Democrats have taken minority voters for granted for many decades now. They've spent years claiming to be the savior of oppressed minorities, and by golly, if only Democrats get reelected this time, things will change. It never seems to work out that way. Democrat messaging harps on the idea that the proverbial American dream is systemically out of reach for minorities, yet what exactly has voting Democrat done for them? Heck, not even Barack Obama was able to deliver on this promise.
Of course, something happened in 2017. After eight years of expecting Obama to lift minorities up, it was Donald Trump who actually delivered for minority voters. Despite endless claims by Democrats that Trump was a racist who was going to reinstitute slavery and open up concentration camps, minority voters found their situations improving more under Trump than they had under Barack Obama. Something finally clicked, I suppose.
And while Joe Biden still won the minority vote, Trump still managed to expand his support from minority voters compared to 2016. And in 2024, he looks to be on the verge of expanding it yet again, suggesting that the ever-so-important demographic, which is critical for the Democrats if they hope to have any political power, is slowly but surely slipping away from them.
According to a recent Emerson poll, there are significant shifts in support for Joe Biden compared to last year's poll, and they all trend negatively for him. Among black voters, there's a noticeable drop from a +61 advantage in 2022 to +47 in 2023, marking a 14-point decline. Support among Hispanic and Latino voters has also decreased by 11 points, moving from +14 last year to +3 this year. Furthermore, Biden's support from voters under 50 has taken a hit, plummeting 13 points and transforming his +12 advantage a year ago into a -1 disadvantage today.
Related: Ouch. You Won’t Believe Who Democrats Are Recruiting to Save Biden’s Campaign.
Consider all the pandering Joe Biden has done for these minority voters, from his fictional backstories, including claiming to have grown up in the black church or that he was a civil rights activist in the 1960s, to picking Kamala Harris as his running mate, Ketanji Jackson Brown as his Supreme Court nominee, and countless other affirmative action picks throughout his administration. What has it gotten him? Nothing that actually helps the communities he's pandering to couldn't have done better.
Making the situation worse for Democrats is that they don't seem to be willing to admit they have a problem.
"The response from the Democratic smart set has been to engage in various forms of polling denialism. The recent polls are an example of Mad Poll Disease," explains Echelon Insights pollster Patrick Ruffini. "Another theory is that respondents are engaged in 'expressive responding,' a clever-sounding explanation for why poll results don’t actually mean what they say. Proponents of this theory argue that members of base Democratic groups are using the polls to vent their frustrations with Biden, but would never actually abandon him."
But Democrats shouldn't pretend that these polls don't matter because multiple polls are observing the same trends in matchups between Biden and other Republican candidates. "I don’t disagree that the polls have a too-good-to-be-true quality about them," Ruffini points out. "But even if Trump doesn’t win the rainbow populist landslide indicated by current polls, the alternative explanations Democrats are giving for these numbers still suggest that Biden is in deep trouble."
And that problem for Biden is that while these traditionally reliable Democrat voters may not vote for Trump (or any Republican) next year, they still might not be motivated to turn out and vote for him.
