The Republicans’ best shot at racial parity with the Democrats has long been to become a multiracial men’s party, given the persistence of the gender gap in how Americans vote. It seems that vision is coming to pass sooner than anyone expected.
Exit polls should always be interpreted with caution, but Donald Trump appears to have made dramatic inroads with Latino male voters, accelerating a rightward shift that had become evident in the last two elections. If the early numbers are accurate, Trump will have effectively flipped Joe Biden’s margin with that demographic, which supported Biden at a rate of 57 percent in 2020, into his own 54 percent advantage.
Indications of a roughly 30-point national swing in Trump’s favor among Latino men seem especially plausible when looking at his county-level performances: Heavily Cuban American Miami-Dade County, one of the Democratic Party’s most reliable Florida strongholds, turned red. So did heavily Mexican American Hidalgo County, Texas, which Biden carried with almost 60 percent of the vote in 2020, along with several other South Texas counties that Biden and Hillary Clinton each won by double digits. Even Passaic County, one of the most heavily Hispanic regions of deep-blue New Jersey, broke for Trump.
To a lesser degree, Black men in a pair of key swing states also supported Trump at higher rates than they did in 2020. Multiple network exit polls show the former president nearly or more than doubling his Black male support in Georgia and North Carolina.
There will be plenty of Democratic finger-pointing over the next four years, with strategists anguishing over what went wrong and who is to blame. But if demographics are indeed destiny, as many Democrats once assumed, then the GOP has to feel........