Figure 7). In 2024, a majority of Black conservatives still voted for Kamala Harris, but this time Trump won 44 percent of their support. We can see some evidence of Black ideological sorting, but it is taking a longer time than other groups. Black conservatives remain much more Democratic than conservatives in any other major ethnic or racial group.
Figure 7. Black support for Democrats by ideology, 2020 versus 2024. National exit polls. Created by the author.
If racial minority voters continue to sort ideologically and come to match (or approach) white levels of ideological sorting, then this would come at a significant cost to the Democratic Party. This is because liberal racial minorities are better sorted than conservative racial minorities. That is to say, liberal racial minorities are more strongly Democratic than conservative racial minorities are pro-Republican. Thus, if there is a greater alignment of ideology and partisanship among racial minorities, the Republicans have more to gain from the next phase of this “partisan sort.”
A multiracial working class
The second explanation for Democrats’ declining success with ethnic and racial minority voters is their declining support among working-class voters, among whom racial and ethnic minority voters are disproportionately represented.
Class is exceedingly difficult to measure in social science. Income does not fully capture class identity, although it is clearly an important part.Footnote 43 A plumber might earn more than a think tank researcher, but the former is more likely to be seen (and see themselves) as part of the working class than the latter. Class is relational and status-driven and, most importantly, made legible by one’s relationship to one’s labour. In other words, class is about the type of work one does and how that work is regarded both by the individual and by society.
William Julius Wilson defined a class as people “who have more or less similar goods, services, or skills to offer for income in a given economic order and do therefore receive similar renumeration in the marketplace.”Footnote 44 Perhaps the ideal marker of class membership would be employment type, and some surveys try to capture a person’s employment and sort it according to the type and status of such a job. This is, however, a laborious task and inescapably subjective. Available survey data often make it impossible to identify class on this basis.
An alternative proxy used by social scientists, instead, is education level. Education is generally indicative of the types of employment that a person will subsequently take up. Certain jobs are reserved for holders of bachelor’s degrees or higher, whereas there are other jobs that typically a university graduate would not seek on a long-term basis. It is, of course, possible that someone with a university degree becomes a carpenter, or someone without a university degree becomes a successful businessman. But, in general, education attainment gives a working indication of class position, as a kind of proxy for the likely status of one’s career path.
Voters without college degrees, whom we might broadly term the “working class,” are leaving the Democratic Party. Over recent elections, we can see a steady decline in Democratic support. In 2012, Obama won the working class by four points; Hillary Clinton lost the working class by three points. Joe Biden lost them by four points. Harris lost them by thirteen points (Figure 8).
Figure 8. Democratic lead among voters by education level, 2008–24. “What Happened in 2020 National Crosstabs,” Catalist, at www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/hzqbc0gambbp7fidn3wld/wh2020_public_release_crosstabs.xlsx?rlkey=8s3u9u0o64yczmt77kya2ckx1&e=1&dl=0), for 2008–20, and national exit poll for 2024. Created by the author.
This is potentially a big problem for the Democrats. More Americans lack a college degree than have one. About a third of US adults hold a college degree. Thus, if Democrats wish to compensate their lost working-class support with college graduates, they need to increase their tally with college-educated voters by a ratio of nearly two to one. Every lost percentage point in support among non-college voters requires an increase of roughly two percentage points in support among college-educated voters just to tread water.Footnote 45
This decline in working-class support for Democrats is not simply a question of disaffection from white working-class voters. Democrats are also experiencing a drop in support from racial and ethnic minority voters without a college degree. Indeed, the decline is much more pronounced among working-class racial and ethnic minority voters than among working-class whites. Democrats might already have hit a floor among white working-class voters, whereas they have further to fall among other working-class groups. Kamala Harris won the same share of working-class white voters as Joe Biden (32 percent), which was slightly better than Hillary Clinton’s low of 29 percent, but she did worse than Clinton by twelve points among working-class nonwhites (64 percent for Harris, 76 percent for Clinton). Since 2012, this has amounted to a nineteen-point decline in support for Democrats among working-class racial and ethnic minority voters (Figure 9).
Figure 9. Support for Democrats by class and race, 2008–24. “What Happened in 2020 National Crosstabs,” Catalist, at www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/hzqbc0gambbp7fidn3wld/wh2020_public_release_crosstabs.xlsx?rlkey=8s3u9u0o64yczmt77kya2ckx1&e=1&dl=0), for 2008–20, and national exit poll for 2024. Created by the author.
All of this means that the Democratic voter coalition is far more college-educated than it once was, among voters of all racial backgrounds. Until the twenty-first century, Democrats typically performed better with working-class whites than with middle-class whites, but since the year 2000, Democrats’ white support has consistently been tilted to college-educated voters (Figure 10).Footnote 46 Democrats continued to perform better with working-class racial and ethnic minority voters than with middle-class racial and ethnic minority voters. But the 2024 election suggests that the reverse may be becoming the case.
Figure 10. Democrats’ lead with non-college-educated voters over college-educated voters by race, 2008–24. “What Happened in 2020 National Crosstabs,” Catalist, at www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/hzqbc0gambbp7fidn3wld/wh2020_public_release_crosstabs.xlsx?rlkey=8s3u9u0o64yczmt77kya2ckx1&e=1&dl=0), for 2008–20, and 2024 exit poll. Created by the author.
It should be noted that the category “nonwhite” is problematic. Here, it unhelpfully obscures the important differences in class voting among different groups of racial and ethnic minority voters. The collapse in non-collegee-educated minority support for the Democrats has, thus far, been driven primarily by Latino voters. African Americans have still stubbornly resisted polarization by class. Thirty years ago, Michael Dawson observed in his seminal book Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African American Politics that class divisions within the Black community do not override a racial basis for a collective vote choice.Footnote 47 Dawson wrote that due to the distinct sociohistorical formation of Black political identity (namely slavery, segregation, the New Deal, and the Great Society) and the strength of Black community ties over time, we should not expect African Americans to exit from racial voting as easily as immigrant groups do. His observations largely remain true. The 2020 exit poll showed that Joe Biden won the same proportion of the vote (88 percent) among African Americans with a bachelor’s degree as among those who did not have one.
Immigration and partisan socialization
A third factor that helps to explain Republicans’ increasing inroads with racial and ethnic minority voters, especially with Latinos and Asian Americans, is partisan socialization. For decades, research in political science has shown that party affiliation is shaped very early in a voter’s life and tends to remain stable. As V. O. Key put it, “Attachments to partisan labels live long beyond events that gave them birth.”Footnote 48 These attachments are shaped, in part, by familial socialization, which operates through and is reinforced by race-specific social and political institutions, social pressure, and social-psychological mechanisms that tie racial identity and party affiliation together.Footnote 49
Although individual-level change is, of course, possible, voters more often than not continue to identify with the party they supported in their younger years. Tasha Philpot argues that these associations only change when counterstereotypical behaviour and signals surpass an individual’s threshold for what constitutes a fundamentally transformed party.Footnote 50 For instance, a Black President at the top of the Democratic Party was, for some racially prejudiced white Democratic voters, the final nail in the coffin in their relationship with the party of their forebears.Footnote 51
The underlying social bases of party support are slow to change. Usually it is cohort replacement (one generation replacing another) that brings about these changes. For example, many African Americans in the early to mid-twentieth century continued to vote for the Republican Party, long after the party had stopped showing any major commitment to civil rights or welfare, partly because they had been strongly socialized to support the “party of Lincoln.” Indeed, in 2014, this author interviewed a ninety-four-year-old African American Republican who explained that he supported the Republican Party because it was the party that liberated his grandfather from slavery.Footnote 52 As Leah Wright Rigueur observes, “Some black families never left the Republican fold.”Footnote 53
This Black Republican socialization was largely replaced in the twentieth century by Black Democratic socialization. African Americans have a particularly well-developed form of “solidarity politics” or a politics of “linked fate.”Footnote 54 Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton summed up this form of politics in their seminal book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. They wrote, “The concept of Black Power rests on a fundamental premise: ‘Before a group can enter open society, it must first close ranks. By this we mean group solidarity is necessary before a group can operate effectively from a bargaining position of strength in a pluralist society.’”Footnote 55 Ismail White and Chryl Laird argue that African Americans for generations have operated under a “racialized social constraint” on partisan defections from the racial group.Footnote 56 They argue that the social costs within the Black community for voting Republican are high and enforced through social ties and Black institutions. While these institutions are strong and important, the example of Blacks leaving the Republican Party in the twentieth century suggests that they are not impregnable.
Immigrant voters, however, do not undergo the same form of partisan socialization. They arrive in the United States having missed entirely or experienced only incompletely the social conditions that shape early partisan attachments. Political socialization in youth has been found to be an important part of partisan formation that endures throughout life. Even second-generation voters lack some of the parent–child partisan socialization experienced by children of US-born parents.Footnote 57 This weaker partisan attachment has been used to explain, in part, why immigrants tend to participate in electoral politics at a lower level than native-born residents.Footnote 58
The Latino and Asian American populations are disproportionately immigrant. Some 33 percent of Latinos and 71 percent of Asian American adults were born overseas, compared to just 17 percent of the overall US adult population.Footnote 59 They have lower turnout than white or Black voters, who have a much higher US-born proportion. Some 91 percent of Black Americans were born in the United States.Footnote 60 Surveys show that, all else being equal, Asian and Latino Americans have weaker partisan attachments than white and Black Americans.Footnote 61 This makes them more open to persuasion from election to election. Republicans have invested heavily in targeting Latino and Asian American voters, especially on policy terms. Republicans have highlighted policy alignment with these voters on social issues, whereas Democrats will often – but not exclusively – seek to appeal to these voters in symbolic terms.Footnote 62
Conclusion
US politics is closely divided. Even small shifts in party allegiance can produce drastically different policy outcomes, magnified by distorting political institutions like the electoral college and the US Senate.Footnote 63 While the shifts described in this article are often changes in degree, they can be enough to result in a change in electoral outcomes. In the 1980s, Republican strategist Lee Atwater said, “Any Republican who can capture 20 percent of the black vote, while holding the GOP base, won’t even have to campaign … The election will be his.”Footnote 64 Atwater’s prognostication was something of an exaggeration, but it speaks to the potential consequences of even a modest shift in partisan voting behaviour among minority voters.
For those who care about the future of American politics, it is, therefore, important to take seriously these shifts both within and among different groups in the electorate. Given the centrality of race to American political development, any study of voting behaviour must take seriously how differently racialized groups in the electorate relate to the political choices in front of them. While the languages and categories of race, ethnicity, class, and ideology are all imperfect and are rightly subjected to much scrutiny, we must not allow categorical challenges to preclude using (admittedly imperfect) data to analyse real and important changes in US voting behaviour.
The shift in Black partisanship in the 1930s, from being a steadfastly Republican electorate to a staunchly Democratic one, in alliance with working-class whites, helped to set up the Democratic Party as the majority party in US politics for half a century. Democrats won every House election (every two years) from 1954 until 1994 without exception. In the sixty years between 1933 and 1993, the Democrats controlled the House for all but four years and the Senate for all but ten.
Since the 1990s, Democrats have struggled to maintain support among the white working-class, but working-class racial and ethnic minority voters initially remained loyal to the party. It now appears that this relationship may be coming to an end, or is at least not as strong as it what it once was. Latino working-class voters, especially, are no longer a reliably Democratic electorate.
It bears repeating that in spite of these aforementioned changes, the Democratic Party remains the party of choice for the majority of racial and ethnic minority voters, especially African Americans. Some comfort for Democrats might also come from the fact that the party is making gains among affluent and well-educated whites. White voters have polarized starkly by education, with a clear majority of college-educated whites favouring the Democrats.
Nonetheless, there are almost twice as many Americans without college degrees as there are with degrees. Latinos, the group among whom Democrats seem to be losing the most support, are the fastest-growing ethnic or racial group in the electorate. This not only is a challenge for the Democrats electorally, but also poses questions for the identity of the Democratic Party. Since the 1930s, the Democrats have been the party associated with championing the marginalized and oppressed. What does it mean for the Democrats if working-class and minority voters no longer support the party to the extent that they did? Can the Democrats be the party of social justice when many of the intended beneficiaries of their policies vote for the Republicans?
The answers to these questions are still under development. But what is clear is that the Obama coalition has unravelled. Kamala Harris’s coalition was not the same as his. Hers was more highly educated and whiter. Fifty-five percent of Obama’s voters in 2012 were white, whereas 61 percent of her voters were. This was in spite the US electorate becoming less white. In contrast, ethnic and racial minorities have gone from being one in ten Republican voters in 2012 to one in five Republicans in 2024. Democrats’ relative losses among conservative, immigrant, and working-class nonwhites suggest that notions of a permanent Democratic majority built on a growing nonwhite electorate were misplaced. Demography may still be destiny but not necessarily in the way that Democrats expected.
Dr Richard Johnson is Senior Lecturer in US Politics and Policy at Queen Mary University of London. He thanks colleagues in the Centre for Governance and Democracy (CDG) seminar at Queen Mary for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
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