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Daily Mail
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Obama advisor warns Dems have 'no path' to victory if they don't win back key voter demographic
A former advisor to Barack Obama has warned that Democrats have 'no path' back to the White House unless they win back Latino voters. Ex-presidential aide Dan Pfeiffer, 49, told Pod Save America the demographic holds the key to the beleaguered party's redemption at the next election. 'There's no way to look at this without recognizing the massive scale of our problems,' Pfieffer told former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau on Friday's episode of the left-leaning podcast. 'You can kind of tell yourself that things might be kind of OK by looking at just the shift from '20 to '24,' he added. 'But if you really want to assess where we are as a party, you have to look at the shift from 2016 to 2024.' Pfeiffer pointed out that former Democrat hopeful Hillary Clinton was much more popular among the Hispanic population than President Trump. She gained around 70 percentage points more from the demographic voter pool than Trump did - a wider margin than Obama. But former Vice President Kamala Harris secured the group by only 54 percentage points on Trump. Several exit polls even indicated that Trump gained more of the vote among Latino men. 'Latinos moved 17 points (to the right) in eight years,' Pfeiffer said. 'Latino men went 14 points (toward the GOP) in eight years.' He added that 'Latinos are the fastest-growing population' in the country. 'They are particularly politically powerful because of how the population is distributed in electoral-rich sunbelt states like Texas, Florida, Arizona, Nevada,' he said. 'They are becoming more of the electorate, and we are losing more of them at a very fast rate. If that trend continues, there is no path to Democrats winning elections.' It comes as voter polls indicate that New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be the Democratic Party's next presidential candidate. There are 65.2 million Hispanics and Latinos in the US, or around one-fifth of the population, according to the US Census Bureau. 'The message I take from this is, anyone who thinks that we can get away with just tinkering around the edges, just hoping that Donald Trump becomes unpopular or they nominate some yahoo in 2028 or we're going to ride the wave of tariffs and inflation to a narrow House victory is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,' Pfieffer added. 'We have to be willing to ask very hard questions.' Efforts by Trump's campaign group to sway over millions of Hispanic voters proved hugely successful, despite a massive pre-election controversy when a comedian at a Trump rally compared Puerto Rico to a 'floating island of garbage'. Trump's biggest gains among Hispanic voters were evident in the key states of Pennsylvania and Michigan. Before midnight on election night, Trump became the first Republican since George H. W. Bush in 1988 to win Miami-Dade, a county where two-thirds of residents are Latino. As well as targeting Hispanic voters, Team Trump also aimed to sway over African-Americans — another huge demographic group in the US. But there was less of a noticeable impact on African-American voters. Exit polls suggested Trump narrowed the gap with Harris among Black men by two points, compared with 2020. Of the 100-plus counties with a Black population of at least 50 percent, the Republicans gained ground in all but eight.
Associated Press
13-05-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
To reach Latinos, some Democrats pivot to talk more about the economy and less about immigration
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Democrats have long focused on immigration when courting Latino voters in states like Arizona, Nevada, New Jersey, and Florida, where generations of Mexican, Cuban and other Latin American immigrants have settled and gained permanent legal status. But Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election and the rightward shift of Latino voters have some liberals reconsidering traditional wisdom. 'People do care about it, but they don't vote on it. They vote on the economy,' said Patricia Campos-Medina, a labor activist who ran for the U.S. Senate last year in New Jersey and is now advising U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill, one of the Democrats running for governor in next month's primary. Liberal strategists, organizers and some politicians are urging Democrats to focus on the economy in this year's elections rather than on immigration. Some argue a broad economic message would be more effective with the wide range of nationalities and experiences in the Latino community rather than customized efforts based on perceived cultural or political interests. Last year, Trump, a Republican, made inroads in heavily Puerto Rican areas of eastern Pennsylvania and turned South Texas' Rio Grande Valley while improving his numbers along Florida's Interstate 4 corridor. His message to Latinos focused heavily on the economy and border security. 'Latino operatives have been saying, 'Don't treat us all as a monolith,'' said Tory Gavito, who co-founded Way to Win, a progressive group formed after Trump's 2016 win that recently conducted focus groups with Latinos who skipped the 2024 election. 'They were pretty monolithic.' Economic concerns topped everything else Inflation was top of mind for nearly half of Latinos who voted last fall, according to AP VoteCast, a wide-ranging survey of the 2024 electorate. About three-quarters of Latino Trump voters were very concerned about housing costs in their community, compared with about 6 in 10 white Trump voters. 'Where we fell short was failing to fully appreciate the bread-and-butter economic issues that were driving them,' said Tom Perez, a former Democratic National Committee chair who served as adviser to President Joe Biden. 'Many folks felt like we were too focused on identity politics and not focused enough on the cost of eggs, the cost of gas, the cost of living.' Alex Berrios, co-founder of the organizing group Mi Vecino, which mobilizes Latino voters in Florida, Arizona and Maine, said Democrats focused too much on using buzzwords and trying to micro-target specific nationalities. The result, he argues, left voters feeling as though the party's message was staged. 'It's like they were saying, 'Let me get my Venezuelan script out,'' Berrios said. 'No. The first thing is just be relatable.' Chuck Rocha is a Democratic strategist who mobilized Latinos for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders' presidential bid in 2020 and for U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego last year and started a super political action committee, or PAC, to reach out to Latinos in key races. He argued that Democrats 'mess up by bringing a policy book to a boxing match.' 'It's about three things: affordability, affordability, affordability,' he said. 'Affordability is the only thing that they care about because that's what's hitting them in the face every day.' New Jersey becomes an early test New Jersey's primary for governor is an early test of the different Democratic points of view. Last year, Trump flipped two Hispanic-majority towns that he had lost by more than 30 and 50 percentage points in 2016. Democrat Kamala Harris won a traditionally blue state by just 6 percentage points, the closest presidential contest there since 2004. Sherrill, who flipped a longtime Republican district in winning her House seat in 2018, has focused on her biography and her military service while also arguing she will stand up to Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk. One of her ads promises she will 'drive down costs from health care to housing.' Her campaign manager, Alex Ball, outlined during the weekend in a memo that one of its goals is meeting in person Hispanic voters from two suburban counties who have voted in three of the four past Democratic primaries. 'There is a real risk of a Republican winning in November, but Mikie is the candidate who can win just like she has won tough elections before, even driving out a long-time Republican incumbent in a Trump district — something no one thought was possible,' Ball wrote. Meanwhile, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka has frequently campaigned against U.S. immigration authorities' plans to open a detention facility in his city. The mayor was arrested by immigration authorities on Friday while demonstrating outside, with video of his detention and release spreading widely and leading to his competitors in the Democratic primary rallying to his side. Democrats see an opening A May AP-NORC poll found that 38% of Hispanic adults approve of Trump's handling of the economy, which is roughly in line with U.S. adults overall. But there's growing unease as Trump's plans to revive manufacturing and reshape the global economy have been rolled out with constant changes, creating uncertainty and sparking concerns of prices rising and products disappearing from shelves. From January through March, the economy shrank for the first time in three years as businesses were disrupted by Trump's trade wars. Trump fired thousands of federal workers, with impacts felt outside of Washington. The Libre Initiative, a Koch Network-affiliated conservative group, is running ads targeting Latinos in support of tax breaks approved during Trump's first term that may expire at year's end. Daniel Garza, president of the group, acknowledged 'nervousness' among Latino voters, with some wondering if maybe Trump took on too much and too fast. But Garza said that it's too soon to make a fair assessment of his second term, which began in January. He argues voters should wait and see how Trump negotiates trade and whether the Republican Party can pass his 'big, beautiful bill' with both tax breaks and spending cuts and promises he made such as exempting tips, overtime and Social Security from taxation. 'My sense is that Latinos are a very patient lot,' he said. 'Aguantamos mucho.' That is Spanish for 'We put up with a lot.' ___ Associated Press Polling Editor Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux in Washington contributed to this report.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Georgia Insurance Commissioner John King joins GOP field hoping to take on Sen. Jon Ossoff
Georgia Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner John King speaks at the Georgia Chamber of Commerce's Eggs and Issues event in Atlanta in January. Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder Georgia Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner John King has joined the race to take on Sen. Jon Ossoff in next year's midterm election. In social media posts announcing his run Monday, King emphasized his military and law enforcement background. King served in the U.S. Army National Guard for four decades, retiring as a major general in 2023. He also served in the Atlanta Police Department and the Doraville Police Department, where he was chief for 17 years. 'I've had the privilege to lead your sons and daughters in some incredible places around the world: Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Africa. During President Trump's first term, I served on the U.S. Mexico border. As an Atlanta police officer, I was shot and stabbed in the line of duty, protecting our community. I've never shied away from a fight, but what truly scares me today is having Jon Ossoff for six more years.' King was appointed insurance commissioner by Gov. Brian Kemp in 2019 and elected to a full term in 2022, making him Georgia's first Hispanic statewide elected official. He was born in Mexico and came to the U.S. at 17. He posted his announcement video to X in both English and Spanish, a sign he could be trying to court Latino voters. Though Latino voters in Georgia favored former Vice President Kamala Harris over President Donald Trump in the 2024 election, Republicans have made inroads in recent years, and advocates report a lack of outreach to Latino Georgians from either major party. In his announcement, King positioned himself as a strong potential ally to the president. 'President Trump got sent to Washington DC to solve some very big problems,' King said. 'He needs help, and I'm asking for your support to go help President Trump and solve these incredibly big problems.' King now joins Congressman Buddy Carter, a six-term Republican representing a coastal Georgia district, in the race against Ossoff. Carter threw his hat into the ring last week, also pitching himself as a strong Trump backer. Ossoff is the only Democratic senator up for re-election in a state won by Trump in 2024, so the race for his seat is likely to keep attracting attention. Last week, Kemp announced that he doesn't plan to run, which could spur even more Republicans to try their chances. He has raised more than $11 million so far in 2025, according to federal election filings. Some of Carter's colleagues in Congress are seen as potential contenders, including Reps. Rick Allen, Mike Collins and Rich McCormick as well as state Agriculture Commissioner Tyler Harper. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene took herself off the list last week with a social media post. In a statement, Democratic Party of Georgia Chairman Charlie Bailey expressed confidence that Trump's policies will harm any Republican's chances in a general election. 'John King touting his loyalty to Donald Trump at the launch of his bid for Georgia's Senate seat is telling yet not surprising as the Republican field grows and caters to the MAGA far-right,' Bailey said. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
CNN
11-05-2025
- Business
- CNN
Analysis: Trump made historic gains with minority voters in 2024. They are already pulling back in 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.
CNN
11-05-2025
- Business
- CNN
Analysis: Trump made historic gains with minority voters in 2024. They are already pulling back in 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.
