What if Trump's gains with minorities weren't about Trump at all?

Washington Post

8 hours ago

Urban minorities in cities such as New York, once Democrats' blue bedrock, swung toward Donald Trump in 2024. Many months later, we're still casting about for a full explanation.
But what if it wasn't really about Trump? Or New York?
Because looking at maps of recent Canadian elections, we saw some eerily familiar patterns.
Maps of Toronto show it was, not for the first time, doing its best NYC impression. Our analysis of Elections Canada and 2021 Canadian census data shows the Great Lakes megacity's most diverse, immigrant-intensive electoral districts (a.k.a. 'ridings') saw some of the swiftest shifts toward Canada's Conservative Party from 2021 to 2025.
Sure, Trump scrambled the Canadian election by suggesting that our larger neighbor become the 51st state, and it may not be representative. But we also recalled that back in July 2024, London voters shifted similarly.
Conservatives there lost ground relative to Labour everywhere, compared with 2019, but lost the least ground (or even none at all) in the least White electoral districts (a.k.a. 'constituencies') — as determined by our analysis of data compiled by University of Oxford political scientist Ben Ansell.
In all those elections, liberals showed unusual weakness among groups that often formed the heart of their coalition: non-White voters. They're not losing many elections in these neighborhoods yet, but if the shift continues, once-impenetrable districts could be up for grabs. (We're zooming in on major cities here to keep it comparable, but in all three countries we found evidence of a national shift as well.)
What's going on? We set out in search of forces that might explain these three parallel moves rightward. We twisted and turned, but all the while we were stumbling toward a potential, and little-discussed, answer.
Anti-incumbent wrath defined elections in the pandemic era, but we can't put all our bets in that bucket, because conservatives were incumbent in the United Kingdom and because we can't think of a truly compelling reason for more diverse neighborhoods to be disproportionately eager to throw the bums out.
In search of answers, we grabbed the phone. And we immediately got an answering machine. Which in this case was the best possible result, because by 'answering machine,' we mean Erin Tolley at Ottawa's Carleton University. She's a machine when it comes to answering questions about her longtime focus of ethnic minorities in Canadian politics.
Tolley started by pouring one of Canada's most abundant resources, cold water, all over our theory that the three parallel shifts might be connected. Northernmost America's political paradigm shift looks much different from what we saw in the U.S. or the U.K.
Trump's campaigns often issued conflicting messages on race — alternating efforts to appeal to young men of color, for instance, with racially inflammatory comments. By contrast, Canada's Conservatives laid the groundwork for deeper support among minorities with two decades of outreach.
Starting under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who ran the boreal behemoth for much of the Obama era, Canadian Conservatives looked at themselves in a metaphorical mirror and realized their political future depended on minority and immigrant voters. Harper consistently cultivated groups such as Cantonese-speaking Canadians who might share his conservative or Christian values.
'They really turned toward the ethnic media,' Tolley explained. 'They attended cultural events and tailored their message to these communities.'
Our theory in jeopardy, we called Will Jennings. The University of Southampton political scientist follows the U.S. and the U.K. closely, but these days the closest he comes to Canadian politics is sharing a name with the dude who wrote the lyrics to Celine Dion's 'My Heart Will Go On.'
On a late-night-his-time Zoom connection far across the distance and spaces between us, Jennings gently informed us that the U.K., too, seemed like an exception. Compared with immigrant and minority voters in the other major cities, London's were 'going in the same direction, but for different reasons.'
In particular, he said, the swing in the U.K., with its proportionately larger Muslim population, was driven by one 'big, big, big factor.'
'You don't get this dynamic if it wasn't for Gaza,' Jennings told us. 'There's just no way it happens.'
The country's Muslims have vocally protested the Labour Party's position on Israel's military campaign in a conflict that Gaza's Health Ministry says has killed more than 50,000 people. In several left-leaning constituencies, Labour politicians were unhorsed by pro-Palestinian independent candidates.
And of course when journalists asked New Yorkers why they voted Republican, they almost always provided Trump-specific explanations. They spoke of his promises to solve a 'migrant crisis' that strained the city's shelters, his perceived business savvy amid a soaring cost of living, and his long history of tough-on-crime rhetoric in a city where some saw rising lawlessness.
But if every country has pursued a unique path, why do all the paths seem to lead to the same place?
We wondered if, perhaps, broader factors have made minority voters in all three cities, and all three countries, more open to conservative messages — or at least less convinced by liberal ones.
If that was the case, then no matter what their message happened to be, right-leaning politicians would find that they were pushing on an open door. It wasn't just the message they pushed with that mattered; it was also that the door was ajar in the first place.
So, what set it ajar?
Well, easy answers don't exist.
In all three countries, minority neighborhoods reliably leaned left or center-left. They still do, but cracks keep appearing.
Michigan State University political scientist Matt Grossmann, whom you might remember from his definitive descriptions of America's education divide, noted that we could be seeing a new frontier of education polarization.
'Education replacing income as a dividing line between left and right parties is an international trend across the rich world,' he told us. 'In the U.S., this has come later to minority groups. It would not be surprising if that were true in other Western democracies.'
But we need more than that long-term shift to explain why polarization has come later to minority groups, after a U.S. election in which our friends at the Pew Research Center found more-educated minority voters shifted right at least as rapidly as their less-educated peers. Luckily, Grossmann pointed to a companion trend: 'Social minorities are sorting by ideology the way that other voters have.'
Ideology and party haven't always moved hand-in-hand in the United States. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats were once commonplace. But they've virtually vanished. The modern shift coincided with the Nixon-era Southern strategy, in which Republicans appealed to conservative and/or racist White Dixie Democrats at the price of alienating Black voters who might otherwise have considered a vote for the party of Abraham Lincoln.
Indeed, from the 1970s through the Obama years, three-quarters of Black Americans who considered themselves conservative nonetheless voted for Democrats. But by 2024, fewer than half of them did, according to our analysis of new data from the always indispensable General Social Survey from NORC at the University of Chicago.
The gap among conservative Hispanic Americans never loomed as wide, but it has likewise flipped in recent years — conservative Hispanics now identify as Republican at almost twice the rate that they call themselves Democrats.
'Conservative minorities, who used to vote for the liberal party out of a sense of identity, have begun to drift towards voting in line with their ideology, while liberal and college-educated Whites drift ever more into the liberal party's camp,' Lakshya Jain told us. Jain, you will recall, leads the critically beloved election analysis and forecasting outfit Split Ticket in his spare time.
But the more we talked to folks who were smarter than we were, the more we kept coming back to what Jennings calls 'atomization.' Minority neighborhoods may have traditionally coalesced around the same candidate because residents got their news from similar sources. But as media balkanizes ever more rapidly in the TikTok era, the electorate splits into smaller and less predictable units.
'If you don't have a collective experience among the electorate,' Jennings told us, 'people are going to be very, very atomized, and it's very difficult to keep a coalition of voters together.'
A full analysis of this phenomenon will probably win somebody a couple genius grants, but for now we'll test the waters with the data we have, courtesy of the perennially popular American National Election Studies, a 77-year-old quadrennial survey organized by top universities and funded by the National Science Foundation.
Consider the most universal political news medium in the most populous country of the three: American television. When you split the White vote by television habits, not much changes. But among minorities, something seismic shifts.
Democrats have always done well with U.S. minorities who follow political news on the telly, and they still won 73 percent of them in 2024. But their support among those who didn't follow the election on TV plummeted to 46 percent, a perfect match for Republican support in that group, which just about doubled to 46 percent.
And, for perhaps the first time, the share of Americans following the presidential election on TV began to fall in 2024. It dropped from 85 percent to 81 percent. We don't know what's replacing it, though we do know that the share who got political news on TikTok soared from 22 percent in 2020 to 33 percent in 2024 — and that TikTok is the only medium through which U.S. minorities were more likely to follow politics than were Whites.
Similarly, a March poll from Pew Research found that 30 percent of minority voters who supported Trump got at least some of their news from 'The Joe Rogan Experience' — putting the Trump-endorsing podcast behind only Fox News in that group. (To be sure, other sources were also close enough to be within the margin of error, and Pew's Elisa Shearer cautioned that our media choice can be an effect of our political views as much as it is a cause of them.)
Anne Wilson has studied the effects of fragmentation as a social psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. (For the record, the school takes its name from the first French Canadian prime minister, a Liberal who — after 15 years in office — finally faced his Waterloo in 1911, when he probably lost the election because, amid a looming trade war with the U.S., he pushed for lower tariffs.)
She pointed out that as culture wars consume politics, folks who are culturally conservative but economically liberal — including many working-class minorities and immigrants — might choose to vote based on cultural issues. Especially as their own algorithm-driven fragment of the media turns those leanings into outrage by amplifying moral- or emotional-based messages.
'Social media can subtly shape people's information diet because algorithms are attuned to what people are engaging with online,' Wilson said. 'So if someone's paying attention to content that leans a little more socially conservative, the algorithm will feed you more and more of that. And before you know it, you're in an informational ecosystem that's pretty different from what you'd see tuning into mainstream media.'
Having studied how our fragmented media, social and otherwise, amplifies fringe beliefs and stokes antipathy toward political rivals, she agreed with our thesis — that changes in media helped bring ideological, educational and gender divides into groups that were once defined first by race or culture — but had one word of caution.
'It's not so much a shift towards conservatives in every case, but a shift away from liberals,' Wilson said, citing sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, author of 'We Have Never Been Woke.' 'Liberals have shifted their messages in ways that I think appeal more to upper-class and educated voters … potentially without being so aware of how that message may not appeal to voters of color who are not in those circles.'
When we tracked down al-Gharbi, who says he actually reads our column(!), he seconded Wilson's points. 'The moves are more driven by alienation from the Democratic Party than genuine affinity with, say, Trump,' he told us.
Hi! The Department of Data craves queries. What are you curious about? Is this an unusually bad time to be a white-collar worker? What's the best way to measure YouTube's or TikTok's gains against traditional television? How much of America's disused rail lines have been converted to trails already? Just ask!
If your question appears in a column, we'll send you an official Department of Data button and ID card. This week, we owe one to data editor Dan Rosenheck at the Economist, whose post on X helped inspire this analysis. We also owe thanks to historian J.L. Granatstein, who helped us understand how U.S.-related tariffs helped decide the 1911 Canadian election.