By the end of winter 2024, the return of Donald Trump to the top of the GOP presidential ticket has revealed a surprising trend in the former president’s base of support: his increasing popularity among Black and Latino voters.

Several polls suggest as many as 23% of Black voters and 46% of Latino voters could cast their ballot for Trump.

If the polls are right, these numbers represent a far cry from the 6% of Black and 28% of Latino voters who supported Trump in 2016 and the 8% of Black voters and 32% of Latino voters who voted for Trump in 2020.

Given Trump’s long record of racist and xenophobic comments, the question, then, is why Trump’s support among voters of color has increased over the years.

Two explanations have emerged to explain Trump’s growth in support among voters of color.

The first is based on the faulty assumption, made by some Democratic strategists that the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the U.S. electorate would automatically benefit Democratic candidates. This assumption rests on the idea that voters of color are inherently progressive on issues such as education, social services, health care and criminal justice reform.

According to this line of thinking, Trump’s polling numbers are mostly the result of poor messaging by the Democrats – a failure to remind voters of color that their interests align with Joe Biden, not Trump.

The second explanation is that voters of color are inherently conservative, particularly working-class Black and Latino men, who identify more closely with the political right on issues such as immigration, law and order and cultural conservativism.

“Many of America’s nonwhite voters have long held much more conservative views than their voting patterns would suggest,” data analyst John Burton-Murdoch argued in the Financial Times in March 2024. “The migration we’re seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned but natural Republicans realizing they’ve been voting for the wrong party.”

Though few other analysts go as far, Burton-Murdoch concluded that the numbers represent “racial realignment.”

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