Minorities Didn’t Follow the Media Script in Voting for Trump

One of the biggest stories coming out of the exit-polling data from last week’s presidential election was that nearly all minorities increasingly went against the elite media’s script on who they should vote for. They voted for the candidate who was regularly called a “racist” by pundits and journalists in larger numbers than they did four years ago. And some of those increases are pretty dramatic.

First, President Trump was supposed to have been solidly with conservative evangelicals, doing their bidding in standing against the gay agenda. But The New York Times’ Charles Blow was nonplussed to find that double the number of LGBT-identified people voted for Mr. Trump last week than voted for him in 2016, a jump from 14 percent to 28 percent. Blow was shocked that number was a full 33 percent in Georgia. And this dramatic increase after Alphonso David, president of the Human Right Campaign complained, “The Trump-Pence administration is the most virulently anti-LGBTQ administration in decades.” Many gays didn’t follow the script.

Second, not only did Donald Trump increase his share of the African American vote from four years ago, but increased it most significantly among Black women. And he not only simply increased his share with Black women voters, but doubled it over 2016. Of the Black vote in general, CNN reported that Trump increased his share from 8% in 2016 to 12% in 2020. He also improved his share of the Black male vote by +5 percentage points.

Third, for all the talk of President Trump’s wall being built to keep out Latin Americans, or as The New Times put it just yesterday, “draconian Trump immigration policies and divisive messaging,” he increased his share of the Latino vote from 28% in 2016 to 32% in 2020. This of course helped propel him to his marked victory in the major swing state of Florida. Cuban-Americans in the Sunshine State voted for Trump at 52%. Biden received precisely the same share of the Latino vote this year across the nation that Hillary Clinton did in 2016. No improvement at all.

Scott Jennings, a CNN commentator, explained to USATODAY that “Trump earned a larger share of the nonwhite vote than any GOP presidential candidate since 1960.” Trump did lose votes among senior citizens and white males this year over 2016, which USATODAY explained was “the only racial cohort to show degradation for the 45th president.”

Minority voters increasingly seem to show they will not be taken for granted by any party or the media at large. That is a very good thing for our democratic process and each group’s own political influence.

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