How Trump’s huge gains with Latino and Asian voters and black men landed him back in the White House
A majority of Latino men, big gains among Asian voters and black men — and a lot more members of Gen Z.
That’s how Donald Trump built a diverse coalition that propelled the former president to an electoral blowout on Tuesday — adding nearly 9 million more votes than he won in 2016.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss was marked by her campaign hemorrhaging long-held Democratic support from groups that have been stalwart Democratic supporters for generations, according to exit polls by Edison Research.
The surveys showed a dramatic drift rightward for young and non-white voters, according to GOP pollster and strategist Patrick Ruffini.
“It is historically unprecedented in the modern era,” Ruffini told The Post, referring to the period following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“We’ve never had this big of an Hispanic electorate before, so it’s really hard to do a comparison,” he added. “Since we’ve had records, certainly it’s the strongest.”
Veteran pollster Henry Olsen told The Post that under Trump’s leadership the GOP had been welcoming in working-class voters only “in fits and starts” until last night.
“Last night it took a big leap,” Olsen said, in large part due to the Republican nominee’s focus on the economy and immigration — the top two concerns for voters all year, per public polling.
“They’re interlinked particularly for Latinos,” he explained, noting how mass immigration presents difficulties for those already in the US looking for jobs.
As for the Harris campaign, Olsen added, the Democratic nominee “was not hitting her targets” early on last night, including shoring up suburban women and retaining high levels of support among black and Hispanic voters.
“She could have minimized some of the loss of the black community by making it up in the suburbs with women,” he said. “But when the votes came in it was quite clear she was not running up the score.”
Strikingly, Trump’s support among white voters dropped by 3 percentage point from 2016 — and Harris gained 8 points among white voters.
In total, 12% of black voters reported casting ballots for Trump in 2024, compared with just 8% eight years earlier. Twenty percent of black men said they supported the former president over Harris.
Asian voters voted for Trump by 38%, which was a nine-percentage-point increase from 2016. That’s the same margin that left the Democratic party by 2024.
Among Latinos, 45% broke for him this cycle, whereas just 29% voted for him in 2016 — a 16 percentage point shift.
A majority (54%) of Latino men helped fuel that rise for the soon-to-be 47th president.
The share of the electorate who is Latino has also grown significantly — from less than 12% in 2016 to 14.7% this year.
Daniel Garza, president of the grassroots Latino advocacy group LIBRE Initiative, told The Post that Trump’s win was the result of “the working class rejecting the political class who don’t relate when it comes to the economy.”
“They were ignored and told to shut up and feel the ‘joy,'” he joked, referring to the Harris campaign’s initial messaging on the Democratic ticket was reshuffled.
Garza also said that the inroads Trump made in swing states like North Carolina and Georgia with the demographic prove that his message of “opportunity,” “prosperity” and “wanting a quality education for their children” was a success.
Jose Luis Sanchez Jr., 41, told The Post he voted only for Democrats when he was younger, but decided to go with Trump this election.
As a resident of Hidalgo County in South Texas, he said he is concerned with the record levels of illegal immigration under the Biden-Harris administration right at his doorstep.
“I think that contrary to the standard belief that Hispanics are just for all-immigration in general — I think that there’s a lot of Hispanics that are actually against this massive wave of illegal immigration,” Sanchez Jr. said.
“And they’re pro-immigration, but they’re pro-legal immigration,” he added. “So that’s one of the reasons why we saw the shift to the more conservative side.”
Zully De La Garza, another Hidalgo County resident who voted for Trump said she believes Hispanic voters in the region are upset to see that migrants who crossed the border illegally are now receiving government benefits — “while citizens here are struggling.”
Both Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden won majorities of Latino voters — with 63% and 59%, respectively.
One in five (20%) black men also went for Trump, compared with 13% who supported him eight years ago.
With Hispanic women, Trump won a 12-percentage-point gain between 2016 and 2024.
Historically, Trump may have received the highest share of non-white voters since Republican candidate Richard Nixon’s loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960, experts said.
Monica Davis, a black 54-year-old woman from Tuscaloosa, Ala., said she cast a ballot for him because he’s “straightforward, to the point.”
“Kamala switched up her accents,” Davis said, referring to the veep intoning like a preacher or dipping into French and Jamaican pastiches. “You never knew where she was coming from.”
Colas Orea, who runs a Mexican grocery store in Alabama, was also happy to see Trump clinch the win.
“It’s fine by me to see him win,” Orea celebrated in his native Spanish. “I think he’ll be good. … He’s a strong man.”
Orea moved to the US from Mexico four years ago. As for whether Trump would be good for immigrants like him, he said, “Immigrants will have no problems as long as they are here properly.”
Even as Harris bled support from non-white voters, Trump lost no ground with a demographic that the Democratic nominee had considered key to her victory: white women.
In 2024, 52% of white female voters went with Trump — the same percentage that supported him in 2016 against the last woman presidential nominee from a major party.
During those eight years, the former president lost just three percentage points of support among white male voters, from 62% to 59%.
Trump also got help from Generation Z. About 42% of voters age 18 to 29 reported supporting Trump — a five-percentage point improvement from 2019.
Harris’ support from Gen Z dropped about 5 points from the 60% Biden enjoyed — amid massive divisions among young people over the Israel-Hamas war and Trump’s direct outreach to young men, who had already showed signs of shifting to the right.
