Analysis: Trump made historic gains with minority voters in 2024. They are already pulling back in 2025

CNN

11-05-2025

Several of the key voter groups that provided President Donald Trump's most important electoral gains in November are recoiling from him as his term moves past the 100-day mark. But it remains unclear how much Democrats can benefit from these growing doubts.
In 2024, Trump improved his performance among some big voting blocs that have historically favored Democrats, including Latinos, younger men, non-White voters without a college degree, and, to some extent, Black men. Trump's advances generated exuberant predictions from an array of right-leaning analysts that he had achieved a lasting realignment and cemented the GOP's hold on voters of all races without a college degree.
But the flurry of polls 100 days into Trump's second term suggests that cement has not hardened as much as some allies anticipated. Across multiple surveys, Trump's overall job approval rating has fallen below his 2024 vote share with these key groups, and they are consistently giving him even lower marks for his handling of the economy, particularly inflation.
'The collapse that he's experiencing — I think that's the right word to phrase it — is broad-based and it's deep,' said Mike Madrid, an expert on Latino voters and a longtime Republican consultant who has become a leading Trump critic in the party.
Few strategists in either party believe the cooling toward Trump means Democrats have erased their long-term problems with these voter groups, which have generally drifted toward the GOP since the end of Barack Obama's presidency. But the rapid erosion of Trump's standing with them does suggest that their movement toward him in 2024 was driven less by a durable rightward shift on cultural issues than by immediate discontent with their economic situation. And that means that rather than solidifying as part of the GOP coalition, many of these voters likely will remain up for grabs if Trump can't improve their finances any more than President Joe Biden did.
'What we don't see is an across-the-board realignment all up and down behind Trump's agenda,' said Robert P. Jones, president and founder of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, which recently completed a large-scale survey of Americans' attitudes on cultural issues.
Whether measured by Election Day surveys or precinct-level results, Trump's improvement among voter groups that had not traditionally supported the GOP was arguably the biggest factor in his return to the White House.
Both the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations including CNN and the AP VoteCast survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago found that Trump's vote among White people was virtually identical from 2020 to 2024 and improved just modestly among voters older than 30.
But all data sources agreed that Trump made significant gains among groups that had been pillars of what was once called the 'Obama coalition' and what I termed in 2008 'the coalition of the ascendant.'
The exit polls and VoteCast studies, for instance, both found that Trump in 2024 won around 45% of voters younger than 30, up from 36% in 2020. Both showed he gained much more among young men than among young women.
Likewise, both sources showed Trump crossing 40% support among Latinos, a modern high for the GOP, up from about one-third in 2020. The VoteCast study also found Trump doubling his vote among Black men to about 1 in 4. (The exit poll did not find meaningful improvement for him with them.)
The most attention after the election focused on Trump's improvement among minority voters without a four-year college degree. The exit polls and AP VoteCast agreed that Trump carried almost exactly one-third of them, a big improvement over the roughly one-fourth of their votes he carried in 2020.
Since Trump's first term, a growing number of center-right analysts in both parties have argued that Democrats were alienating working-class non-White voters by emphasizing culturally liberal and 'woke' positions on issues such as transgender rights or the use of 'Latinx' to describe Latinos. Many of these voices took Trump's 2024 gains as proof that non-White voters without a college degree were now realigning away from Democrats toward the GOP, primarily around cultural issues, just as non-college-educated White voters did during the 1960s and 1970s.
'The Democrats really are no longer the party of the common man and woman,' Ruy Teixeira, a longtime Democratic analyst who has become a leading critic of the party, wrote immediately after the election. 'This election has made this problem manifest in the starkest possible terms, as the Democratic coalition shattered into pieces.'
Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, author of 'Party of the People,' a book that perceptively analyzes the GOP's growing strength among working-class minorities, summarized the results even more succinctly: 'No word for it but … realignment,' he wrote on social media few weeks after the vote.
Just over 100 days into Trump's second term, the picture, at the least, looks much more fluid.
The swarm of national polls marking Trump's 100 days shows his job approval rating among young people, Latinos and Black Americans falling below — often well below — his 2024 vote shares. His ratings on the economy with those groups are even weaker. And while Trump still receives decent grades from Hispanic and young people for his handling of the border, ratings of his overall approach to immigration have consistently fallen into negative territory with them as well.
Trump's position has equally eroded among the group whose shift toward him last year attracted the most attention: the large number of minority Americans without a four-year college degree. His approval rating among those blue-collar racial minorities stands at just 29% in the latest CNN/SRSS poll, according to results provided by the CNN polling unit. (The latest New York Times/Siena, Pew Research Center and Washington Post/ABC/Ipsos surveys produced nearly identical results among that group.)
Just 27% of non-college-educated people of color approved of Trump's economic performance in the CNN survey, and two-thirds of them thought he was 'going too far' in his deportation agenda. Nearly 3 in 4 of them in the Washington Post survey said Trump does not respect the rule of law, and just 1 in 6 in the New York Times/Siena poll agreed with his assertion that he should be allowed to send US citizens to a prison in El Salvador.
Coming so soon in 2025, this broad dissatisfaction is casting a retrospective shadow over what happened in 2024. Madrid says the recoil from Trump, particularly among Latinos, makes clear that the movement toward him in 2024 was based mostly on economic factors rather than affinity for his cultural and racial views. 'This is just another brick in the wall of the argument that this (Latino voter) is an economic voter,' Madrid said.
Jones similarly thinks the quick distancing from Trump strengthens the argument that his 2024 gains among minority and younger voters were driven more by the economy than by a cultural realignment. In PRRI's recent national survey, Hispanic, Black and Gen Z adults were all much less likely than Trump's core constituency of White voters without a four-year college degree to agree with foundational MAGA beliefs, such as that Whites and Christians are the real victims of discrimination or that 'immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.'
'There's a real danger that Trump is overreaching on the cultural issues,' Jones said.
Republican former Rep. Carlos Curbelo likewise believes Trump may be pushing his Latino supporters too far with the sweep of his deportation agenda, especially while they remain stressed about the economy. 'Democrats were wrong to believe that Hispanic voters would never prioritize border security and the deportation of the undocumented,' Curbelo wrote in an email. '(But) the current Administration is wrong if they think Hispanic voters will perform like MAGA base voters on immigration enforcement matters.'
Ray Serrano, national director of research and policy at LULAC, a Hispanic advocacy organization, sees Trump's decline in terms that are even more absolute. 'If there was a flirtation with possibly moving to the Trump side, to the Republican side, it's moving away now,' Serrano said during a recent conference call that Latino advocacy groups held to release a national survey from a bipartisan polling team about Trump's first 100 days. The disappointed response to Trump's return, he argued, could signal 'the rise and immediate fall of the Trump Latino Democrat.'
It may be as premature, though, to dismiss Trump's inroads among these traditionally Democratic groups as it was to declare them proof of a durable realignment. All the 100-days surveys provide evidence that many of these voters, though disappointed in Trump's first days, have not shut the door on him.
Republican pollster Daron Shaw, for instance, said the survey conducted for Latino advocacy groups by a bipartisan polling team found that both Trump's job approval and support for some of his most controversial initiatives, such as deporting people without hearings or ending diversity initiatives, remained much stronger among men younger than 40 than any other group of Latinos.
And, as Jones pointed out, some of Trump's conservative cultural views continue to resonate with minority voters, especially men. Big majorities of Latino men and women and Black men, for instance, agreed in the PRRI poll that transgender people should be required to use the bathroom of their gender at birth; a substantial minority of each group also agreed with the conservative perspective that society is better off when men and women accept traditional gender roles.
Even on the economy, the polls show some room for Trump, with many of his new voters saying it is too soon to render a verdict on his impact. The latest CNN poll was typical: Half of minority adults without college degrees said Trump has done nothing to address the nation's problems, compared with only about 1 in 5 who said his agenda was already helping. But slightly more than another 1 in 4 of them said his agenda could generate benefits in time. That suggests he could recover among blue-collar non-White voters if they see progress on their biggest concerns, principally inflation.
John Della Volpe, who directs the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics' youth poll, agreed that Trump's attraction for younger voters has been frayed, not severed. 'A lot of the newer Trump voters could say they disapprove of him, and they are unsure of his policies, but they are telling me they are giving him some time,' said Della Volpe, who also advised a super PAC in 2024 that tried to rally young voters for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Della Volpe says younger voters' uncertainty about Trump hasn't erased their doubts about Democrats. Though the Harvard survey has recorded sharp declines in support for Trump's economic management just since January, Della Volpe said, 'it doesn't mean Democrats at this stage are a viable alternative.'
Madrid likewise thinks it would be a mistake for Democrats to assume the discontent with Trump has solved their own problems with Latinos and other blue-collar minority voters. He correctly notes that Democrats' performance among Latinos rebounded in the 2018 midterm elections relative to 2016, only to resume their decline in the 2020 presidential election and continue downward in 2024.
The party could likewise run better among Latinos in 2026 than in 2024, Madrid says, solely because the less frequent, often younger, Latino voters most drawn to Trump tend not to turn out as much in midterm elections. But unless Democrats develop a more convincing economic message, he says, those less-reliable voters could easily prefer the GOP again when they return in larger numbers in 2028. 'The lesson that Democrats failed to learn in 2018 could come back and haunt them in this election cycle: Winning just by being against something does not cement or build the coalition,' Madrid said.
Trump so far has clearly failed to consolidate, much less extend, the beachhead he established last year with younger and non-White voters. His sweeping tariffs, by raising their daily costs, seem likely to weaken his position with them.
But in the battle for these voters' long-term allegiance, Democrats would be dangerously complacent to conclude the tide has already turned. Young people and blue-collar minorities, especially the men in each group, now look less like reliable voters for either party than a volatile swing constituency that could tip future presidential contests based on which side they believe can best deliver for their bottom line.