My own election post-mortem pieces focused less on the question of “why Trump won”, and more on the question of what his victory implies for the Democrats going forward. But the question of why Trump won is an interesting and important one! My friend Dhaaruni Sreenivas had some thoughts on why Trump managed to attract so many Latino and Asian voters this time out. Racial depolarization was one of the most important trends this year, and it pays to think about it carefully — not just in terms of what it implies for future elections, but what it says about how Americans define themselves as a nation.

Dhaaruni is a data scientist who used to work for the Democratic political consultancy Jones Mandel. She has also worked for Representative Suzan DelBene, and volunteered on a number of political campaigns.

Since November 5, there have been many post-mortems written about Kamala Harris losing the presidency in addition to Senate Democrats losing the chamber, and House Democrats failing to regain a majority. While there are some bright spots for Democrats in the results, there are also blaring alarm bells for Democrats, most of all the rightward shifts of non-white working class voters, who have long been the backbone of the Democratic Party. 

Generally speaking, individuals and groups change their political affiliation or allegiance due to policy disagreements or values dissonance, and both of these factors encompass prioritization. For instance, there are many former Republicans who are now voting Democrat because they disagree with their party’s shift towards immigration restrictionism or just take major issue with Donald Trump’s character. However, in the case of Asian and Hispanic voters, their shift right is about policy disagreements with Democrats AND perceived values dissonance, which means that Democrats will not be able to win them back solely with superficial messaging changes. 

To quote Simon van Zuylen-Wood in New York Magazine:

“If Trump’s victory was not in fact a reflection of voter sentiment, it became less important to court or win back his voters. Through the resistance years and into the COVID era, liberal institutions from universities to media organizations to nonprofits cathartically swung left, which bred further denial about what voters cared about and were experiencing. A partial catalog of progressive denialism, listed in no particular order: that alienating left-wing positions or rhetoric were confined to college campuses; that the externalities of pandemic shutdowns, such as grade-school learning loss, were overblown; that the rapid adoption of new gender orthodoxies, especially in settings involving children, was not a popular concern; that the “defund the police” movement would be embraced by communities of color; that inflation was overstated; that the pandemic crime wave was exaggerated; that concerns over urban disorder represented a moral panic; that Latinos would welcome loosened border restrictions. Thanks to these and other issues, the gap continued to widen not just between liberals and conservatives but between the highly educated elite and the moderate rank and file of the Democratic Party.”

In 2016, Hillary Clinton received 37% of white voters and Joe Biden did worse than Clinton with Hispanic voters (in some states, markedly so) but received 41% of white voters, gaining the most with moderate and conservative white men, which is why he ultimately won and she ultimately lost. Kamala Harris’ final tallies with voters are yet to be determined since the final Congressional races in California are still being tabulated, but based on exit polls and current results, the Associated Press has determined that Harris received 43% of white voters, more than Clinton and slightly more than Biden. 

However, in addition to losing all seven swing states and subsequently the electoral college, Harris also lost the popular vote to Donald Trump, who lost it to Clinton in 2016 despite winning the electoral college. The primary difference between Harris’ losing coalition and Biden’s winning coalition ultimately wasn’t her margin with white voters, or Black voters, it was due to her losing double digits of support with Hispanic voters, both male and female, and to a lesser degree, double digits of support with Asian men, even while improving with Asian women.

While final results for the election have not yet been determined and exit polls aren’t a perfect metric (although they’re generally directionally correct), as Jed Kolko writes in Slow Boring, we have the final vote counts on the county level. Moreover, the American Communities Project, which groups counties based on a variety of factors including income, race/ethnicity, religion etc., confirmed that Trump improved the most in majority Hispanic, Native, and Urban counties. Lastly, we also have access to the vote counts for individual precincts in large cities, many of which are defacto racially segregated, and show clear signs of Asian and Hispanic voters cratering rightwards. 

In the following piece, I’ll be focusing on rightward shifts among Asian and Hispanic voters that were seen in the 2024 election, why the results came about, and where the Democratic Party goes from here. 

Kamala Harris is the the first Black woman to be on the presidential ticket, but she is also the first Asian-American since her mother, Shamayla Gopalan, is from Chennai, India. However, despite her heritage, Harris received the lowest percentage received by a Democrat in 40 years, losing 7 points of support compared to Joe Biden’s exit polls in 2020. Why did this happen?

According to AAPI Data, a research project by UC Berkeley, Asian American and Pacific Islander voters make up between 3-12% of the electorate in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, all of which Kamala Harris lost. However, these shifts weren’t just witnessed in swing states; they showed up in safe blue states and districts. For instance, Grace Meng won re-election in New York’s 6th Congressional District with 60.3% of the vote, but in the same district, Kamala Harris received 51.8% of the vote, with Meng outrunning Harris by over 8%. 

While New York isn’t currently a swing state, the demographics within the state and the city itself that cratered right, including Asian Americans, are indicative of larger nationwide shifts. Trump either won outright or made significant gains in several parts of the New York metro area that are home to large Asian American populations, such as Flushing, Bensonhurst, and Sunset Park, which are predominantly Chinese-American. Parts of the Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens, where 16.2% of the population is South Asian and 7.2% is Indian, also shifted towards Trump despite Harris’ Indian heritage.

However, these trends weren’t just witnessed in NYC. As per the Chicago Board of Elections, the Dallas County Elections Department, the Fort Bend County Elections Administrator, as well as the NYC Election Atlas, Asian majority precincts shifted 15-30 points right.  

Karthick Ramakrishnan, founder of AAPI Data, believes that Trump’s improvement with Asian Americans is due to inflation and the economy, and stated, “He [Trump] succeeded in creating an impression that the economy was doing horribly.” This sentiment is echoed by Trip Yang, a professional Democratic strategist, who said that the perception that the Republican Party is stronger on the economy remains prevalent with Asian American voters. 

However, when Asian American voters were explicitly asked why they voted for Republicans, their answers were more divergent.

In the Bay Area, Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price were recalled on November 5, due in part to the overwhelming opposition against them from Asian American voters. In the wake of COVID-19, hate crimes against Asian Americans skyrocketed, with volunteer patrols rising up to combat them. Russell Jeong, a professor at San Francisco State University, said, “If you are a victim of crime, and your family is a victim of crime, then that’s probably the most visceral ‘in your face’ election issue to address, because you don’t want your family in danger.” In essence, Asian American voters felt hung out to dry by local governments, and the party in charge of those governments was the Democratic Party.

But, crime isn’t the only issue that is causing Asian Americans to shift right. Many Asian Americans, who prize academic achievement, are angry at the Democratic Party’s opposition to “educational excellence” as Matt Yglesias puts it. While the Biden-Harris administration never endorsed attempts by local and state Democrats to get rid of advanced math classes or gifted programs, national Democrats rarely if ever publicly condemned those initiatives. Moreover, these attempts by local Democrats to crack down on merit-based admissions at magnet schools and make it impossible for public school children in San Francisco public schools to take algebra in the 8th grade, had statewide and national implications.    

In 2020, California, which is 15% Asian, attempted to enact a statewide ballot proposition that would have restored race-conscious admissions at public universities, and in government hiring and contracting. While Joe Biden won the state by 29% over Donald Trump, the proposition underran Biden with all racial demographics; however, while 78% of Black voters supported it (compared to the 93% of Black voters in the state who voted for Biden), only 39% of Asian voters supported it even while backing Biden by 63%. 

In New York City, concerns about the fate of a citywide standardized test that echoed national concerns that college admissions discriminated against Asian college applicants via affirmative action (concerns that aren’t unfounded) caused Asian Americans to outrightly start voting Republican, trends which continued in 2024. While affirmative action was ultimately overturned in 2023 by the Supreme Court, Asian American voters aren’t likely to quickly forget the context in which the initial lawsuit against elite colleges came about. One such manifestation of this discrimination was a leaked “joke memo” from an associate director of admissions at Harvard University that parodied the admissions officer downplaying an Asian American applicant’s achievements. The memo read, 

“While he was California’s Class AAA Player of the Year with an offer from the Rams, we just don’t need a 132 pound defensive lineman. […] I have to discount the Nobel Peace Prize he received. . . . After all, they gave one to Martin Luther King, too. No doubt just another example of giving preference to minorities.” 

In essence, the memo dismissed the fictional applicant as “just another AA CJer”, Harvard admissions shorthand for an Asian American applicant who intends to study biology and pursue a medical career.

The crux of Asian Americans’ rightward shift is about policy disagreements with Democrats and a fundamental disagreement on values and priorities. Asian American voters are angry that crimes against their elders are not being prosecuted by local Democrats, and that issue can theoretically be addressed through more tough on crime policies. However, to many Asian Americans, the issue of crime is indicative of the Democratic Party not valuing their safety. Similarly, for many Asian families, education and academic excellence has been a primary tool of class mobility, and since they see the Democratic Party as an affront to those values, they vote against the party.

In 2002, John Judis and Ruy Teixeria wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, which detailed  how, so long as Democrats held their margins with white working class voters, a “browning” America so to speak, demographic changes due to immigration and older voters dying out, the Democratic Party would have a solid electoral advantage. 

For a while, this theory seemed correct since Barack Obama achieved historical margins among non-white voters but also retained enough white, non-college voters, especially in the Midwest, to comfortably win two terms. After 2012, Republicans were reeling from Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama, and wrote an “autopsy” for their party so they were able to reconvene and defeat the Democratic Party in the next presidential election. In this postmortem, Republican consultants postulated that their party should liberalize on immigration so they did better with non-white voters, and should work to appeal to young people, among other recommendations. 

However, in 2015, Donald Trump came down that escalator and on “build the wall” and “Mexicans are rapists”, propelled himself into the White House in 2016, on the votes of non-college white voters who pulled the lever for him over Hillary Clinton. The “Emerging Democratic Majority” was halfway gone, since despite Clinton running up the margins with non-white voters, she cratered with the white working class, and ultimately lost the election.   

In a recent episode of his podcast for the New York Times, Ezra Klein discusses the 2024 election as the end of the Obama Coalition, the combination of voting blocs, primarily non-white voters, young voters, and white voters without a college education, that propelled Obama to victory in 2008 and 2012. While Clinton almost matched Barack Obama’s numbers with Hispanic voters, in 2020 and especially in 2024, even after family separation during his first term, his governance during COVID in 2020, and virulently racist 2024 campaign, Trump improved with both Hispanic men and Hispanic women, receiving a slightly higher percentage of the vote than George W. Bush in 2004, and once again, becoming president of the United States. 

Senator-elect Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), a Hispanic Marine veteran, ran 8 points ahead of Kamala Harris in 2024, and won his race against Kari Lake due in part to his outreach and messaging to Hispanic men. Gallego held watch parties for boxing matches, attended Cinco de Mayo events, meeting the voters where they were ideologically and literally. Moreover, Gallego ran sharply to the center on immigration, with his first Spanish-language ad of the 2024 cycle focusing on border security since Latinos in Arizona, as Gallego put it, saw refugees pouring into the country as “chaos”. More damningly, Gallego explicitly stated, “We didn’t actually speak about immigration reform [during the campaign] because we know that the Latino voter just doesn’t believe it anymore.” 

In other words, the Republicans’ autopsy of their 2012 loss was wrong (they didn’t need to moderate on immigration to win over Hispanic voters), and also, the Emerging Democratic Majority as a whole has been pretty solidly discredited. (which Ruy Teixeria himself has been warning about for years). The Democratic Party has become toxic to white working class voters and moreover, and is bleeding non-white, and in particular Hispanic, voters who had voted for Democrats for decades prior, due to many of the social positions the party holds (or is perceived to hold). 

That said, the Latino shift rightwards isn’t just solely due to immigration and in fact, was arguably driven primarily by economic concerns, which could have served as a Trojan horse for many others. In 2023, Blueprint discovered that Latino voters cared most about lower prices and least about “creating more jobs”, which they considered Biden’s priority over lower inflation.

When asked why he and his community voted for Trump in 2024, Samuel Negron, a state constable and member of the large Puerto Rican community in the city of Allentown, Pennsylvania, answered, “It’s simple, really. We liked the way things were four years ago.” He went on to say that the shift was primarily economic, since prices of groceries, of housing, of goods and services, had substantially increased in the last few years. These price increases are due to global inflation patterns, and even though inflation is now cooling, prices are slower to come down, and many Latino voters didn’t believe that Biden and then Harris, were adequately addressing their concerns and empathizing with their struggles. 

Moreover, some Hispanic voters also believe the Democratic party is out of line with their values. Arturo Laguna, a Mexican-American first-time voter in Arizona said, “The three biggest things of importance are family values, being pro-life and religion. I don’t feel like Kamala represents those values.” 

Like with Asian voters, the path to winning over Hispanic voters both is and isn’t the economy (stupid). In order to improve on 2024 margins with Hispanic voters, Democrats have to not only make policy changes but somehow have to figure out how to align the party’s values with those of the voters we’ve lost, which is much easier said than done.

Kamala Harris didn’t lose the 2024 election due to slippage with white voters that voted for Biden in 2020. Harris lost due to slippage with non-white voters who’d previously voted for Democrats, which isn’t even entirely her fault as a candidate since based on anecdotes and data, the result was baked in long before Biden dropped out of the presidential race in July 2024. 

If the Democratic Party wants to win, it must reach out to the voters it has lost to Republicans and understand why they shifted right. While there’s a very high chance that Republicans will mess up the country (again) and Democrats will regain Congressional majorities and/or the presidency due to thermostatic politics and negative polarization, the reality is that Trump won in 2024, and moreover, Harris, and the Democratic Party, lost. 

Unlike 2016, Trump didn’t just squeak by in the electoral college, he didn’t lose the popular vote by almost 5 million like in 2020; he turned out hundreds of thousands, if not millions of voters that voted only for him while leaving down-ballot races blank, flipped a substantial amount of Biden 2020 voters, and won a record percentage of non-white voters for a Republican. The sooner the Democratic Party can accept these facts without bending over backwards to prove the loss isn’t actually an indictment of them, the sooner it can recalibrate for the next two years, and beyond. 

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