As we know, President Donald Trump’s four years in office saw charges of racism and nativist xenophobia constantly levelled against him. So, in the 2020 election, how did he fare with the groups who were the main targets of his alleged wrath? Surprisingly, better than we might have expected.
For the second straight presidential election, the polling industry missed the mark, though it was not as blatant as in 2016, when polls were certain that Donald Trump would lose to Hillary Clinton.
This has now happened twice in a presidential row. Perhaps once is a fluke, but twice shows inherent problems. My guess is that far less attention will be paid to polls in the future.
While Joe Biden won the White House this year, it didn’t signal the blue tidal wave that Democrats expected. Rather, Trump’s supporters kept pace.
As we search for reasons why polling seems to capture Democratic vote share but not Republican, a narrative is emerging: Minority groups included “shy” Trump voters the pollsters missed, and probably some respondents refused to answer honestly.
The less than impressive Biden victory supports the theory that there was a shift among minority voters, who moved slightly towards Trump, cutting into Biden’s margins. Biden underperformed compared to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 numbers among voters of colour and other minorities who usually tilt Democratic. They still voted for the party, but by smaller margins than four years ago.
The AP VoteCast, a survey of the U.S. electorate conducted over several days before Nov. 3, and continuing until the polls closed, included interviews with more than 110,000 people across the U.S.
The survey was conducted online and via telephone. The margin of error was 0.6 percentage points for voters and 0.9 percentage points for non-voters, 19 times out of 20.
AP VoteCast found that African Americans remained overwhelmingly Democratic, with only eight per cent supporting the GOP. Even here, though, the vote for Trump increased by about two per cent.
The numbers were more mixed for other groups that Democrats assumed were in their corner because of ethnic or religious identity.
Some 28 per cent of Asians voted for Trump, up five per cent, and, perhaps most surprising, so did a full 35 per cent of Hispanic and Muslim voters. Trump also received 30 per cent of the Jewish vote, up six percent from 2016, despite being accused of anti-Semitism throughout his four years in office.
Trump’s performance among Latinos, up three per cent nationally, alarmed the Democrats. He won 47 per cent of the Hispanic vote (as well as 41 per cent of the Jewish vote) in Florida, and it helped him keep the Sunshine State. He also gained Latino support in the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas and held the Lone Star State as well.
Trump was also accused by those on the left of the spectrum of being anti-Muslim, if not indeed an Islamophobe. But Trump’s support grew by approximately four percentage points among this growing sector of the American population.
This trend has been causing consternation and disbelief within progressive circles who mechanically assume members of marginalized groups view themselves primarily or wholly in terms of their ascriptive identities.
What else may have motivated such voters this year? Many Blacks and Latinos are devout Christians and “pro-life,” hence supported Republicans. And some African Americans were pleased with the low unemployment numbers and Trump’s desire to reduce the injustices of mass incarceration, which disproportionately affects them.
Many small business owners from minorities liked Trump’s economic policies. For example,Vietnamese Americans, many of them entrepreneurs, actually favoured Trump outright. Among Jewish voters, Trump’s perceived pro-Israel positions were a major factor.
People are not automatons or robots. They have agency and free will. Is it not possible those who didn’t follow the left-wing dogma that they should be unthinking Democrats are assimilating more fully into an American culture in which they feel freer to define themselves?
In fact, Biden might have white men, more than any other group, to thank for entering the White House. In 2016, Trump won white men by a margin of 31 percentage points over Clinton. This time? Just 23 percentage points over Biden.
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