Here's how Trump's anti-immigrant message broke through with non-white voters
Donald Trump made notable gains with voters of color despite his openly racist and xenophobic campaign messaging.
A record 46 percent of Latinos voted for the former president, up 14 points from 2020, and Asian American support jumped five points to 39 percent, while Black support gained only one point, at 13 percent, since his election loss to Joe Biden, reported The Guardian.
“That racial baggage is one that we’ve carried in this country and through American politics for a long time,” said journalist Paola Ramos, who said many Latino voters have been taught to “idolize and romanticize whiteness." “I think [that] has now been finally revealed in very clear ways through Trumpism.”
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Many Latino voters are also disconnected from the immigration experience and hold xenophobic ideas themselves, according to producer and author Dash Harris.
“We cannot act as if the Dominican Republic isn’t deporting thousands of Haitians right now,” Harris said. “If Latin Americans are migrating from fascist countries, they are going to support fascism in their new space. It’s a continuum of interest convergence.”
Trump intermingled his xenophobic attacks with his economic message, which resonated with voters in many demographics.
“In every single message: ‘[Immigrants] are taking your jobs, they are coming after you,'" Harris said. "Inevitably, particularly if you’re part of certain ecosystems, you’ll start believing that rhetoric.”
Trump's racism was a "dealbreaker" for many Asian American voters, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, the executive director of Asian American and Pacific Islander data at the University of California at Berkeley, but that demographic has "shifted more conservative" on undocumented immigration.
“The Trump campaign and the Republican Party did a very effective job at portraying the border as out of control, and cities [as] overrun by immigrants, and they framed it as one of illegal immigration," Ramakrishnan said.
Black support for Trump doesn't indicate any sort of "realignment," according to Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University, because 85 percent of Black voters backed Kamala Harris, but instead reflected widespread dissatisfaction with the economy under president Joe Biden.
“There are people who think the economy is in bad shape, and think that the incumbent administration is at fault for this bad economy,” Gillespie said. “It would make sense that there would be people who would want to punish the administration, and those people might not be thinking primarily about civil rights issues or what was the latest racist thing that Donald Trump said.”