Trump comes out with flying colours on diversity

Republicans have sounded alarms for more than a decade about the limits of their overwhelmingly white party. To stay competitive for the White House, strategists warned, they would need to bring more black, Latino and other voters of colour into the fold.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump showed how it could be done.
His victory over vice-president Kamala Harris was decisive, broad and dependent on voters from core Democratic constituencies. Results showed that Trump continued his dominance with the white, working-class voters who first propelled his political rise. But he also made modest gains in the suburbs and cities, and with black voters, and even more significant inroads with Latinos.
Trump’s performance did not suddenly transform the Republican Party into the multiracial alliance of working-class voters that some strategists say is necessary for survival in the rapidly changing country. But he nudged it in that direction.

At a time when the nation is sharply divided – particularly between rich and poor, and between those with and without a college degree – even incremental shifts were enough to sweep Trump back into power and put him on track to win the popular vote. Conservative strategists who have pushed the party to broaden its appeal pointed to the changes as proof of concept. Democrats, who have long relied on the support of minority voters, agonised over the trends. “The losses among Latinos is nothing short of catastrophic for the party,” said Rep. Ritchie Torres, an Afro-Latino Democrat whose district based in New York City’s Bronx borough is heavily Hispanic. Torres worried that Democrats were increasingly captive to “a college-educated far left that is in danger of causing us to fall out of touch with working-class voters.”
There was evidence of Trump’s inroads across the country. In the heavily blue-collar community of Fayette County, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh, Trump won nearly 70% of the vote, expanding his margins by about 5 percentage points since 2020. Nationally, Hispanic-majority counties on average shifted toward Trump by 10 percentage points. His gains with black voters were less significant but still notable in smaller communities across Georgia. Hancock, Talbot and Jefferson counties, all majority-black counties with no more than 15,000 people, shifted toward Trump. Trump campaign celebrated a victory in Baldwin County, Georgia, where 42% of the population is black. Republicans had not won the county for decades.
Asian-American voters, who make up the fastest-growing eligible electorate in the country, also appeared to have drifted away from Democrats, according to exit polls and unofficial returns. “The strength of Trump’s reach into the traditional Democratic coalition of voters of colour was stunning,” said Daniel HoSang, a Yale professor who has written about the rise of right-wing political attitudes among minority groups.
Working-class voters were once aligned behind Democrats, while the Republican Party catered to the upper-income and business interests. Trump made a point of shifting his policies to speak to these new Republican voters: He proposed eliminating the tax on tips. He said he would increase the number of tax deductions. He vowed to increase manufacturing jobs across the country. Many Latino voters were not turned off by Trump’s hardline immigration policies. Polling showed that about one-third of Latino voters supported his policies for mass deportations of immigrants without legal status.
The result was a far cry from the party’s infamous “autopsy” report following Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, which urged Republicans to adopt more compassionate immigration policies. Instead, HoSang said, the winning formula was much closer to what Steve Bannon, Trump’s ex-chief strategist in the White House, has called “inclusive nationalism.”