Trump’s Multiethnic Winning Coalition
Trump’s Multiethnic Winning Coalition
by Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone Institute
Go on, admit it. Don’t be shy. Did you feel the joy in the late evening and early hours of 5–6 November? How about the vibe? Democrats failed to feel either as the garbage deplorables took out the trash and made a bonfire of the dumpster bin. The diversity hire can now retire and feel the sadness of adversity instead.
Donald Trump’s 312-226 landslide victory in the Electoral College is not a repudiation of democracy but a triumphant affirmation of its liberating power. He lost the popular vote in 2016 by three million votes (two percent) and in 2020 by 7 million (four percent). This time he won the popular vote by three million (76-73) and two percent (50.1-48.1) – his first victory in the number of ballots and in securing an absolute majority. About 90 percent of over 3,000 counties across the nation shifted to the right.
Trump won in 2016 with a winning coalition of disaffected working-class whites. More than half of workers are living paycheck-to-paycheck, the purchasing power of which has been falling with high inflation. Contrary to the American dream of intergenerational progress, many young people have a worse standard of living than their parents. While consolidating that voting base, the more sweeping triumph this year was helped considerably by substantial inroads into ethnic groups traditionally aligned with Democrats. Trump described his diverse and inclusive coalition as a ‘beautiful,’ ‘historical realignment’ in his victory speech on the night. Harris refused to give a concession speech until the day after.
In an NBC exit poll, Trump won 57 percent of white and 55 percent of male voters, retaining his hold on these groups. In an AP exit poll, he won 20 percent of the black vote, up from 8 in 2016 and 13 in 2020. Harris’s 80 percent black vote is a ten-point drop from Joe Biden’s four years ago. In addition, he also won the support of 46 percent of Latinos, 39 percent of Asian-Americans, 54 percent of ‘Other,’ 45 percent of women, and 43 percent of 18–29-year-olds. Hence the prospect of a major new realignment of American politics. There are important lessons in all this for centre-right parties across the West: authentic conservatism attracts more voters than it repels.
Trump’s success in creating a new multiethnic winning coalition indicates that voting trends may be coalescing, with previously segmented cohorts normalising and starting to vote more as Americans and less as ethnics. Thus in an AP analysis, the economy and jobs rated as the top issues for voters overall, for blacks and Latinos, and for the youth. Phrases like the Latino, black, or Asian-American vote are increasingly meaningless. What once were voting blocs are fragmenting into individuals with agency. This can only be good for the long-term health of American democracy, contrary to the hysterical warnings of its imminent collapse should Trump win.
In the history books, 2016 might be described as a dress rehearsal for the real deal in 2024. Trump won back the White House and delivered Congress on his coattails, with a net gain of four Senate and 1-2 House seats. Plus he will have a favourable balance of justices on the Supreme Court. All this will be crucial in confronting the expected challenges from Resistance 2.0, aka swamp dwellers protesting at the swamp drainage scheme. So will the lessons internalised from the experience of 2016–20, including the choice of top personnel who understand and are committed to the Trump agenda.
Traditional Voter Concerns Beat Woke Neoliberalism
Progressives once again went into meltdown. Writing in The Globe and Mail in reliably woke Canada, Andrew Coyne solemnly describes Trump as ‘manifestly, palpably, incontrovertibly unfit for public office, not only in his own character and abilities, but for what he represents, including his attacks on the rule of law, basic freedoms and democracy itself.’ His take on the outcome? ‘Sometimes the people get it wrong.’ He echoed the instant reaction from Jill Filipovic that ‘this election was not an indictment’ of Harris but ‘an indictment of America.’ At least one Guardian columnist gets it. John Harris concluded that the ‘simple, inescapable message’ from Trump’s victory is that ‘many people despise the left’ with progressives seen as ‘one judgmental, “woke” mass.’
Harris goes on to note that support for border security and enforcement was higher among blacks and Hispanics than among white progressives. So too for statements that ‘America is the greatest country in the world’ where ‘most people can make it if they work hard,’ again contradicting the core tenets of critical race theory. The fact that Trump’s 14-point advantage among voters without college degrees flips into a 13-point loss among the college-educated indicates the source of the luxury beliefs. This in a tough economic environment in which, in a survey last year, 39 percent of Americans admitted to having skipped meals to keep up with housing payments.
Trump was authentic and Harris inauthentic, intellectually shallow, morally vacuous, and prone to mistaking platitudes as policy pronouncements. Harris held a celebrity-studded rally in Philadelphia on 4 November. Speaking at his own overlapping rally in Pittsburgh, Trump said: ‘We don’t need a star because we have policy.’
She recruited Republican reject Liz Cheney whose surname remains toxic among true-blue Democrats. He won over disillusioned Democrats Robert F Kennedy, Jr (nominated to be Secretary of Health and Human Services) and Tulsi Gabbard (the new Director of National Intelligence) along with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (co-chairs of a new Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE). Her only sales pitch was ‘I am not Trump. I am not Biden.’ This was delivered with an accompaniment of trademark word salads, infamous cackles, and a baffling array of accents to suit every audience.
Trump dodged bullets, Harris dodged questions. He had a record to defend, she had one to airbrush. Democrats voted for the party, not Harris. MAGA people voted for Trump more than the party. Harris neither explained and defended the last four years nor articulated a vision for the next four. All she did was to attack Trump. He closed with the simple yet powerful question: Are you better off now than then? They replied: Diversity hire, you are fired.
Trump won, Harris lost, and the progressive governance elite was humiliated. The biggest losers of the night were A-list celebrities and the legacy media. Even Taylor Swift’s hometown of Reading, PA went with Trump. She might be a fashion influencer but is no more an opinion influencer and thought leader than I am a fashion influencer. The centre ground of the political information complex has shifted from legacy to online alternative and podcast media. As Kimberly Strassel put it in the Wall Street Journal, it was ‘a landslide against the media’ (think CBS editing a word salad answer from Harris into a crisper sound bite but refusing to publish the full transcript).
Echoing the ‘quadfecta’ of the GOP capture of the Presidency, Senate, House, and popular vote, the MSM too suffered a quadruple calamity. Their preferred candidate lost. Their already dented credibility was torn to shreds. Echoing the George Costanza strategy, some voters did the opposite of what the media hacks told them, echoing last year’s Voice referendum here in Australia. Also like the Voice, Harris’s massive spending advantage merely reinforced the perception that she was the candidate of the wealthy few and he of the more numerous little guys.
Ironically, the media helped shrink-wrap the Democrats in the DC bubble so they never woke up to just how cut off they’d become from the concerns, fears, hopes, and aspirations of everyday Americans. Reduced to a party of, by, and for elites, they mistook the noise of shouty inner-city activists for the voice of Middle America. The voters gave the tiresome snobs (elites) and scolds (culture warriors) a big ‘FU’ in return, just like with the Voice down under.
Growing the Trump Voter Base
There isn’t just one US presidential election but 50 simultaneous but separate ones in every state, each with its own rules and processes. Similarly, there isn’t one unified and cohesive electorate but several distinct voting cohorts. As alluded to above, the Trump-led Republicans deepened their appeal among white working-class Americans but also broadened it to peel away once-solid support for the Democrats among specific cohorts and bring them inside the Republican tent.
This was particularly true of but not limited to the immigrant ethnic groups. According to a Forbes analysis, Harris’s six-point lead over Trump among Latinos was a steep drop from the 33 and 38-point margins for Biden and Clinton in 2020/2016. In Starr County in south Texas with a 97 percent Latino population that hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1892 and Clinton won by 79 points in 2016, Trump won 58 percent of the votes this time round. In Queens County, NY, one of the most ethnically and racially diverse counties in the US, the needle moved 20 points towards Trump from 2020. For all the brouhaha over an insult comedian’s off-colour Puerto Rican joke, even heavily Puerto Rican Osceola, FL, which Biden carried by nearly 14 points, flipped to Trump.
Clearly, voters were not moved much by Harris’s appeal to gender and minorities. Having failed to read the room, CNN’s exit poll shows that the Democrats have shrunk into the party of college-educated, high-income (above $100,000), whites, and single women.
None of the four main attack lines against Trump – a convicted felon, a racist, a misogynist, a wannabe Hitler who will destroy American democracy – resonated with these demographics. The first was viewed as the result of anti-democratic lawfare. The second was contradicted by the evidence of their own lying eyes with people such as Nikki Haley, Ramaswamy, Gabbard (raised a Hindu), Kash Patel, and Bobby Jindal inside the GOP fold. Ditto the third with Haley, Gabbard, Susie Wiles (Trump’s new chief of staff, plus Elise Stefanik and Kristi Noem among his other early top picks), his public support for Kellyanne Conway, and his emphatic support for women’s rights against trans extremism. The fourth flew in the face of their direct experience of the records of Trump and Biden-Harris and their own judgment on which of the respective two records was the greater violation of democratic norms. The CNN exit poll confirmed that voters perceived democracy to be threatened almost evenly by Harris and Trump.
The established immigrant populations too see economic downsides to having newer immigrant workers come in and compete for jobs. They too object to unlimited immigration on cultural grounds, having become proud of their American citizenship. They may even become more vociferous defenders of Americanism than whites who can trace their ancestry in the US further back but are wracked with guilt over historical sins like slavery and racism. They fault the Democrats on immigration, culture wars, and pronouns, and net zero obsession and costs be damned. Their optimistic vision for America is one based on promoting nationhood, national identity, American culture, secure borders, a history of many accomplishments to be proud of and celebrated, social conservatism, the prosperity of people who actually live in the country, and a better life for their kids.
Democracy Under Threat
In a surreal bait-and-switch tactic, the Democrats campaigned heavily on the fear that Trump, a closet Hitler, would begin to establish a dictatorship from Day One. This is from the party that overturned the democratic choice of 14 million voters to dump Biden and impose a DEI pick for the ultimate job, even though she failed to win a single delegate in 2020 and did not contest the party primary this year. She knew it, Americans knew it, the world knew it. Everyone also knew that the Democrats had lied about Biden’s cognitive health for four years and then, after replacing him, lied about Harris’s fitness for office. They treated voters with open contempt and they’ve returned the favour.
When the machine came after Trump in a scorched earth campaign of total lawfare, blacks and immigrants from countries where state harassment is routine related to him. This is disturbingly reminiscent to many immigrants, including Indians, of the VIP culture in their home countries which they fled in search of a better future for themselves and their descendants in the land of opportunity and the free.
The Democrats mostly refused to accept the legitimacy of Trump’s victory in 2016 and worked assiduously to undermine his presidency with guerrilla tactics and the Russia collusion hoax. Fifty-one former senior intelligence officials ran election interference against Trump in 2020 with knowingly false declarations on the Hunter Biden laptop story as classic Russian disinformation. They spied on his campaign, impeached him twice, arrested him, and tried to bankrupt, incarcerate, and throw him off the ballot. He was twice the target of assassination attempts and famously rose up from one with defiant fist pumps of ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ He absorbed all the punches and just kept coming back at them.
This was the mother of all overkills. Those pushing it sounded more like demented rage addicts than serious contenders for high political office. In the end, the only verdict that matters was delivered by the jury of all American voters. The charge that Trump is an existential threat to American democracy was also totally contradicted by Harris’s concession speech on the 6th: We lost this battle, she said, but the fight goes on and we will win the next time. And then she appealed for kindness towards the person she had been trashing for the past 100 days as a racist and sexist second coming of Hitler.
Immigration
Immigration has long been argued to bring multiple benefits of economic stimulus and growth, replenished gene pool, enriched cultural diversity, exposure to the world’s diverse range of scrumptious cuisine, and so on. In the US, Republicans tolerated illegal immigrants as a large pool of cheap labour and Democrats as a large bloc of reliable long-term votes. But in recent times mass and illegal immigration in particular have tipped the balance away from net benefits to harms, including net lifetime drain on public finances and stressed out public infrastructure. This is more so for the working classes than the elites.
This has put many settled liberal assumptions under scrutiny. For example, it is true that liberalism embraces multiculturalism. But actual and growing evidence in many Western democracies clearly indicates that not all multicultural groups embrace the core assumptions and values of liberalism, including tolerance for diversity of faiths, beliefs, and practices. The resulting fractures of civic culture, social cohesion, and political stability have heavily qualified the experience of shared citizenship.
By reversing Trump’s efforts to control the southern border and opening it wide to floods of illegal aliens on Harris’ watch as the border czar, the Democrats left her candidacy hostage to fortune and have paid the price. Exit polls showed immigration and the economy as the voters’ top two concerns and Trump – with a tough message on immigration, border enforcement, and mass deportations – won on these with 90 and 80 percent support.
A Win for Women’s Rights against Trans Colonisation of Female Spaces
The progressive cultural crusade is quintessentially Western, irrelevant, and repugnant to many non-Westerners. They don’t subscribe to white privilege and guilt, don’t believe masculinity is toxic and all women should be believed automatically when making serious allegations of sexual assault that devastate not just the man but his whole family, don’t support affirmative action for blacks, women, and transgender, don’t obsess over personal pronouns, and don’t lie in bed terrified of being cooked alive by global boiling.
They were horrified at the very thought, in the name of promoting trans rights, of males invading female spaces involving their daughters, from sporting competitions to changing rooms, showers, toilets, and schoolchildren on overnight camping trips. Trump’s disdain for these progressive pieties quite appeals to them. The distortion of policy priorities by the Democrats on climate catastrophism and trans extremism moved the needle of voter sentiment from opposed to angry. Most migrant minorities would favour a return to the progressive centrism of equal opportunity and fairness, not the cultural Marxist nostrum of identity-driven equitable outcomes.
While Trump-Vance spoke to people’s concerns on inflation, jobs, energy security, mass illegal immigration, and crime, Harris-Walz identified with boutique ideas around race and gender. Trump’s counterattack on transgender rights more than offset abortion – sorry, reproductive rights – as an issue for women in general and for non-white men and women in particular. In a Gallup Poll last year, 69 percent of Americans backed restricting sporting teams to biological sex and not based on gender self-identity.
Harris suffered a fall of three points from men and two points from women voters; Trump gained three points from both. How could this be: Isn’t he misogyny incarnate? The Biden-Harris administration was responsible for the most grievous assault on the sacrosanct principles of bodily integrity and ‘My Body, My Choice’ with its vaccine mandates. But when the Supreme Court struck down Roe v Wade in June 2022, they suddenly rediscovered their passion for the same principles and launched an all-out attack on the threat to abortion from another Trump term.
Yet, in a report published in May 2024 by Guttmacher Institute, a research organisation that supports access to abortion, the total number of abortions in the US was 1,037,000 in 2023, the first full year after the court decision. According to CDC data, this was a 64 percent jump from 625,978 in 2021 before the court decision (possibly depressed during shutdowns) and the highest in a decade.
Most people want neither harshly restrictive access to abortions nor the removal of all restrictions until birth. But most people don’t feel comfortable discussing it, believing it to be an intensely personal choice. The topic doesn’t align with the joy vibe and there’s something unsettling about any national leader who campaigns against bringing children into the world.
About a third of American women are pro-life. Even among pro-choice women, the majority don’t back abortion all the way to full term. Trump sided with the Supreme Court that it’s a state-level political issue, not one for the federal judiciary to adjudicate. He explicitly ruled out taking any further action and promised to veto any national ban on abortion. In the end, the much-trumpeted gender gap worked to Trump’s net advantage. Men broke for him 55-42 and women for Harris 53-45, giving Trump a five-point net gain.
The issue didn’t even excite the young. About 39 percent of young women and 42 percent of young men identified jobs and the economy as their top issue, while 17 percent and 8 percent picked abortion. Trump won 40 percent of the votes of female under-30s, up by seven points. Harris won the under-30s overall by 52-46, but fell back from Biden’s margin by 19 points. He won among under-30 men by 14 percent, a 29-point swing from 2020.
The Democrats spent $175 million on TV ads across the country to hammer their message on abortion – more than on any other issue. Republicans spent $123 million attacking trans athletes. One ad featured footage of Harris from the 2019 primaries saying she supported taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgery for illegal immigrants and transgender prison inmates. The tagline: ‘Kamala’s For They/Them. President Trump is for you’ was exceptionally effective. The New York Times reported on 7 November on an analysis by Future Forward, a pro-Harris super PAC, that that one single ad shifted the race by a stunning 2.7 percent towards Trump after viewers watched it.
Culture warriors have captured and occupied the commanding heights of state and public institutions, including most of the print and electronic legacy media, from which to coerce and harass critics and dissenters into compliance through an expansive abuse of administrative power by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is a good example and I wonder how much harm this American import has caused to Australia’s critical relationship with the incoming administration by picking a fight with Musk (which she lost) who will wield a powerful influence on Trump.
Indo-Americans
For reasons that should be self-evident, I am more familiar with Indo-American than with other groups’ sentiments. The comments that follow draw on many conversations over time with colleagues, friends, and relations in the US.
Unlike the low depression hanging over many Western capitals led by people yet to outgrow student politics, in heavily polluted Delhi the Modi government will be pleased to see the House of Orange restored to the White House. Speaking at a function in Mumbai on 10 November, in response to a question from the audience on the implications of Trump 2.0 for India, Foreign Minister S Jaishankar remarked (at around 25 minutes) that ‘a lot of countries are nervous about the US…We are not one of them.’ He said that Modi’s call of congratulations was among the first three that Trump took from foreign leaders.
The rise in India’s global profile has coincided with the rise into public prominence of many people of Indian origin living in the West, none more so than in the US. There are 5.2 million Indo-Americans, over half of them of voting age. They have been a historically solid Democratic voting cohort. Their high-income worth, educational qualifications, professional occupations, and political engagement give them a role that belies their small numbers.
It’s worth remembering that small numbers can tip the outcomes in just a handful of states to determine the overall winner. There are over 700,000 Indians in the seven swing states. In 2016, 84 percent of Indo-Americans voted for Hillary Clinton, falling to 68 percent for Biden in 2020. Harris’s share fell again to 60 percent, despite her mother being Indian. Support for Trump was 31 percent, up from 22 percent in 2020.
Many Indo-Americans had to wait years for a green card while working in tech, starting companies, paying taxes, but unable to claim Social Security benefits until they became citizens. Immigration as a fairness issue has turned many into Trump voters, especially when they see undocumented immigrants committing crimes and accessing social benefits funded in part by their taxes.
They resent Democrats pandering to grifters who contribute little to society or the economy and forgiving debts incurred by students of the many victimhood and grievance degrees. Coming from a country that was invaded, conquered, colonised, and ruled for a thousand years by Islamic and British invaders then partitioned, they are bewildered at being maligned as White Adjacent for their success through education and work ethic because this contradicts the narrative of oppressed minorities. They fought all the way to the Supreme Court against discriminatory admissions by the nation’s elite universities. They have lived experience of the onerous burden of the parasitical regulatory state.
The reasons why Indo-Americans have begun switching to Trump’s Republican Party offer important clues on Trump’s appeal to other Asian-Americans, Latinos, and blacks. This should attract the interest of campaign strategists of centre-right parties across Western democracies, including Australia, on how to fight and win culture wars and defend cultural centrism in order to win elections in a rapidly evolving political landscape where traditional partisanship is in freefall and new alignments are coalescing around class- and family-based values and concerns.
A substantially shorter version was published in Spectator Australia online on 14 and in the magazine on 16 November.
Trump’s Multiethnic Winning Coalition
by Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society