The 2024 election has seen no shortage of headlines flagging an apparent slip in support for Democrats among Black and Latino voters. While poll after poll to suggests that former President Donald Trump stands to make some gains among these groups, experts are skeptical of the narrative, at least until Election Day.
In recent years, the Democratic Party has seen its support slip among Black and Hispanic voters, and Republicans, including Trump, have tried to capture these votes. This year, it also looks like Vice President Kamala Harris is set to overperform among older voters, leading to an image of an older and whiter Democratic Party. While there’s been much ink spilled on these trends, the scale of this shift and the potential dangers of reading into it too much has gone under the radar.
There has been no shortage of attention paid to Trump’s reported increase in support among Black Americans this year. In 2020, President Joe Biden won 87% support among Black voters compared to Trump's 12%. Recent NAACP polling found that some 63% of Black voters say they plan to support Harris compared to just 13% who say they plan to support Trump, showing some potential slippage for Harris but little gain for Trump.
The increase in support for Trump, however, appears to be mostly isolated to younger Black men. Looking at the crosstabs of the NAACP poll, 26% of Black men under 50 say they support Trump compared to 49% who say they plan to support Harris. For comparison, 77% of Black men over 50 say they support Harris and 67% of Black women say they support Harris while just 8% say they support Trump.
Other polls have found similar results. A recent Associated Press/NORC survey found that 21% of all Black men and 22% of all Black voters aged 18 to 44 say Trump would make a good president. The same survey found that just 11% of Black women and 8% of Black voters over 45 said the same thing.
If these polling results are accurate, it suggests that Trump has gained some support among Black men. It’s crucial, however, to keep the size of this shift in perspective.
In 2020, exit polling shows that Trump enjoyed 19% support among all Black men. This means that it’s still a fairly modest increase in support even among the group of Black voters that has swung the most towards Trump, likely somewhere between three to six points, based on the aforementioned polling.
Howard University’s Initiative on Public Opinion conducts polls with a focus on Black Americans, with their most recent survey reaching 1,000 Black registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Their survey found an even smaller shift than other national surveys: among Black likely voters, Harris leads Trump 82% to 12%. The same sample supported Biden 81% to Trump’s 9% in 2020.
Clarence Lusane, a professor of political science at Howard University, told Salon that whatever shift there was towards Trump when Biden was the nominee has largely dissipated at this point, with Harris’ rise being a decisive turning point.
“I would put some history on this. Both in 2016 and 2020, the Trump campaign looked at polls that showed not quite 20% but mid-teens support and they celebrated and argued that the Black community and Black men were moving away from the Democrats,” Lusane said. “I’m a little suspect about how much Trump is actually going to get in the final vote because if history is an indicator, then these last-minute Black voters tend to go with Democrats.”
Lusane also pointed to a variety of things he said Trump has done since 2020 that could alienate Black voters, like his claim that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, or his attempt to have the votes of people in swing state cities with large Black populations thrown out in 2020.
Lusane did, however, note that the level of turnout Democrats can drive in swing states among Black Americans could be decisive in both the election and in terms of what percentage of the Black vote Trump wins in the end. Lower turnout among Black Americans is likely more advantageous for Trump. He added that he thinks the Harris campaign needs to be more specific in what is in their agenda to help Black Americans as well as the threat to democracy that Trump poses.
“I think Trump as a threat to Democracy still needs to be underscored,” Lusane said. “This is someone that represents an extremist view with an extremist movement behind it.”
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Apparent gains among Latino and Hispanic voters have also drawn significant attention this year. According to exit polls, Biden carried 65% of the Hispanic vote while Trump carried 32% in 2020. This year it looks like Trump is poised to do better.
A recent Pew Research survey found that, 57% of Latino registered voters plan to support Harris while 39% say that they plan to support Trump. Another survey from the Hispanic Federation found that 59% of Latino and Hispanic voters plan on supporting Harris compared to 35% who back Trump.
Similar to the shift among younger Black men, any shift among Hispanic and Latino voters appears to be relatively small. Frankie Mirana, the president and CEO of the nonpartisan civic engagement group Hispanic Federation, is skeptical about drawing sweeping conclusions from much of polling that has been done on the subject.
“I don’t think that the 36 million eligible Latinos in this country has been properly polled or that there’s been proper outreach to this voting block,” Miranda told Salon. “When we look at the samples of some of these polls, we’re not confident about those numbers or the sample size is too small. I am confident that our poll is the largest sample and the most representative.”
Miranda, whose organization has another survey coming out Tuesday, said that the shift among Latinos being tracked by most polls is “overplayed.” He added that he’s less concerned about any political shifts in the community than he is about Spanish language content with inaccurate information about candidates.
“We know that some of this misinformation was been curbed in some form in the English language but that it runs rampant in the Spanish language,” Miranda said.
When asked how some geographically specific shifts in Latino voting patterns might be interpreted, like shifts in south Texas or Florida, he said that they were attributable to “culturally competent and linguistically competent messaging.”
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“If you do campaigning in South Florida and talk about ‘noun, verb socialism’ and ‘noun, verb communism’ that is socially competent. Is it real? That’s another question,” Miranda said.
In Miranda’s assessment, there are some recorded geographically specific shifts among Latino voters but those shifts often correlate to the community in a specific region. And, larger narratives about trends among Latino voters are often projected onto the group as are perceived issue priorities for Latino and Hispanic voters.
“For one side they say Latinos are stealing and voting illegally in an election and the other side says Latinos are why one state is swinging one way or another,” said. “There’s a lot of assumptions about what we supposedly want to hear about and what we need to mobilize the vote. I think in the last few weeks I’ve seen an intensification of messaging toward our community — good, bad and ugly. I wish that this messaging had started earlier.”
The next polling trend drawing headlines this election is Harris’ potential strength with America’s seniors. In 2020, exit polls found that Biden won 47% of voters over 65 while Trump won 52%. This year, Harris appears to be on track to win this group, according to some polls. Recent New York Times/Siena College polling found Harris leading among seniors 49% to 47% and the most recent CNN/SSRS polling found Harris leading Trump 50% to 46% among seniors. Other polling has suggested a similar breakdown in support among older voters to 2020.
While older voters are historically easier to poll than many voting demographics, there is still reason to treat this analysis of the crosstabs with some skepticism. This isn’t because it’s implausible that Harris could improve with older voters, who make up a fairly large chunk of the electorate, rather it’s an issue with crosstab analysis in general and one that applies to the conclusions people are drawing about Black and Latino voters as well.
John Culverius, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and director at the university’s Center for Public Opinion, told Salon that “crosstab analysis is always fraught” especially among harder-to-poll groups like younger voters and voters of color. Moreover, crosstabs generally have “a much wider margin of error” that makes it hard to draw conclusions from shifts in the polls, especially smaller shifts like what’s being tracked in all of these groups.
“We will know more once we see final exit polls that are weighted to the final result,” Culverius said. “That’s a disappointing answer, but I remain skeptical of potential large shifts in subgroups in the electorate, especially when the election, up until two months ago, was a rerun of 2020.”
Still, even a small shift — with any group, not necessarily the ones that have drawn the attention — could have a significant impact on election results, particularly if that shift manifests in Pennsylvania, said Liberty Vittert, the lead data scientist at Decision Desk HQ.
“This election will be decided on the margin and any trend downward isn’t good,” Vittert said. “Whoever wins PA has an 80% chance of winning the election and her numbers have been trending downward (albeit by small numbers) and there are similar trends in the blue wall states.”
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