Four years of President Trump’s tweets have made white women woke, but his policies have evidently made black and Latino men take a second look. Polling leading up to the highly contentious 2020 election indicated that Trump would do better than any Republican presidential candidate in a general election since George W. Bush in 2004, and based on early returns, the polls, at least in this respect, were correct.
Florida, favored to benefit Joe Biden by a razor-thin margin leading up to Tuesday, was not the nail-biter it was supposed to be. The Sunshine State was one of the few purple bellwethers expected to post returns tonight, but late into the night. Instead, Biden vastly underperformed Hillary Clinton in Miami-Dade County, leading to an early call for Trump. If this result and Georgia exit polls are any indication, it’s thanks to a paradigm shift of the racial political gap become less polarized and the gender gap becoming more so.
Florida’s early swing toward Trump was surely indicative of the Republican’s success with Cuban Americans, who tend to lean more conservative in general due to their sensible disdain for socialism. But similar movement among Latinos in Georgia indicates that the trend is much broader than just among the Cuban diaspora.
According to CNN exit polling from 2020 and 2016, Latinos in Georgia shifted by 10 points in favor of Trump from Clinton to Biden. With white college-educated women, Trump lost 10 points from 2016 and 2 points with white non-college-educated women. With black women, Trump’s Georgia support actually improved by 2 points since 2016, and gendered breakdown among Latinos isn’t available from 2016.
Overall in Georgia, Biden lost 15 points of support of Latinos from 2016. In Florida, he lost 19 points. In Ohio, he lost 17.
Women may save Biden yet, but there’s no question that racial demographics are no longer destiny.
