New York Times op-ed details how Democrats lost the non-White voters Obama gained

Fox News

a day ago

On Thursday, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Dr. Daniel Martinez HoSang, a professor of American studies and political science at Yale University, analyzing how the Democratic Party has lost a sizable portion of the non-White voters that former President Barack Obama brought into the party during his eight-year tenure.
After researching and speaking with minority voters in typical Democratic strongholds like Milwaukee and the Bay Area of San Francisco, HoSang concluded that many of the non-White voters who now support President Donald Trump left the Democratic Party after becoming exhausted by identity politics and worsening economic conditions and crime.
"The rightward drift of minority voters is not a story of just one election. It is a phenomenon years in the making, one that is reshaping the American political landscape. And to understand this movement, you must understand the transformations in the places they are happening," HoSang wrote.
According to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, Trump has made up extensive ground with Hispanic voters, Black voters and Asian voters.
The poll found that Trump significantly closed the gap on Hispanic voters, with 51% of them going to former Vice President Kamala Harris, and 48% going to Trump, a significant shift from the 2020 presidential election, when Trump fell behind with Hispanic voters to former President Joe Biden, 61%-36%.
The president also made significant gains with Black and Asian voters, boosting his support among Black voters from 8% in 2020 to 15% in 2024, and among Asian voters from 30% to 40%.
One former Obama voter HoSang spoke to, Orlando Owens from Milwaukee, said that he joined the Democratic Party because he was Black, but was eventually disaffected after becoming tired of the party's identity politics and empty promises.
"When you get your food stamp review, you have to go give shot records, school records, blood type. You almost have to get absolutely naked to get a $50 increase. But you have people coming to this country who have no documentation who are staying in hotels for two years, for free? How is that right?" he questioned. "A lot of Black people have already heard the promises from the Democrats. And nothing was delivered."
HoSang argued that the foreclosure crisis, opioid epidemic and chronic funding shortfalls have "created cracks in the bedrock of Democratic support" in cities like Milwaukee, and yet, "Democrats have largely doubled down on promising relatively modest policy reforms meant to speak to the interests of voters of color."
"Disappointed in the party that they saw as presiding over these profound economic shifts, nonwhite voters found that the institutions where many of them found their political identities — churches, unions, clubs — have been in decline," HoSang reported.
With many of these typical community pillars in decline, HoSang contends that voters of color today are being influenced by new forces, such as right-wing podcasts, influencers and social media.
"The narrative emerging from this wave of new media is a compelling one to disaffected communities of color; it captures the very real struggles they experience and repackages them as proof that Democratic policies have failed them," he argued.
In San Francisco's Bay Area, another issue has swayed their heavily Asian-American population away from the Democratic Party — crime.
HoSang spoke with one Bay Area resident, Nancy Yu Law, who voiced her frustrations about the city's crime problem that has made running her four stores in Chinatown much more taxing.
"I have four stores in Chinatown. My store was broken into two times. At my gift shop, they took money and they took one tablet. My boba shop was broken into and vandalized. In those years, it was really unsafe. A criminal is a criminal. Elected officials did not stand up to say that," she told HoSang. "It felt like there's nothing you can change in California, so we were all just complaining. When I ask my friends, what do you think of President Trump? They are all pretty satisfied."
The Yale professor visited Turning Point's AmericaFest conference last December where he spoke with several young working-class Black women who were part of conservative influencer Candace Owen's Blexit movement.
He noted that there was very little evidence of "buyer's remorse" when it came to Trump, and that many of the Blexit members he spoke with worldviews were "far more heterodox, guided less by ideological rigidities and more by their aspirations to build lives of dignity for themselves and their communities."
In closing, HoSang felt that many of the minority voters he spoke with were politically driven by the realities that their racial communities face, such as collapsing social structures, economic uncertainties and "a sense that the status quo is untenable."
"Absent a solution to these core problems, appealing to disaffected voters of color on their racial identity alone has rung hollow. Grappling with the complexity of their frustrations, anxieties and hopes will determine the next political chapter of this country," he concluded.