AMAC Exclusive – By Andrew Abbott
While poll numbers show that President Biden is generally unpopular with all voters nationwide, what should be particularly alarming to the Democratic Party is his precipitous decline in support among minority voters. Nowhere is this clearer than with Hispanic Americans, who now disapprove of the job that Joe Biden is doing as President by a whopping 60%-26% margin. The numbers are similarly concerning among other key Democrat demographics, including black voters. Should this trend continue, it may point to the permanent evaporation of what once promised to be a permanent Democrat majority coalition.
Defenders of Biden suggest his declining support among Latino voters in particular, who have been hard hit by inflation and rising gas prices, is merely a result of the current economic tumult and not the problems with the party itself. But the numbers tell a different story. According to a Quinnipiac University poll, “48% of Hispanic registered voters said they wanted Republicans to take control of the House of Representatives, while just 34% said they wanted Democrats in power. In addition, 49% of Hispanic voters said they wanted the GOP to win the Senate, while 36% said they wanted Democrats to remain in control of the chamber.” Clearly, Hispanic dissatisfaction is with Democrats generally, not just Joe Biden.
While Biden does remain above water with black Americans, his approval has slipped to 63% from 85% last year. But even before Biden took office, Democrats were showing signs of struggling with what has long been a key bloc of voters in both statewide and national elections. Hillary Clinton severely underperformed with black voters in 2016. In 2018, despite winning back control of the House, Democrats actually won a smaller share of the black vote than they did in 2016. Donald Trump won more of the black vote in 2020 than he did in 2016, despite four years of a mainstream media smear campaign. While black support for Democrats remains strong overall, Republicans are undoubtedly trending in the right direction, albeit slowly.
This hemorrhaging of minority voters is unprecedented in recent history and is unthinkable to many progressive elites. Last month, co-host of “The View” Sunny Houston expressed as much when she said that “I don’t understand Black Republicans, and I don’t understand Latino Republicans,” going on to say that a “black Republican” or a “Latino Republican” is an “oxymoron.”
Houston’s comments indicate how progressives have for years viewed support from minority voters as a given and not something that must be actively pursued. The belief among liberal elites is that the Republican Party exists explicitly to service and promote the policies and principles of “white America” and that, since the 1960s, the party has been rooted in white isolationism, nativism, and resentment of minorities. Thus, as the country becomes more diverse, the white Republican vote will gradually be destroyed via diversity, or so the theory goes.
This idea was popularized by a 2002 book titled The Emerging Democratic Majority and has become the de facto philosophy among Democratic Party strategists ever since. Mitt Romney’s disappointing 2012 presidential campaign was pointed to as the clearest sign that the days of the Republican Party were numbered. Following his defeat, the RNC released a much-touted “autopsy” of his failed campaign, which concluded that the party was on its way to oblivion if it didn’t become more “inclusive.” In a way, the GOP did become more inclusive, but not by embracing the Democrats’ brand of identity politics as the GOP autopsy imagined.
When Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, progressives predicted that not a single minority voter would support the controversial candidate. Prominent Clinton supporter Maria Cardona reassured Democrats that a “big, beautiful brown wall” of Latinos stood between Trump and the White House. A New York Magazine writer called the 2016 Trump campaign “the death throes of white male power.”
To the shock and horror of all these experts and elites, Donald Trump successfully won the presidency in 2016 with almost a third of the Hispanic vote. Furthermore, he outperformed Mitt Romney with black Americans. Despite the clear repudiation of their theory of the GOP’s demise, many Democrats continued to assert that “demographics were destiny” and that 2016 was merely a “fluke,” primarily due to an unpopular Hilary Clinton and alleged “Russian interference.”
It wasn’t until the 2020 presidential election that Democrats realized they were genuinely losing ground with minorities, even if they managed to win back the White House and the Senate. Not only had Trump held onto his minority support, but he actually won a more significant share of black male and Hispanic voters than he did the first time. This rude awakening was reaffirmed in 2021 when Republicans won all three statewide offices in Virginia with, by some metrics, a majority of the Hispanic vote. As David Shor, a Democrat polling expert and avowed socialist, said, “the GOP is really assembling the multiracial working-class coalition that the left has always dreamed of.”
There are many theories on why minorities, especially Hispanics, are shifting away from the Democratic Party. One of the most prominent is “messaging.” According to Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ): “We don’t really talk about the American dream to Latinos; we talk to them like we talk to white liberals. But they’re not white liberals! Latinos want to be rich; they want to be successful.” That’s a message much more in tune with traditional conservative principles, not progressive rhetoric about redistribution of wealth and the “Tax the Rich” slogan Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez famously wore splashed on her gown to the Met Gala in Manhattan.
But, rather than “messaging,” the deeper issue for Democrats might be a fundamental misunderstanding of what issues truly matter to minority voters. Democrats consistently invoke amnesty and immigration “reform” as the main priority when speaking with Hispanic voters. Yet, for at least the last decade, immigration has ranked low in priorities for Hispanic communities. Most Latinos are in favor of border security and support border patrol and law enforcement. They don’t want government handouts and free healthcare; they want economic opportunity to build a future for themselves and their children, something Democrats have not even talked about for decades.
Even with Democrats bleeding minority support thanks to their failed policies, Republicans can and should continue active outreach to these voters. The future of the Republican Party–the one that Democrats truly fear–is a diverse coalition of voters united not by shallow identity politics and fearmongering but by a shared love of country and commitment to broad prosperity that has always defined our national character.
Andrew Abbott is the pen name of a writer and public affairs consultant with over a decade of experience in DC at the intersection of politics and culture.