How Donald Trump, the Leader of White Grievance, Gained Among Hispanic Voters

Eight years ago, at the dawn of the Donald Trump era, Toni Morrison spoke for many liberals when she described his election as a reaction to the "collapse of white privilege." In an essay called " Making America White Again ," published in this magazine, Morrison argued that in the aftermath of Barack Obama's Presidency many white people felt driven to "keep alive the perception of white superiority." And she lamented "how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump."

This vision of Trump as the leader of an aggrieved white America took hold broadly during the early years of his term, boosted by the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, scarcely six months after he took office. Some of the marchers, who objected to the removal of a monument to Robert E. Lee , were carrying Confederate flags, and some were wearing "Make America Great Again" hats. After a counter-protester was run over and killed by a man who had praised both Trump and Adolf Hitler, Trump delivered remarks that helped define his Presidency. "You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides," he said. (He also added a qualifying follow-up: "I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists—because they should be condemned totally.")

The idea that Trump was a white nationalist in disguise was horrifying to his opponents, but it was also seductive, because it made him seem like a fringe character, the kind of politician who might inspire a multiracial coalition of decent folks to rise up against him. Especially, perhaps, Latinos, since invective against Hispanic immigration was so central to Trump's 2016 campaign . Instead, in his second run for the Presidency, Trump improved his performance among Hispanic voters: according to a Pew study , he lost that group by thirty-eight points in 2016, but only twenty-one points in 2020. The data seem to suggest that Joe Biden was elected President that year only because Trump underperformed among one group in particular: non-Hispanic whites.

This week, the notion of Trump as the leader of a distinctively white movement became harder to defend. Although exit-poll data can be unreliable, there are signs that, in his extraordinary comeback, he continued to assemble a coalition that is not unusually white but, rather, unusually nonwhite, by the standards of the recent Republican Party. For instance, Trump became the first Republican in more than a century to win Starr County, along the Mexican border in Texas, which is almost entirely Hispanic; he did similarly well throughout the state's majority-Hispanic border counties. It is possible that Trump also made gains among Black voters, who remain a much more reliable Democratic constituency, but we don't yet have dispositive data. One theory is that Trump does better among non-college-educated voters over all, including nonwhite ones; this argument is consistent with both his popularity among some traditionally non-Republican constituencies and his unpopularity among members of the cultural élite, including some former Republicans .

As the results rolled in on Tuesday night, the racial diversity of the Trump coalition was discussed across the cable-news spectrum. "What we've heard from both campaigns is that Donald Trump is doing a little bit better with African Americans, especially African American men, than he did last time," Jake Tapper said on CNN, a little after ten o'clock, as Democrats were starting to fret. "It's clear now that Donald Trump has picked up key support among Hispanic voters," Michele Norris, of MSNBC, said about an hour later, as the camera showed grave-looking Harris supporters at Howard University. "Long term, Democrats are going to have to think about—they're losing their coalition," Katie Pavlich said on Fox News, at eleven-thirty-seven, by which point Trump's supporters were ready to celebrate.

Considering the tumult of the past four years, it was striking how little the Presidential candidates talked about race this year, at least explicitly. In this abbreviated campaign, unlike in 2020 , Kamala Harris seemed intent on avoiding the subject. And although, in campaigns past, political arguments about crime have often been interpreted as veiled appeals to racial identity , Trump tends to talk as if most American crime is the fault of immigrant groups—Haitian migrants, perhaps, or Venezuelan gangs. Claims like these are insulting to those immigrant groups, but they are also flattering to a broad range of Americans, who can imagine themselves as part of a diverse country where all the locals are basically well behaved.

Late in the campaign, during a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, one of his opening acts, the antagonistic comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, threatened to disrupt this state of affairs. He made a joke about Puerto Rico being a "floating island of garbage," which for a time became the campaign's . Nicky Jam, a reggaetón star from the island, un-endorsed Trump ("Puerto Rico se respeta," he said—"Respect Puerto Rico"), and Democrats traded hopeful stories about Puerto Rican voters on the mainland who were angrily turning against Trump. But, like so many things that happened during the campaign, this didn't seem to matter much: Osceola, a majority-Hispanic county in Florida with a large Puerto Rican population, swung from a fourteen-point Biden victory in 2020 to a narrow Trump victory this year.

It's possible, maybe likely, that Trump's second term will bring a new series of statements or policies that reinvigorates our old arguments about racism in America, and that gives fresh ammunition to critics who view him as a white supremacist in disguise, or perhaps not in disguise. It is true, too, that what it means to be white in America has changed over time; perhaps Trump's coalition will help Americans rethink the assumption that "white" and "Hispanic" are mutually exclusive categories, and will boost a new version of the old white identity. But, as far as we can tell, Trump's America is a place that is more polarized by education than it used to be and less polarized by whiteness and non-whiteness—by race, broadly understood. This switch, if it holds, may be bad for Democrats, at least in the short term. But if one party no longer represents whiteness so specifically, isn't that good for America?