The news
When I went to vote in New York this morning, there were six referendums on the ballot: an abortion rights amendment, a rule to expand the Department of Sanitation’s reach to highway media, three budget issues, and a measure to create a new Chief Business Diversity Officer.
The first five measures won easily. The sixth, creating the diversity officer, lost by five points.
That happened as New York did its part to return the House of Representatives to the Democratic Party, turning at least two seats blue. It happened amid a fierce backlash against the progressive victories of the past decade. And it happened as Donald Trump presided over a surprising realignment of American racial politics, ending Democrats’ presumptive dominance among black and most Latino voters.
Election day exit polls are notoriously slippery, and so be it the early figures The suggestion that Trump may have won among Latino men and fared well into double digits with black voters — against a black candidate — may be shifting. But the election results appear to point to the best results in a generation among non-white voters for a Republican candidate.
Ben’s vision
Race has long been a source of unpredictable energy in American politics, the subject of coded language and dog whistles as elections have turned in different ways to bigotry and solidarity. It’s been that way for a lifetime. American racial politics fell into something of an ugly equilibrium after former white Democratic segregationists became Republicans and black voters fled their party for the heirs of Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights coalition.
Now the 2024 election was clearly — take note, liberals looking for a silver lining — the least racially polarized in a generation. Trump made deep inroads into historically Democratic working-class Mexican American neighborhoods and appears to have blunted Kamala Harris’ lead among black voters. He did this without releasing the kind of targeted policy proposals (the “Platinum Plan”) that he did in 2020 and without promising any further action on his signature First Step Act, which softened harsh criminal justice policies. Some voted for him, others may have simply stayed home.
Instead, he campaigned through symbolism and outreach to men who didn’t go to college. One of the most surprising things I read this cycle was Kadia Goba’s journey through Trump’s campaign for black men. It read a bit like a comedy.
Once she convinced the campaign, she took a serious interest in the subject: “I got a call from Mets and Yankees slugger Darryl Strawberry. That was the beginning of an odyssey through the heroes and villains of my youth: Over the next few weeks I chatted with heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, stood backstage at a Trump rally with retired NFL star Lawrence Taylor and traveled to meet boxing promoter Don. King personally. Ultimately, I spoke to Trump himself.”
“They see what I’ve done and they see power, they want power, okay,” he said. “They want power, they want security. They want jobs, they want to have their jobs. They don’t want millions of people to come and take their jobs. And we – that’s what happens. These people coming into our country are taking jobs from African Americans and they know it.”
American elections never really solve anything. Tomorrow the sides return to battle. But it’s clear after this Election Day that Democrats, for the first time in a generation, will have to find a new way to reach people who were among their most reliable voters.
That means a new kind of bidding war between the parties for Latino and Black votes, and — possibly — new pressure on Republicans not to do anything that could drive away the new allies.
Remarkable
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Early exit polls collected by the Washington Post show an unusual – for American elections – even division among each ethnic group.
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“As more Latinos vote for RepublicansExperts tend to attribute this shift to an ideological transformation, and too often they ignore the impact of community organizing.” Jack Herrera wrote of Trump’s campaign in Pennsylvania.
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Black and Latino voters switched to Trump for the same vague reasons that affected American voters in general. “The truth is that there are many explanations and they are difficult to untangle,” said the New York Times Nate Cohn wrote.